Things You're Just Supposed to Know

Most of the time, Long-Forgotten assumes that readers are already familiar with basic facts
about the Haunted Mansion. If you wanna keep up with the big boys, I suggest you check out
first of all the website, Doombuggies.com. After that, the best place to go is Jason Surrell's book,
The Haunted Mansion: Imagineering a Disney Classic (NY: Disney Editions; 2015). That's the
re-named third edition of The Haunted Mansion: From the Magic Kingdom to the Movies (NY:
Disney Editions, 2003; 2nd ed. 2009). Also essential reading is Jeff Baham's The Unauthorized
Story of Walt Disney's Haunted Mansion (USA: Theme Park Press, 2014; 2nd ed. 2016).

This site is not affiliated in any way with any Walt Disney company. It is an independent
fan site dedicated to critical examination and historical review of the Haunted Mansions.
All images that are © Disney are posted under commonly understood guidelines of Fair Use.

________
.

Monday, September 6, 2010

The Other "Nine Old Men"

.
This is another one of those posts that focuses on quirks and curios rather than Profound Meanings.  With the Mansion, you don't get one without the other.  I have a couple of good, meaty posts in the works, but I'm saving those bad boys for later on when I've got more time.  Today is Labor Day, and everyone has barbecues to get to.

The title alludes to Walt's "Nine Old Men," of course (his nickname for a set of senior animators in his stable).  Since he's all done with it, I've stolen it to use for the nine major tombstone types in the graveyard scene.  They're pretty interesting, really.  Like the outdoor "family plot" cemeteries, the epitaphs are not gibberish (for the most part) but cryptic tributes, put there by the sculptors in the model shop.  Unlike the outdoor stones, however, the writing on these nine was never really intended for public consumption.  I'm sure no one ever expected that someday Haunted Mansion fan(atic)s would subject them to microscopic scrutiny.  Good thing there wasn't anything naughty on them.

I've posted them before, but here, once again, are the nine old men, plus two, smaller, blank types.


We'll deal with the little blanks first, the "ironing board" and the "knobby" types.  Judging by old photos, they may have been more common in the beginning than they are now, but a bunch of them are still there.  These noticeably smaller stones go into the background of the various tableaux, part of the forced perspective they use to make the place look bigger.  An old Disney trick.



Incidentally, the knobby types are an authentic, Colonial New England style.

(pix from the Farber Collection)

Enough of those; now let's look at the nine.

Seven of the nine have dates on them.  They could be based on Imagineer's birth years, minus two or three or four centuries.  That's a favorite game among the Imagineers.  But I suspect that the final digit is used to identify them and organize them.  Otherwise, this is a curious coincidence:

1771
1702
1803
1704
1705
1506
1707


Left to right in the top row of that montage, we start with RESEER. Not until June of 2020 (!) did I have a clue as to who this might be, but retired Imagineer Tom Morris came through for me. This is likely Larry Reiser, who set up the "Project Installation Coordination Unit" (PICO) for the future WDW in 1969, but Tom thinks it's likely he also did similar work on the Anaheim HM before going to Florida. Basically a project coordinator, his would have been a face everyone interacted with. He's honored on a Main Street window at WDW:




TREBOR LLEWE is Robert (S)ewell.  I'm not sure why the "s" is missing.  Maybe it's there but sculpted too shallow, and it didn't survive the molding process well enough for the painter to notice it.  Note that the "OR" is barely readable.


(Edit 2016: I've actually seen some old photos recently in which the "s" is partially visible.)


Bob Sewell got not one, but two tribute stones.  The other one is outside, in the family plot at WDW: 
"RIP Mister Sewell, the victim of a dirty duel."


Sewell joined WED soon after Disneyland opened in 1955 and did a lot of work in the model shop.  He ended up in charge of the installation of many of the major attractions in the park. Here he is working on Small World:


Moving on to SNEVETS NOR, originally, this is what I wrote:  "...again, sorry, I got nothin'.  Somebody named Ron Stevens.  Maybe some of these enigmatic names will be identified in the Comments section, if some of our Disney employee readers know something I don't know."  In January 2012, someone did exactly that, and a long-standing mystery is ended:

I think can solve one of your mystery tombstones.  "Snevets Nor" is, as you surmised, Ron Stevens.  Mr. Stevens worked for WED on the HM interior and "ride works" effort. (The exterior building was long completed by then.) To the best of my memory, he would have been about 20 years old at that time and was probably a junior drafter or job captain in the architectural dept.

