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Today in Disney history, July 19, 1999, Walt Disney’s barn opens to the public in Griffith Park, Los Angeles.
Dave: Michael Broggie is the son of Disney Legend Roger Broggie, who is credited with being the first Disney Imagineer. Roy E. Disney called Roger a mechanical genius, and said that Disneyland would not have been possible without him.
If you’ve ever seen the photo of Walt Disney on the E.P. Ripley locomotive before opening day of Disneyland. Michael is the kid who was Walt’s fireman that day. He eventually worked at Disneyland as a cast member until he ended up at the motion picture marketing department at the studio.
Aside from his time with the company, he built relationships with Walt’s wife Lillian and daughter Diane. Those relationships helped bring about one of the most beloved places that Walt Disney fans – who also love railroading – can visit. Thanks for joining me, Michael. Would you tell us the story about saving Walt’s Barn and making it available to the public?
Michael: Hi, Dave. Well, thank you for inviting me to tell this story. It’s one of my favorites because it has a personal connection to Walt and his family, and having spent childhood hours with my dad and my older brother working as crew members on Walt’s backyard miniature railroad, the Carolwood Pacific, it gave me an opportunity to get to know Walt personally. As a kid growing up in his backyard, one of the things in an operation day is you report to the Barn in his backyard. The red Barn, which was his workshop, and as I refer to it as Walt’s Happy Place. It’s where he spent time every evening when he got back home from the studio, those were always, in a large part, stressful days because of the responsibilities that he had running the company. And so he would go down to the Barn and work on a project until his wife called on the phone that was located in the Barn and said, Walt, dinner’s ready, come on up. And he would and sometimes bring along a little miniature of something he was building in the Barn to share with the family, with his wife, Lillian and daughters Diane and Sharon. So the Barn had always been the showplace hallmark of the Carolwood Pacific Railroad. Well years later, fast forward, Walt passed in December of 1966 at the age of 65 – only 65 – and that’s looking very young to me.
Dave: How old are you now?
Michael: Oh, come on… 83 that’s classified! Not really, no… for an 83 year old, I think I’m doing all right. No I can’t complain. So an afternoon, phone rings and it’s Diane. And we had gotten to know Diane quite well through Retlaw and I did some projects for Retlaw. She called and said, “Michael and Sharon, we have to save dad’s Barn.” And she went on to explain that the Carolwood Estate had to be sold because the family had an obligation of inheritance tax for Lillian. Lillian had passed, and Lillian was 98 years old. She was always very sensitive about the fact that she was two years older than Walt. She never wanted that revealed. And Diane says, “We’ve gotta save dad’s Barn. It was so special to him.” And “Can you help?” So Sharon and I took on the project. We contacted a restoration contractor who lived Flintridge, La Canada area, and his name is Bill Abel. And I said, Bill, there’s a building that needs to be dismantled and saved because the estate is being sold, and one of the family is concerned that this wooden Barn would probably be reduced to kindling by the new owner. So the idea from Diane was, let’s take it apart, save it and then figure out where we’re going to put it. So Bill and I met up at the property. He walked through it, he looked at it, looked at how it was put together, and said, I think we can do this, because his specialty was restoration work. He’s the perfect person to do this project.
We then commenced with Diane’s clearance to go ahead and dismantle the Barn. And as they took it apart, they found out there were things that were not apparent when you looked at it. And Walt, who was a stickler for originality and accuracy, for example, the ridge of the roof, where the cupola sits up on the middle of the ridge, and the roof actually slants down from the front and up again toward the back…
Dave: So there’s a sway in the center of the roof line.
Michael: Yeah. And so Bill looked at that, and he said, geez, this is an old building. Look at that roof is sunk in the middle… so when they finally got to taking off all the shingles, they found out that that sway was actually built into the ridge. It was purposely created to give the appearance of age. And it didn’t stop there. The other thing that Walt didn’t want the Barn’s size to overwhelm the scale of his 1/8 scale locomotive and his railroad. So what they did is they made a slight ramp down as you approach the building, you actually walk up a slight incline so that the floor of the Barn actually was higher than grade. Thus giving the appearance of being smaller than It actually was, because, you know, it’s full size inside. So that was another example of, you know, fooling the eye and Walt’s meticulous attention to detail.
So as we progressed with taking it all apart, and there were 37 windows, so all the windows and the framing and everything had to be carefully dismantled, all the shingles, all the siding, and they used a couple of containers to store all the wood and all the parts, pieces and everything that the Barn represented into a container, and the container was then stored somewhere, probably on the property, until a plan was developed to… where is the Barn going to end up? And there was a discussion with the people at Disneyland about the possibility of moving it to the park. And they wanted it and because of its historic, but Diane did not want the Barn to end up at Disneyland. She wanted somewhere else.
