Designer Times by Bob Gurr
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68. Working with Contractors and Suppliers

Alastair Dallas of Los Gatos, CA writes..."I would enjoy hearing more about contractors like Arrow in the early days. Rides like Splash Mountain seem designed for almost mass production, while the rides from the fifties were one-of-a-kind. I'd also like to know more about how you worked with Bacon and Morgan you've mentioned that Roger Broggie had you redesigning their stuff, so I'm wondering if you could expand on that a bit, such as what needed changing, whether they were good engineers, and so on".

As Disneyland was under construction in late 1954, and I was put to work designing the original Autopia Car, I became aware of just how many rides were going into the park. I could see the Disney efforts towards manufacturing their own ride equipment such as the Steam Trains and the Mark Twain Riverboat. But some of the planned rides were going to be built off the Walt Disney Studio lot. I heard the name, Arrow, mentioned a lot, but I didn't know exactly what this meant.

By the spring of 1955 as our Autopia Cars were getting into production, I realized that Disney was working with a great number of suppliers and contractors. Disney wasn't just the sole builder of ride equipment. So the name Arrow meant Arrow Development Co., an amusement ride manufacturer located on Moffett Boulevard in Mountain View California, up in the bay area. I think it was an old pickle factory...sure smelled like pickles when I first visited Arrow some time later.

To learn more about Arrow, read Robert R. Reynold's book, "Roller Coasters, Flumes, & Flying Saucers from Northern Lights Publishing of Jupiter Florida.

The two founders of Arrow, Ed Morgan and Karl Bacon were absolute design geniuses even though they both did not have formal engineering training, but were self taught machinists. This blessed them with the natural ability to figure out solutions to just about any new idea involving mechanical and electrical stuff.

Since many of the folks that Walt Disney had collected to design and build Disneyland were self-learning self-starters, Ed and Karl were a perfect parallel fit with the future Imagineers at Walt's WED Enterprises, as the current Walt Disney Imagineering was then known as. I think this was the key to how productive the Disney-Arrow relationship turned out to be for nearly twenty years. I was constantly amazed at how these guys could work so smoothly with us at WED on the toughest projects. Always with a smile and never any yelling or bickering.

As related in many of the early stories in Designer Times, Disneyland's opening years were fraught with mechanical breakdowns on the various rides, whether Arrow or Disney built. These early stories describe how my boss, Roger Broggie might ask me to design something new as well as redesign something that didn't work as well as expected. This brought me into direct contact with Arrow's rides.

The first experience was that Arrow's Tea Cup Ride suffered almost continuous metal fatigue cracking. The Disneyland welding shop personnel used to do welding repairs for two hours every morning, then go work on other rides the rest of the day. Tea Cup became kind of a joke, but it never stopped running all through the summer of 1955. We finally could take a closer look at what the problem was after the summer crush.

Roger told me to crawl under the thing, watch it run for a few days, then come up with a fix. This was my first actual contact with the Arrow Development manufacturing drawings, which I was to use as a basis for any changes. And it was a chance to actually meet Ed and Karl personally. I figured they'd be upset that Roger had me, a younger guy with no engineering education, assigned to redesign their stuff. After all, they had years of manufacturing experience. But Ed and Karl were very friendly to me, and we became instant long term friends right there.

The Tea Cup redesign project turned into a near-total reengineering job since we had to build an entire new set of turntables as well as a whole new spring suspension system for the support wheels. This job was contracted to a nearby outside steel fabrication company, the same one that built the Tomorrowland TWA Moon Rocket. Thus I became aware of the developing relationships with the increasing number of contractors that Disney would work with in future years.