He went on to become an architect with his own practice in Southern California and later moved to Northern California or Oregon. I have not seen him for many years.  We worked together briefly in an architectural firm as drafters and designers.  He was once kind enough to allow me to examine his copies of the HM construction documents, probably progress checksets, since many of the details are missing or at variance with those you publish in the blog.  I remember that he kept a tape dispenser on his desk, with "SNEVETS" written on it in large black letters. I asked about it, since it's the sort of anonymous thing that drafters put their names on, to prevent "drift". He remarked that "everyone used their name backward" where he used to work.  Hope this helps.


I have since found Stevens' name on some HM blueprints, so we've got a match.  There is a curious story involving this stone.  The Haunted Mansion Holiday switchover every year must be a routine business by now, but after the first Nightmare Before Christmas overlay in 2001, it must have been pretty crazy around there when they switched back again, since no one had ever done it before.  Call it the Nightmare After Christmas.  Well, when they were all done, they apparently had a Ron Stevens stone left over.  Kinda like taking apart an engine or a clock or something and putting it back together.  You're very proud of yourself until you notice that there's a wheel left over.  Anyway, they put it outside in the pet cemetery, which makes sense since Snevets Nor is such a common pet name.  I know my friend had a hard time deciding between "Prince" and "Snevets Nor" when he named his German Shepherd.  SNEVETS NOR stayed out there for more than a year.




That's also the approximate timeframe for this photo. Looks like the spare SNEVETS came in handy when a figure was out for repair.

pic by Anthony Mejia

The epitaph on the last stone in the top row is just gibberish, unless there's a pun in PAX BETA, which would be "Peace B."  Peace be, get it?  Far out, man.  Remember, this is 1969.  "ETI N" in Greek would be "Yet the" or "Still the," but that's grasping at straws.  Gibberish, says I. [Edit: But see now the suggestion by John Edwards in the Comments.  Possibly Et In Terra Pax ("and on earth, peace") lies behind the epitaph.]

Bottom left.  SAHC NOSUF.  Charles Fuson was a layout artist for the old Crusader Rabbit cartoon series before coming to Disney in 1953.  He did some in-betweener work in the animation department, but from 1960 until 1965 he mostly did pencil sketches for comic books and comic strips, including the popular Sunday edition of Scamp.



Unless there were two Chuck Fusons at Disney during this period, our Charles apparently went to WED and became an Imagineer.  Here he is (right) working with Yale Gracey (left) on a burning ember effect for Pirates of the Caribbean:



Next, we have TEUH - 1803 - FILIC.  This is a slightly garbled inversion of Cliff Huet.  He's another guy who got both an inside and an outside stone:  "Rest in peace, Cousin Huet, we all know you didn't do it."  Cliff Huet was a WED architect and one of the lead interior designers for the Mansion.

The inscription, "My Glass is Run" (i.e., the sand in my hourglass has run out) was popular on tombstones.  It's from a 16th c. poem by
Charles Tichborne, an interesting guy who. . . let's just say he fought the law, and the law won.


My prime of youth is but a frost of cares,
My feast of joy is but a dish of pain,
My crop of corn is but a field of tares,
And all my good is but vain hope of gain;
The day is past, and yet I saw no sun,
And now I live, and now my life is done.

My tale was heard and yet it was not told,
My fruit is fallen, and yet my leaves are green,
My youth is spent and yet I am not old,
I saw the world and yet I was not seen;
My thread is cut and yet it is not spun,
And now I live, and now my life is done.

I sought my death and found it in my womb,
I looked for life and saw it was a shade,
I trod the earth and knew it was my tomb,
And now I die, and now I was but made;
My glass is full, and now my glass is run,
And now I live, and now my life is done.

If he sounds a little down, it might be because the next day he was hanged, drawn, and quartered.

We talked about
LAUDEMUS TE ("We glorify thee") in a previous post.  'Nuff said.


MURDNIWG is George Windrum, an Imagineer who did "show set design" for the If You Had Wings attraction at WDW.   According to his daughter Gayle, "He ran the Show Set Design department at W.E.D. (former name of WDI)--creating working drawings for the interiors of many rides including the H. M."  A certain "G. K. Windrum" drew up some Haunted Mansion blueprints that I have seen.  There is also a "George Windrum" who does oil paintings and won first place in an art show put on by the Glendale Art Association in September of 2008.  And that, dear friends, is the sum total of my knowledge about George Windrum.

NEKEESORF is Ken Forsse. The last name is often misspelled as Frosee or Forsee; even this tombstone seems to assume "Frosee."  Ken worked on all the Disneyland attractions throughout its "golden age," the 60s—early 70s, including work on the HM, but he's more famous for what he did after he left.  His genius was in recognizing that low-level, mechanical audio-animatronics had come well within the economic reach of the toy market.  He invented Teddy Ruxpin, the biggest selling toy of 1985.



