I just want to be that lady with two ice cream cones sitting in the Carnation truck without a care in the world 🍦 You might be asking, well, who did Walt put on the windows then when Disneyland opened? It’s a good question, and a tough one to answer. In general, the people who got screen credit (for the “show” of Disneyland) were similar to the ones who got credit in Disney films, which wasn’t very many. Over the bank, there was a list of art directors that came from other studios to help with the park (including a few people Walt didn’t particularly like). Among the names listed there were: Richard Irvine, Marvin Davis, Bill Martin, Gabriel Scognamillo, George Patrick, and Wade B. Rubottom. On another window were park engineers J.S. Hamel, William T. Wheeler, and John Wise. On one side of Market house were three of Disney’s own art directors including Ken Anderson, Bruce Bushman and Don DaGradi, and the other side featured Bob Mattey (whose window has a story of its own), George Whitney Jr. and some construction supervisors. There were also a few other windows to people who helped in various capacities, like Renie Conley who made the costumes for the Golden Horseshoe and Disney lawyers Gunther Lessing and Fred Leopold. It seems that, from what I’ve seen, many of the people we think of as the “original” Imagineers weren’t necessarily honored by a window early on (though there is some ambiguity about which windows existed in 1955 and which were added later like set designer Emile Kurie in 1959). It seems like the intention for the first set of windows was not to honor everybody, but to give credit to those who were the main driving force behind creating Disneyland. Though the studio artists adding their names to these cute fake stores was meant to be a stop-gap solution while they were rushing to complete the interiors, Harper Goff in a later interview seem to imply that those windows were the first step toward honoring Disney legends on Main Street USA.
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