Working with Børge was fun, hard, boring, exciting, unusual, normal, and most of all educational. Over a year before leaving high school, in March 1978 I found out he lived in my neighborhood from a tv program about him and his wife Joanika. So I found him in the phone book (remember those?) and called him up. While studying art history, for a year I was his "pupil" doing animation tests, dropping by and having him correct them. Then, fed up with my art history professors, I moved my animation desk with my Neilson-Hordell disc into his Blaricum attic! (I am pointing at it in this photo taken last year:) Here, for almost four years, from March 1980 to November 1983 I smelled of his Douwe Egberts Red Amphora pipe tobacco and every day incl. weekends, Christmas and New Year from 10 to 6 we worked to the sound of BBC World Service if there were no jazz songs he had to listen to over and over again for an upcoming gig. I started doing simple non-production tests from his animation...
One problem is that Kimball wasn't retired in 1968. He was still active in 1969, when I visited him at his office at the studio, and he was producing the "Mouse Factory" TV show a few years later. The studio's announcement of his death said he retired in 1973. I can believe the substance of the anecdote, but I'd bet that Ward imitated Walt's cough soon after Walt's death--when it really would have been spooky to hear it--and a long time before his own retirement.
ReplyDeleteGood observation! Well, I can only say: I tell 'em as I hear 'em. You are probably right, too, when you suspect it wasn't too long after Walt's death...
ReplyDeleteI have a 1971 phone directory that the animator Fred Kopietz used to keep track of his studio collegues. Kopietz retired in 1971, so he kept this in his home in Arizona to write in. Following Ward Kimball's name he writes "let go"...