Yeah, I know.  Pretty cutesy-wootsie for these parts.  I used to call him
Rusty Bedpan, but everyone thought I was just being a meanie.

If you're familiar with the behind-the-scenes footage from the old Disneyland Showtime
Osmonds program, you have seen Forsse without knowing who he is, most likely:


On the strength of his experience with the Haunted Mansion, Ken was contracted to design a full-scale haunted house attraction for an Atlanta park. Sadly, it was never built, but a detailed scale model exists. Sadly, Forsse passed away in March of 2014 (age 77). 

That concludes our tour of the inside graveyard tombstones.  Between the nine old men and the two types of smaller stones, we've accounted for almost all of them.  There are, however, a couple of one-offs.




We already know about the Rolo Rumkin stone, which was one of the original family plot stones in the DL queue.  Currently, it's directly across the tracks from the teaparty.  The "Jay" stone is from a charity auction in 2004, where the highest bidder got his or her own gravestone in the Mansion.  The winner was Cary "Jay" Sharp.  He bid $37,400.  Find it between the "hell hound" and the See-Saw Royals:


The big one is at WDW and pays tribute to Judi Gray, Fred Joerger, and Harriet Burns, plus "Ed" and "Art," whoever they are.  Fred is yet another Imagineer who ended up with both an inside and outside stone.  He's "Good Old Fred," upon whose head a "big old rock" fell.  Both he and Harriet are Disney legends in every sense of the word, and both did valuable work on the Mansion.  In 2011 Harriet got a second tribute, in the WDW interactive queue, where a gravestone reads: "First lady of the opera, our haunting Harriet, searched for a tune, but never could carry it."



I just learned today (6-4-20) something about Judi Gray. According to Tom Morris, Judi
worked in the WED model shop from the mid-60s to the early 70s. He sent me a photo:


Here's another, from the 1968 Disney Annual Report:




**************

Nothing profound, just team members in an extraordinary creative enterprise giving each other subtle high-fives or paying tribute to personal heroes.  That's profound enough, I guess.
.

23 comments:

  1. Fantastic!

    Let's hope the interwebs work their magic and bring us the answers...

    ReplyDelete
  2. I've added a few more bits of info about "G. Windrum" that I've dug up. "G" is George, and he did show set design at WDW for If You Had Wings. He won a local art contest in Glendale in 2008.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Not to mention that he is listed as the "Show Producer" for Walt Disney World's Pirates of the Caribbean.

      Delete
  3. I should add that I'm not 100% certain the Glendale oil painter is the same George Windrum as the Disney George Windrum, but the name, the place, and the field would lead you to think so. Could be a son, of course.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes that is the same George Windrum. I should know, I am related to him

      Delete
  4. Hello, everyone. Although this is an old post, HBG2 encouraged me to comment.

    There may be a single source for two of the Latin/quasi-Latin tombstone inscriptions discussed on this blog. The Gloria in excelsis from the Latin Mass (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gloria_5_%28init%29.png) contains these two phrases: Et in terra pax (And peace on earth) and Laudamus te (We praise Thee). Laudamus te shows up verbatim on the "Memento Mori" stone. The Latinesque gibberish on the "Memorie" stone seems to derive from Et in terra pax. If I had to guess, whoever designed these inscriptions was using the Gloria as a reference/source, but not suspecting that his work would be picked apart decades later on a blog, he didn't feel the need to be exact.

    Actually, though, Et in terra pax would be a nice pun. We usually think "peace on earth" when we hear that, but it could equally mean "peace in (the) earth"--quite an appropriate funerary inscription, don't you think?

    ReplyDelete
  5. I've added new photos and info about Chuck Fuson and Bob Sewell.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Nice photo of Bob Sewell (my father). The "Dirty Duel" tombstone was well known in my family, but I'm not sure if I'd ever known about "Trebor Llewe[s]". (I used that as a pseudonym myself when I was a kid, since Robert was my middle name.) Wish I could contribute toward illuminating more of the tombstone mysteries, but the family lore on that heading is unfortunately deficient.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Thank you, David, and any other tidbits you might like to share about your father, particularly in relation to the HM, are welcome.

    ReplyDelete
  8. I think can solve one of your mystery tombstones.

    "Snevets Nor" is, as you surmised, Ron Stevens.

    Mr. Stevens worked for WED on the HM interior and "ride works" effort. (The exterior building was long completed by then.) To the best of my memory, he would have been about 20 years old at that time and was probably a junior drafter or job captain in the architectural dept.

