This year Mickey Mouse turned 94 years old. Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks created Mickey in 1928. Mickey’s first animated short had been a silent one and the addition of sound, including music, that same year in “Steamboat Willie” made all the difference.
Disney was the voice of Mickey in “Steamboat Willie” and would continue to be Mickey’s voice into the 1940s. It was that film that made Micky famous and established Disney in the forefront of Animation.
George Borgfeldt & Co., under the name of Fun-E-Flex, became Disney’s first toy licensee, selling wooden Mickey Mouse toys that had been patented in 1930. The Borgfeldt Co. already had an international reputation for toys and dolls as they were the manufacturer of Bisque doll heads and limbs in the late 1800s. In 1913, the company brought out the Kewpie doll. The wooden Disney figures, and especially Mickey Mouse, became very popular in the early to mid-1930s.
While Josh Meador, who called Columbus home, was not the Disney artist famous for drawing Mickey Mouse, according to Dave Smith, Disney Studio archivist, he was the animator who often made Mickey come alive on the big screen. Meador went to work for Disney in 1936 and became head of Animation Effects. In a column I did on Meador last summer, I lacked the room to include some local stories about him growing up in Columbus and later returning for visits.
These local stories are usually the ones not recorded and end up being forgotten. People who were in school with him recalled him as friendly, loving art and always getting in trouble for drawing in his textbooks during class. He was a ”little merchant” or paperboy for The Commercial Dispatch, delivering newspapers, and was a Boy Scout. After graduating from Lee High in 1930 he was offered an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy.
He attended the Chicago Art Institute instead, and in 1935 graduated with honors. The same year he married his high school sweetheart Elizabeth Alston. A friend talked him into going to California to look for work. His friend who had an interview with Disney talked Josh into getting one too. It was Josh who got the job.
Josh always called Columbus home and for the rest of his life returned to Columbus almost every summer to visit.
On those trips he would meet old friends at Bob’s Place for a beer and hamburger or barbecue. While there, he would sketch cartoon figures on napkins. Uncle Bunky told me when Josh and his friends left the napkins would just be thrown away. Bunky said he sure wished he had saved them.
Josh was always interested in what was going on in Columbus. During World War II there was a serviceman’s club in the basement of Whitehall. Josh got Walt Disney
to autograph several animation cells or drawings “Happy landings at Whitehall Walt Disney” and send them to Columbus.
Also, through Josh, Disney offered Uncle Bunky a job. Bunky thanked Disney but declined, saying his calling was to stay in Columbus and help the community’s young people. He even gave his old High School a large oil painting of a Spanish Galleon tossed on a stormy sea to hang in her classroom. The painting was lost when the old Lee High School building burned in 1959.
Josh Meador died in 1965. He and his wife are buried in Friendship Cemetery.
Starkville also has a Disney connection. Andy Harkness was with Disney for more than 20 years. His animation work included “Pocahontas,” “Lion King,” “Lilo and Stitch,” “Brother Bear,” and he was a visual development artist (backgrounds) on “Frozen” and “Zootopia” and an art director on “Mulan,” “Moana” and “Prep and Landing.”
He left Disney and was an art director for Sony’s Vivo. He is now production designer for Skydance Animation. Andy has won a Primetime Emmy, an Annie and won the VES Award by the Visual Effects Society in 2017 for the Outstanding Created Effects Environment in an Animated Feature for his work on “Moana.”
Rufus Ward is a local historian.
Rufus Ward is a Columbus native a local historian. E-mail your questions about local history to Rufus at [email protected].
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