And we had a friend who was a city councilman, who I approached. In fact, he came out and visited the Barn before we started taking it apart. And he said, I love to have this in Griffith Park. And he represented the district of LA that the park is in that district. So he said, let me do some checking on my end with city government and see if we can locate the Barn in Griffith Park.
So as making progress about a site possibility, and then things got really legally complicated, because it was determined probably the most desirable place would be on the 10 acre site that the city had permitted LA Live Steamers Club, which Walt happened to be a charter member of the LA Live Steamers. And like Walt, you know, they scale in 1/12th, 1/8th scale locomotives, and they run track all around their 10 acres. And there was a meadow of undeveloped land that we thought might be a perfect site for the Barn.
So with that, it became a triangular relationship – the Disney Family, which did not want to give up ownership of the Barn – to this day, they still legally own the Barn. The Barn is on loan to the city of Los Angeles. So we had to meet with LA Park Commission, because Griffith Park is under their jurisdiction, and get their approval to locate the Barn on the site of the LA Live Steamers. Then we had to get the LA Live Steamers on to agree to have at the Barn located within their jurisdiction. There three parties – Disney Family, City of Los Angeles, and the LA Live Steamers. So after many, many meetings and negotiations, finally, it got green lighted. Let’s see Lillian passed in December of ’97, got the call in ’98
early in ’98, because the house had gone into escrow from a buyer that agreed to buy the estate for $8.5 million, and Walt and Lillian paid $25,000 for 5 acres in 1949…
Dave: From the phone call until putting it into the shipping container, about how long was that?
Michael: Couple of months. Couple of months… because we knew we had to get it off the property, before the close of escrow. And so that was progressing, and we couldn’t stop that clock, so we had to get the Barn off the property, which we did.
Dave: And then you said, with all the meetings, the many meetings with the city and LALS, about how long did that take?
Michael: A couple of months.
Dave: Oh, okay, not, not as bad as I was thinking.
Michael: Because we had to appear before the City Park Commission and tell them what we wanted to do, and had to get their approval. And so we were starting to line up our assets and our constituency to make it a doable project.
Dave: So within a year, within a 12 month time frame, you you went from dismantling the Barn, putting in the storage and getting an agreement, before you started construction.
Michael: Right and now Walter Miller, Diane’s son, was active in Retlaw at the time, and he was a real assist, and became kind of our ‘go-to-guy’ on approving what we were doing. And so it was Walt Miller, and although it was Diane that signed the agreement. So once we got the signatures and everybody is on board, we started with the foundation and the construction under Bill Ables, very able direction.
And fortunately, as the parts and pieces were removed from the container, which was then relocated to the Griffith Park site, none of the windows were broken. All of them made it, and we were notified by the city that our shingle roof was not acceptable in the fire code because they were in a fire zone there in Griffith Park. So all of the wood shingles then had to be disposed of. I did save a few of ’em. In fact, I’m looking at one now, a nice little commemorative piece that we created, a picture of the Barn, a section of the original shingle and a commemorative pin.
Another thing, there was a small enclosure in the Barn that housed a toilet. And when we were removing the goods out of the container, we had help from Bill Evans, who agreed to do the landscaping for the Barn…
Dave: Wow! Bill Evans was one of the horticulturalists that designed and built all the greenery at Disneyland.
Michael: Who would be better than to recreate? Because Bill Evans did all of the horticulture at Carolwood, estate. That’s how Walt got to know Bill Evans. He says, Well, you did such a nice job on my yard at my house, how about you landscape Disneyland for us? And he became a Disney Legend and did all 10 Disney Parks before he passed. Bill Evans was a terrific guy, a genius in his field.
One of Bill’s assistants, very nice young lady, I don’t recall her name, but she ‘What are you gonna do with that toilet?’, because it was kind of in this little collection of things that weren’t gonna make the final cut. And I said, well, we’ll probably just dispose of it, you know, take it to a landfill or something… ‘Oh no, no, no. I want that. I want that. It will be a beautiful flower pot for my yard.’ So she acquired the toilet that was in the Barn, and it’s now in her landscaped yard filled with flowers.
Dave: So once construction was finished, how long before you were ready to open to the public?