    He went on to become an architect with his own practice in Southern California and later moved to Northern California or Oregon. I have not seen him for many years.

    We worked together briefly in an architectural firm as drafters and designers.

    He was once kind enough to allow me to examine his copies of the HM construction documents, probably progress checksets, since many of the details are missing or at variance with those you publish in the blog.

    I remember that he kept a tape dispenser on his desk, with "SNEVETS" written on it in large black letters. I asked about it, since it's the sort of anonymous thing that drafters put their names on, to prevent "drift". He remarked that "everyone used their name backward" where he used to work.

    Hope this helps.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Splendid! Thank you very much.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Now I think I may have to name my next pet "Snevets Nor." (I could call it Nora or Norm for short.)

    ReplyDelete
  11. "The epitaph on the last stone in the top row is just gibberish, unless there's a pun in PAX BETA, which would be "Peace B.""


    Um, "Pax Beta" means simply "Be at peace". It's a varient of RIP.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Interesting. Do you have some documentation for that? "Beta" (or "Be Ta," etc.) is not a form of "to be" in Latin; it's just the letter "B." I can't find any place the phrase "pax beta" has been used historically.

      Delete
  12. No, no documentation :)
    I meant to said, "I'm guessing it means...".

    If I remember my high school Latin:

    "memorie - et in tei pax beta" means "in her memory - and upon her peace beta" (whatever beta means)

    To me "beta" is either the name of "her" or it is a silly twisting of "be at" in English. So it would be "peace be upon her".

    But one of the problems is that the second and third words are not clear. Is that "intei" or "intci" or "in tei" or "in tci"?! Or is that last letter "I" actually an "L"?

    If you translate it with the L - "et intel pax beta" - that would mean basically "and complete peace beta".

    But in that case, if we're just guessing anyway, it could refer to the Christian fish symbol - the peace fish (pax = peace and beta = the fish). Then again, betas are not very peaceful fish, which is why they are always kept separate in their own bowl.


    Wonder why no one in all of these years ever asked the imagineers what the heck it meant. It's as frustrating as working on Ancestry.com and discovering dead relatives that your other relatives never bothered to tell you about while they were alive and now there's no one left alive to know who anyone was.

    ReplyDelete
  13. Apparently this wasn't the only haunted house attraction Ken Forsee (the inventor of Teddy Ruxpin) worked on. See https://plus.google.com/105281104953680569679/posts/1A5Y8CoGvmj

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you very much for that link, which is very informative. I'll be incorporating some of that into the post above.

      Delete
    2. You're welcome. Came across it the other day, thought you in particular would find it interesting.

      Delete
  14. If you're still here… Judi Gray sighted over at the "Ghost Relations Department": in post "Three Bodies - One Grave", it is mentioned that this tombstone features three of the model builders mostly involved with Mansion; Judi Gray, Fred Joerger and Harriet Burns".

    ReplyDelete
  15. Something possibly of interest: this from a 1972 WDW souvenir pop-up book:

    https://disneynouns.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/cd020-book7.jpg

    So that kid-friendly Popup Ghost is pretty patheitc, but look at the tombstones. They are of the same model you analyze in this post. One features an illegible brass plaque, which could just be artistic license, but the other features another inscrutable epitaph: "ST. B. CLEVES". Did the artist (one Dean Walley, per front-page credit) add in a tribute of his own? Make up random gibberish? Or is this a trace of a WDW-only Tenth Old Man?

    ReplyDelete
  16. "Good thing there wasn't anything naughty on them." That gave me a chuckle, since I started reading your blog a few days ago to see if I could find any more detail about one of the graveyard tombstones... with a nude sketch on the back of it. When I worked as a sweeper at DL, in the early 90s, I got a few opportunities to explore. The last time I was in the HM, I decided to take a closer look at the musicians across from the Caretaker. When I turned around, I saw two very nicely done sketches of comely lasses... but I hardly remember the one on my left. I was fixated on the one to my right, closest to the Caretaker. I recall it as a nude version of Tinkerbell, in a Marilyn Monroe Playboy cover pose. It has almost been 30 years now, so I have no distinct description for the other sketch.

    As I have learned more about the HM in intervening years, I have wondered if it was a Marc Davis sketch, and I hope you might have more insight? I wish I could find a photo, but all my googling has been for naught. Any tales of what might be on the reverse of other tombstones as well? I kick myself now, but I did not look back of any more of the stones, probably having exceeded my limits of bravery for tramping about the sets already.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I've never heard of this, and so of course I've never heard of photos of it. But it doesn't surprise me either! It's well known that some of the Imagineers smuggled naughty things into Mouseland from time to time. Thanks for sharing this.

      Delete