We already met John Hench in volumes 1 and 4 of Walt’s People. Here are a few of his memories of Walt.
Richard Hubler: Walt really intended, at first, to put Disneyland on the Studio lot?
John Hench: Yes, he intended to have some kind of a little park there. The embryo of the idea was growing. The first description I ever heard of Disneyland was a kind of park for children of the employees. He thought about an artist’s gallery for our own exhibitions and the employees who painted and some place for kids to visit. I remember one feature was a singing waterfall. There was a singing waterfall and a few other things that were in his mind. He laid it out there, and I think the longer he thought about it, [the more he realized], of course, that it wasn’t big enough.
Because Walt was a guy who kept getting more and more ideas. No matter what he did: particularly a problem in motion pictures ’cause you have a definite overall time limit. You know you just can’t go on forever with a picture. Walt had so many ideas it was a great problem: what we would do with them all? It’s like working with a pan that you’re supposed to put so much bread in and the yeast just keeps on growing and you have more and more bread and you have to scrape it off because it’s too big for the container. […]