Michael: We wanted to have a date that was close to the anniversary date of the Park, but not on their date, because we didn’t want to interfere with the Park traffic. So we selected the Monday of that week in 1999, which turned out to be July 19, instead of the Park date, which is, of course, July 17. So we also wanted to coordinate the presence of as many of the Disney family that were available, and we ended up with three generations of Disney family. And that was Diane, her son, Walter, her daughter, Joanna, and Joanna’s children were there. So that’s three generations of Disney family.
So anyway, we scheduled a 10 o’clock press opening, and we had officials from the city of Los Angeles, their park commission were there, the City Council were there, and the mayor sent his regards, so everybody was in line, and we had representatives, the LA Live Steamers, and, of course, our volunteers who were going to manage operations of the Barn. So all of us showed up that day. The Barn looked great, it had been painted and fixed up and had a new fireproof roof that met city code. I mean, it sparkled.
Dave: How did Diane decide that she wanted this to be a tribute to Walt and his love of railroading?
Michael: Well, as she called it, it was her dad’s happy place. It’s where he spent his off time tinkering. He loved to tinker. He was already skilled in woodworking. He’d learned that from his father, who was a carpenter, Elias Disney, his dad. And in fact, Elias, some people know that Elias worked on the Union Pacific as a carpenter, laying track from Kansas City to Denver… three years he was a carpenter on the railroad. So it was in Walt’s DNA, and his uncle, Mike Martin was an operating engineer on the Santa Fe line that ran through Marceline. So there were a lot of connections with railroading and the Disney family. And Walt loved that. He loved history, and that transferred to railroading as being like the connecting element that connected everyone together by rail, literally. So the Barn was a natural, but it had history.
When Walt was a youngster in Marceline, they had a 40 acre farm, and there was a barn on that farm, and when Walt was seven years old, he put his first show on for the neighborhood kids in that barn that looked an awful lot like the Barn that ended up in his backyard. Years later, when he became a film producer at the studio, they were making a film called So Dear to My Heart, there’s a character in that film who was Granny Kincaid. And Granny Kincaid had a small farm and a barn, and Walt wanted that barn to be like the one on his family farm back in Missouri. So they built a set in Porterville, where the location was made, and there is that barn in the background, is very obviously the same barn, same design. So years later, when Walt got his property, he and Lillian bought their place in Holmby Hills in 1949 only a couple of years after So Dear to My Heart, was released, which is 1947, that he said to his folks building his backyard layout, I want that barn, same barn, Granny’s barn. And so they got the plans for the set, and he said, the one thing I want different though, I want windows. They said, well Walt, barns don’t normally have windows. I want windows. And if the boss says he wants windows, he got windows, 37 of them. So that’s how Granny Kincaid and the family farm in Marceline all had barn connections.
In fact, there is a book called Walt Disney’s Happy Place that chronicles the Barn evolution in Walt’s life.
Dave: That’s your book. You pulled that together many years ago.
Michael: Yes, because I thought it was an important sidebar to Walt’s career in life. Most people had no idea that this barn had a legacy to it. To most people, ‘oh, it’s cute, cute, little red barn’, but don’t have any idea there’s a history, very ingrained in Disney family history. So the Barn became, the center of his activity, and then years later, when we reconstructed the barn in Griffith Park and scheduled a grand opening and had the Disney family representatives and all our volunteers and city officials, and so on, and so it was a big event. And I remember Diane, up at the podium, with the Barn behind her, she said, “My dad loved this Barn. It was where he would make things and spent time, and he had lathes in here, and he had tools and so on.” And she said that it was really the heartbeat of her dad, was that Barn. And she meant it. Sincerely, that that Barn was really representative of Walt.
So we launched the Barn that day, and it’s had many, many visitors come. I try to make it for signature events, when I can to be there. I was there for the 25th which is last year. I was there for the 20th, so I do try to get over there from my home in Arizona when I can.
Dave: And for those that don’t know, one of my all time favorite books, because it is all about Walt and all about trains, Michael Broggie also wrote “Walt Disney’s Railroad Story – The Small-Scale Fascination That Led to a Full-Scale Kingdom“. It is beautiful, wonderful, and it tells a lot more history about Walt, the Barn, the trains, and the parks.
Michael: Well, thank you for that plug, Dave.
Dave: Thank you for sharing the story! Unless there’s any other notes you wanted to make about the Barn history…
Michael: No, only Diane’s last words were, “Thank you, Michael and Sharon for doing this.” That was a nice acknowledgement from Walt’s daughter.
Dave: Wonderful. Well again, Michael Broggie, thank you for sharing the history and story of saving Walt’s Barn, and I look forward to seeing you out there.
