Designer Times
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37. EPCOT and General Motors

By 1973 much of the Florida property development was well under way with the major infrastructure in place to support the Walt Disney World Magic Kingdom, and be ready for the big push to build Walt's dream, EPCOT. Marty Sklar convened an early WED think tank group called the "Wednesday Morning Club". It was composed of diverse Imagineers who began to wrestle with Walt's ideas which had lain in limbo since December 1966. Marty chaired the group and I was among the twenty or so folks that met every Wednesday starting in mid 1973.

We kicked around endless ideas and gradually evolved a working philosophy for EPCOT which Disney President, Card Walker, presented to the American Marketing Association on May 15, 1974. This set the stage for the planning of the First EPCOT Symposium to hopefully be held by April, 1975. A prime achievement prior to the Symposium, according to an August 2, 1974 memo from Pat Scanlon to Marty Sklar, was to have a commitment to EPCOT Phase One from a major American Industrial firm.

Steve Mannheim, in his book "Walt Disney and the Quest for Community", details many of the efforts that Walt and WED undertook towards making EPCOT a reality. The activities starting with the Wednesday Morning Club eventually led to presentational material prepared by WED for marketing the EPCOT idea to industry. One such presentation was a number of beautifully boxed brochure sets which thoroughly described what EPCOT was all about. Marty Sklar had these in his office in Glendale, California.

Pause......Rewind back to Los Angeles 1951. I was a young auto design student at the Art Center School. General Motors provided a scholarship every year to a promising student. I was poor enough to qualify, so GM paid for my schooling until graduation in May, 1952. Actually, I never graduated since GM asked the school to send their best students about a month early to Detroit for interviews. Arriving in Detroit, I found myself the subject of a GM vs. Ford student raid and wound up at Ford, thus missing my long planned dream career with General Motors. Many of my buddies later spent their design lives with GM.

In December 1952 I was raided again, this time to George W. Walker Industrial Design, located near the GM Styling Section in Detroit, where I met a young designer, Dave Holls. He and I became lifetime friends. His big fame came as the designer of the giant finned 1959 Cadillac. In January, 1976 at the dedication of the new campus of Art Center, Dave introduced me to his boss, Bill Mitchell, Vice President of Design for General Motors. I lost no time in telling Bill all about EPCOT. GM used to have a great traveling car show called Motorama back in the 1950's.....absolutely exciting with all their wild new show cars. I thought GM would like a new place for Motorama......EPCOT.

I asked Marty Sklar to send an EPCOT boxed brochure set to Bill Mitchell in Detroit. Marty was furious.....Walt Disney Productions had identified the Ford Motor Company as one of our key EPCOT marketing targets, not General motors! We had great relations with Ford at the New York World's Fair and the Studio used lots of Ford cars and trucks. But Marty sent the material anyway. GM very quickly responded with serious inquiries, and so began a long period of The Marketing Dance between Disney and GM.

During the next (18) months Disney and GM personnel at many levels made numerous visits to WDW, Detroit, and California to share their cultures and develop a plan to make GM a part of EPCOT. Future GM Chairman Roger Smith would come out to WED, our Imagineers were taken on fascinating tours of GM's Milford Test Track and the GM Tech Center. We were shown lots of secret stuff. I enjoyed visiting my old schoolmates who were designing some great GM cars. On one visit there, I was allowed to wander about thru the GM Styling areas unaccompanied by security. Styling Chief Chuck Jordan noticed me nearby and was shocked to find me snooping about. This was 1976, long after I was a Ford guy....."Oh well, Gurr's to old to know what he's looking' at anyway".

I eventually learned why Bill Mitchell responded to our EPCOT idea. He would retire in a few years and wanted to establish a Race Driver Hall of Fame in Florida......sort of his own Race Motorama. Maybe he could get it into EPCOT. Aha, the secret agenda. Earlier in 1975, Disney had sent me to Europe to gather advanced transportation ideas for EPCOT. My old school chum, Henry Haga headed up the styling department of GM's Opel Division in Frankfurt. I spent a weekend with him and his boss, John McCormack, President of GM Europe, who was an auto racing enthusiast.

Disney made a major EPCOT presentation at WDW to the GM team headed by Anthony De Lorenzo, Vice President, GM Marketing on August 9, 1977. All of our Disney heavy hitters were there, and GM had about a dozen suits also. Great meeting at the Contemporary Hotel. After our money guys divulged the price to participate in EPCOT, Tony ran some numbers on his little calculator......"That's 53 ¢ a head.....what am I getting for that?". Well, that sure silenced the room for a bit. But Tony was a really neat guy. His folks and our folks got right into a friendly dialogue. A few of his guys wanted to see where their Pavilion was going to be built. We piled into a couple of Jeeps and headed into the Florida Jungle. I grabbed a wooden stake, wrote down EPCOT's opening date on it, and flipped it into the sand.....landing upright. Good omen the GM guys said.

I had a tight airline schedule to get back to Disneyland to entertain John McCormack's family at Club 33. To help out, Tony took me to GM's private Gulfstream Jet with his guys for a quick return to Detroit to make my connection. The pilot signed me aboard as Passenger No. 13, Mr. X. I was told to go to the cockpit, be quiet and just watch. Upon landing, I was last off, stepping onto a red carpet leading to several black Cadillac limos. A cute lady dressed in red stood nearby with a large basket of roses.. Oh my, what a peek into the inner sanctum of American Industry.

When GM signed on with EPCOT, this triggered many other participants, just as Disney had anticipated. Wed and GM worked very smoothly afterwards as both companies combined efforts to create the GM World of Motion, which opened in 1982. I designed the concept for an updated kind of Omnimover Ride which the MAPO engineering staff then completed for production. I was delighted to finally enjoy at least a bit of my dream for a career with General Motors, even if it was more marketing than styling.

oOo

Next month: Disney Designs - End of An Era