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from
Sleeping Beauty
sat on top of a cabinet behind his drawing board. There was also a movieola right behind the chair where I sat. It was bigger and more complicated than I had imagined.
    This first interview led to warm friendship with Frank over the years, in which we kept in touch by mail and occasionally in person, usually through the wonderful hospitality of Howard Green, who would arrange dinners with Frank and Ollie and their wives and with Joe Grant. I treasure Frank’s lettersthat were filled with news, enthusiasm, self-deprecating humor, advice, and an occasional irresistible barb that was so typical of him. Our Christmas card usually has a photo of my family in front of our 1938 Standard Oil Santa Claus. One year, we did something different, and I heard about it from Frank right away. So every year for the rest of his life, we made sure the Santa was featured on our card and we have kept it there ever since in Frank’s memory. I feel honored to have known Frank for almost thirty years.
    DP: What was your first impression of Walt Disney?
    FT: I think I was probably more impressed with his product than I was with him as a person. I didn’t have very much contact with him. You know, I’d see him around the halls, and he seemed to be a nice enough guy. He’d say “Hi,” and I’d say “Hi.” But there wasn’t anything until I got further along. I was working for Freddy Moore. He had a lot of footage on a picture with the little pigs [
Three Little Wolves
(1936)]. It was more than one guy would normally turn out. I was responsible for about two hundred feet or something like that. Walt called me in because he thought it ought to be divided to get the picture out: “You’ve more than you can handle.” I said, “Gee, I don’t [think so],” because I wanted to do it myself. I thought I was the only guy who could do it, naturally, because Freddy had told me how he wanted it. Actually, I wasn’t that good, but I didn’t realize it then. So that was probably the first time I talked to Walt. He gave me a long piercing look and said, “Well, okay, if you think you can do it, we’ll let you try.” So all my first meetings with him were very favorable that way. He seemed to have a good impression. He seemed to like what I was doing and believed in what I was saying, which is more than I did. So I didn’t get into any kind of pressure situations with him. It was all just a good pleasant relationship for a long time.
    DP: I guess when you came to Disney, he was already well established. Did he seem to fit the image that you had in your mind, or did he seem more down-to-earth than you might have thought?
    FT: Maybe I was awfully naive, but I didn’t really think that much about people and what they were like. You see, I’d come down here to go to art school. First of all, I wanted to be an industrial designer. Then I was talked into switching over to magazine illustration. Cartoon[ing] had always been fun for me, but I never thought of it as a lifework. Here’s a chance to do that. I just wasn’t sure that I wanted to stay with this business, yet every day it got more interesting, more intriguing to me. The further I went in it, the more I was hooked on the thing. So Walt was just another guy who was making a success of what he was doing. I don’t know, maybe I thought of him like a teacher I had at college or something of that sort. He was young, and he wasn’t a boss behind a desk and didn’t smoke cigars or a pipe [although he was a heavy cigarette smoker]. There was nothing about the image. He was just a guy who worked with you. I would hear stories about things he had done to someone or how mad he’d got. He didn’t always get mad; he had other ways of dealing with it! The guys would try to put things over on him or get by with something.
    What kind of personality? Boy, it was years later before I