This is, briefly, the story of a small, rural town in California that became a resort epicenter. And it’s the story of a visionary businessman and some big dreams.
I’m not sure exactly how it relates to another small, rural town, located in southwestern Colorado and known as Pagosa Springs. Maybe it doesn’t relate at all.
Here’s how that small, rural California town — Anaheim — looked in 1890, the year before the Town of Pagosa Springs was incorporated far away in the mountains of Colorado.
The rural colony of Anaheim was founded in 1857 by grape farmers and wine makers from Bavaria. Settlers voted to call the community Anaheim, a German name which I believe translates (perhaps longingly) as “Home in the Valley”. To the Spanish-speaking neighbors, the settlement was known as Campo Alemán (Spanish for “German Field”).
The grape industry was destroyed in the 1880s by an insect pest, and other crops — walnuts, lemons and oranges — soon filled the void. Fruits and vegetables had become viable cash crops when the Los Angeles and Orange County region was connected to the continental railroad network in 1886.
 In 1928, a new celebrity made a splash in nearby Hollywood, CA after appearing in an animated cartoon titled Steamboat Willie. The celebrity — a mouse by the name of Mickey — had been created by a chain-smoking businessman named Walt Disney (who, in later films would provide Mickey’s voice, once the clever mouse had learned to talk) and an artist named Ub Iwerks.
Ub Iwerks had designed the animated mouse to be a versatile actor, capable of many anthropomorphic emotions, expressions and body positions — and to that end, had chosen to construct Mickey’s body from “easy to animate” circular and tubular shapes. This decision to use simple, repeatable shapes allowed numerous apprentice artists to assist Iwerks in hand-rendering each animated, six-minute cartoon — each cartoon required about 45,000 individual drawings — and his decision is credited as one of the keys to Mickey’s artistic success with movie audiences.
45,000 is a lot of drawings. I’ve worked on a couple of animated films, as an apprentice “tweener” artist — one of the artists who draw the “in-between drawings" that connect one “key frame” to the next “key frame.” I can appreciate, for example, how many thousands of dollars Walt Disney saved on each film by deciding to give Mickey three fingers and a thumb, instead of five digits, on each hand.
By 1954, Walt Disney had cast Mickey Mouse as a hero in a few dozen short cartoon and in three feature length films, and the Disney organization had been to the edge of bankruptcy and back — thanks to World War II, which sent some of Disney’s most talented young artists off to fight in the trenches.
Here’s a photo of businessman Walt Disney, with a couple of his trusted financial advisers, reviewing a map of 160 acres of orange and walnut trees in Anaheim, CA. The trees would soon be cut down and replaced with one of the most popular theme parks in the history of mankind: Disneyland.
Disneyland was completed in 1955 — and would utterly change the character of the formerly sleepy agricultural town of Anaheim. Following the opening of Disney’s theme park, the surrounding property has snapped up by hotel and motel developers, and land values began to skyrocket. Numerous expansions of Disneyland have taken place since 1955, and the city of Anaheim now recognizes itself as a “resort epicenter” — with a population of about 340,000 people.
Obviously, the transition of Anaheim — from orange groves into world famous resort — was largely the result of artist Ub Iwerks’ thoughtful decision, back in 1928, to draw Mickey Mouse using very simple circular shapes.
That's how artists change the world.
A couple of weeks ago, I attended a meeting of a Town Tourism Committee (TTC) subcommittee: the Reservoir Hill Task Force. This rather small group of volunteers — once a much larger group of volunteers — has been meeting for about a year with the task of developing a business plan for making Reservoir Hill Park into an amusement park. A very modest amusement park.
The task force has been filtering and refining ideas for nearly a year and have reportedly come up with a business plan; I have not yet seen the plan, but it was summarized for the Pagosa Springs Town Council at a public meeting back in early November.
Although the remaining members of the task force don’t much like to admit it publicly, the original purpose of the business plan was to determine whether Pagosa Springs should — or shouldn’t — install a second-hand chairlift on Reservoir Hill. The chairlift had been purchased last winter for $41,000, and the Town Council had agreed to the purchase with the understanding that no chairlifts would be installed on Reservoir Hill until a business plan could show, with some certainty, that the operation would not be a financial disaster — and might actually break even, or show a profit.
The subcommittee’s quest to justify the Town’s chairlift purchase has led to numerous discussions, and even a state-wide tour, by key subcommittee members, of several theme parks in Colorado. As I've already noted, the subcommittee members are all volunteers — except for TTC executive director Jennie Green. I believe the task force volunteers paid their own expenses during the tour of Colorado theme parks, but don't quote me on that.
All of the Colorado parks visited during that tour, I have been told, were operated by private corporations — except for a public hot springs operation in Ouray that was part of the tour. Currently, there are no representatives of private theme park corporations involved in our local Reservoir Hill task force. So the community is wondering whether the Town of Pagosa Springs — trusty tax-supported entity that it is — will eventually be asked to finance the chairlift and related amusement park operations atop Reservoir Hill.
The task force is scheduled to meet again today, at 10:30am, at the Ross Aragon Community Center.
As far as I can tell, there are no artists currently participating in the Reservoir Hill Task Force subcommittee — certainly, no artists as talented as Ub Iwerks, at the very least.
I’m not sure why, but the term “Mickey Mouse” has become a popular derogatory term meaning “small-time,” or “amateurish,” or “trivial.” In Great Britain, the term “Mickey Mouse” is also used to mean “of poor quality.”
So we might ask the question: Is there a relationship between the Reservoir Hill business plan, and Mickey Mouse?
Read Part Two... |