Tributes to effects animator and Columbus” own Joshua Meador has proponents bubbling with high hopes.
Local historian Rufus Ward, Columbus Convention and Visitors Bureau board member Glenn Lautzenhiser and Columbus-Lowndes Public Library Archivist Mona Vance have been moving and shaking in the last few months, determined to outdo recent appreciations of sportscaster Red Barber and boxer Henry Armstrong, both Columbus-born.
“We just decided that, is there anything else that we could honor? We immediately thought, Josh Meador,” Lautzenhiser said Thursday.
He and his allies plan to hold two series of events — first in October, then in March — in honor of Meador, who grew up in Columbus and went on to animate Disney movies such as “Peter Pan,” “Pinnochio,” “Cinderella,” and “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” before his death in 1965. He is buried in Friendship Cemetery.
The organizers are also pushing for the construction of a Meador-centered art park next to the Tennessee Williams Welcome Center on Main Street.
“I guess it seems like a no-brainer to me,” Vance said Friday, standing in the vault where some of Meador”s original paintings and sketches are kept. “To highlight someone like Josh Meador with other individuals from Lowndes County really shows how cultural our county is. You know, he was on the national forefront in the development of animation.”
The planned celebrations would not mark the first for Meador in Columbus, but they would likely be the most elaborate yet.
An art park downtown and a historic marker at his old house would last longer than the four-week exhibition of Meador”s paintings, sketches and technical drawings at the library in 1984. The artist”s widow, Elizabeth Alston Meador — they were S.D. Lee High School sweethearts — was on hand to welcome visitors for a few days.
Meador was born in Greenwood in 1911, but since he lived in Columbus from the time he was about 7 until he graduated from Lee High, and since some of his family members lived in Columbus, he liked to call the Friendly City his hometown, his wife told The Dispatch in 1984.
Secretly took art classes
When Meador wasn”t drawing in notebook margins at Lee High, he was taking art classes in secret at what was then known as Mississippi State College for Women, his widow said.
He graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1935. A year later, he was working at Walt Disney Studios in California. When World War II came around, he helped animate war promotion materials, including the film “Victory Through Air Power.” In 1954, Disney loaned him to MGM to help create “Forbidden Planet,” which would inspire science fiction productions for decades to come. He became director of special effects for the studios before retiring in 1960.
All along, on the side, he made oil paintings with a palette knife, and sketches in pencil or charcoal he called “quickies.” Some images mimicked scenes from daily life. Others slid toward fantasy. Yet a sketch of a house in Columbus across the street from his does not come off as unrelated to one carving out a possible demon for the “Night on Bald Mountain” segment of “Fantasia.”
Exhibitions of his art in California increased his nationwide fame and recognition back home in Columbus. Bunky Williams painted a caricature of Meador from memory.
But in the last few decades — since the 1984 exhibit — little has been done in Columbus to memorialize Meador. And yet, for years, the Walt Disney Company has wanted to support a tribute to Meador, Ward told the Columbus CVB board members last week.
Reviving the legend
Now, Williams said, “It”s so weird that he is so famous with Disney and nobody in Columbus, Miss., … (has) ever heard of Josh Meador, and that”s what gets me.”
Ward, Lautzenhiser and Vance are working to revive Meador”s legend — and maybe not just for his sake.
“It”ll be interesting to see who”s next,” Vance said, “what the next generation will create, who will be the next Joshua Meador or Tennessee Williams, and what path they”ll forge, you know?”
The Dispatch Editorial Board is made up of publisher Peter Imes, columnist Slim Smith, managing editor Zack Plair and senior newsroom staff.
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