Bob Gurr has often joked that if it’s at Disneyland and it moves, he likely had a hand in its design. Gurr first started working for Disney in late 1954, just months before Disneyland would open in July 1955, and is one of the figures instrumental in the look, feel and tone of the park.
Gurr was the pivotal designer behind the Autopia cars, the Disneyland Monorail, the Matterhorn Bobsleds and the tomb-like ride vehicles — the “doom buggies” — of the Haunted Mansion. But there’s one of his designs that’s often overlooked by fans, and it holds a special place in Gurr’s heart: a little red vintage fire engine that can regularly be spotted on Main Street, U.S.A., Disneyland’s introductory land.
The Los Angeles-born Gurr had as a teenager been asked to drive a fire engine in a Temple City parade. Serendipitously, that car was owned by Disney master animator Ward Kimball, whom Gurr had met via a car enthusiast society, the Horseless Carriage Club. “So I’m 18 or 19, and driving a fire engine,” Gurr says. “I want one and I’ll never have the money for one. It was a bug.”
But one day in 1958 Gurr would get his fire engine.
“Walt,” says Gurr, referring of course to company founder Walt Disney, “came to my office, and he had a quiet moment, which he did a lot. I said, ‘Walt, we don’t have a fire engine on Main Street.’ And he said, ‘No, Bobby, we don’t.’ About 20 minutes later, the accounting department calls, and the lady says, ‘Bob, write this number down. This is the charging number for the fire engine project.’ And I thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to get a fire engine!’”
Today, Gurr has become one of the more public-facing advocates for vintage Disney tales. He hosts a monthly bus tour, Bob Gurr’s Waltland, which visits integral Disney sites around L.A. It often sells out in minutes, as fans know that Gurr, 93 and still fiery, is a wealth of Walt-era stories about the creation of Disneyland and Walt Disney Imagineering, the secretive arm of the company devoted to theme park experiences.
He shares them with fans regularly at Disneyland, as well as on his YouTube production “The Bob Gurr Show.” This Saturday, a documentary on his career, “Bob Gurr: Living by Design,” will premiere at the Alex Theatre in Glendale, the neighborhood in which Gurr grew up.
He does all this, he says, because it’s fun to talk about his work — he says in the film’s trailer that he’s done “250 basic jobs.” But he also views it as something of a mission. “Walt was Walt,” says Gurr, who’s prone to talk in exaggerated tones with excitable gestures. “As time goes on, people think he’s a company or a brand. I come across people who didn’t know he was a person.” And, he adds, few remain who worked with Walt personally.
On a recent morning at his Tujunga home, Gurr was getting a little wistful. Sitting in a living room overflowing with tchotchkes — some of them incredibly valuable to Disney fans, such as artist-proof models of Gurr’s original monorail designs that casually sit on a coffee table — Gurr draped one of his legs over the arm of a chair and talked about why his fire engine is so meaningful.
It’s that small, early 20th century open-air vehicle that became one of Walt’s favorites. “The last photograph of Walt in his park, what was it?” Gurr asks, referring to a Renie Bardeau picture of Disney behind the wheel in the carriage of a car in front of Sleeping Beauty Castle. “Sitting there in the fire engine with his buddy Mickey Mouse. That was the last photo in Disneyland before he was gone. So that little fire engine has had a circle of life.”
In many ways, so has he.
Gurr’s life has been one of constant activity. Born in 1932 and raised just a short walk from Glendale’s Grand Central Airport, now part of the Disney campus, Gurr grew up airplane- and car-obsessed, eventually attending ArtCenter to study vehicle design.
His first major post-ArtCenter gig was in Detroit, working briefly for the Ford Motor Co. On his coffee table sits a gleaming metallic hood ornament, a winged pointed figure that looks like a mock spaceship that Gurr hoped would grace a new Lincoln. It was rejected, but he holds it proudly today as one of his first professional designs.
“The company did not like it, but I loved it and stole it and took it home,” he says.
Missing the West Coast, however, Gurr returned to L.A. Though the Disney company wasn’t on his radar, Gurr says he was close with Ub Iwerks and his family, having gone to school with one of Ub’s sons. Iwerks was instrumental in the development of Mickey Mouse and often a close collaborator and business partner with Walt Disney. “I knew he worked at Disney,” Gurr says, “but he never told me what he did.”
Gurr was asked to take a look at what would become Autopia and offer his design ideas. He was hired.
“Bob was quickly identified as one of the can-do people,” says Tom Morris, a former Imagineer turned author-historian on the division. “The ones who said ‘yes’ to an opportunity, even if they weren’t really sure they could do it. Bob had that natural inclination, along with a strong curiosity and that thing Ray Bradbury called ‘optimistic behaviorism,’ the ability to be realistic and practical.”
Gurr met Disney on one of his first days on the job working on the Autopia cars, a story he tells often. Gurr didn’t recognize the company patriarch — “an older guy, unshaven, kinda ratty looking” — when he put his leg up on one of the tires of the mini-car. But the two quickly got along.
“He always came in at least once a week and sat down and talked to me,” Gurr says. “I found out later he didn’t do that with everybody. I think the kind of stuff I did — cars, and I could come up with stuff very quickly — was stuff he would like to have in his park. But he doesn’t give ‘atta-boys.’ He doesn’t thank anybody. He does it in a very subtle manner, but very seldom people are thanked. I think his attitude was, ‘There’s no point in giving an ‘atta-boy,’ because if I hired you and you’re here and you’re doing stuff, why would I thank you?’
Gurr backs up.
He notes he was thanked, in Disney’s peculiar way, once in his career, and that’s when he was working on the Disneyland Monorail, which debuted in the park in 1959. Gurr created the initial design, a “Buck Rogers”-inspired space age vehicle, as Gurr wanted it to feel sleek and ready for liftoff. The original drawing of the monorail, stenciled by Gurr within three days of getting the assignment and colored by John Hench, hangs in Gurr’s living room.
Eventually, Gurr also was tasked with overseeing its manufacturing. Gurr recalls one day in which he was working on a half-built monorail train in a soundstage and was paid a visit.
“The finance guy pulled me aside and handed me an envelope,” Gurr says. “He says, ‘Walt can’t understand how you do this, but he’d like you to have this.’ I opened the envelope and it was 10 $100 bills in 1959. I took that as an ‘atta-boy,’ but he didn’t want to tell me.”
Gurr speaks with a mix of humor, directness and curiousity, eager to share stories but also not someone who overly romanticizes them. Asked about his design philosophy, for instance, and Gurr dispenses with big theories and instead focuses on careful pragmatism.
“If you over-anticipate and then something doesn’t work, you have a downer,” Gurr says. “I did this with everything I ever designed. ‘This thing is going to work because…’ And I have to prove every single step. You plot every detail, but you don’t anticipate guaranteed success. It’s a cautionary approach to life. People, say, ‘Oh, I hope, oh I dream.’ No, no no.”
Gurr is told such a philosophy seems to clash with a company that made wishing upon a star — and phrases such as “If you can dream it, you can do it” — part of its brand.
“Think like a Buddhist,” Gurr says. “Dream, wish and hope are dangerous words. You get yourself thinking and set up for disappointment. Stay on the reality side. Then if it didn’t work, we’re going to figure out what we’re going to do now.”
Gurr gives an example from his career. He was brought in relatively late to the project that would become “Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln”; the long-running show features a robotic Abraham Lincoln and debuted at New York’s 1964 World’s Fair and was installed at Disneyland the following year. The Lincoln animatronic wasn’t moving with the realism that Disney was demanding, and Gurr was told he had about three months to figure it out. Gurr began dissecting the figure’s innards, working primarily with parts from the airline industry.
“I didn’t know anything about the shape of humans,” Gurr says. “I’m a car and airplane guy. And 90 days is a rushed job. But I figured out how to build a structure with a human figure. Someone else had worked on it, and it didn’t quite work. But I can look at a human and see something like an airplane — a lightweight, tubular structure. When you look at something and you’re not trained, you see it with a different filter.”
The conversation inevitably turns to the upcoming Disneyland show “Walt Disney — A Magical Life,” which will temporarily displace “Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln” during Disneyland’s 70th anniversary celebrations. “A Magical Life” is set to debut July 17, Disneyland’s official anniversary, and will feature an animatronic of Disney, which the company has teased is its most lifelike robotic figure to date.
Gurr is asked for his thoughts, specifically how Disney may have felt to be turned into a mechanical creation. But he doesn’t bite; Gurr notes that the Walt Disney Co. has him sworn to secrecy on the matter.
“I am embargoed,” Gurr says. “I see, I know and I follow it, but I’m embargoed to say nothing. The public, though — there will be quite a reaction, I’ll say.”
Gurr is typically an open book, especially as he has grown into his status as a mentor and a role model. In recent years, for instance, Gurr has become more comfortable discussing his personal life. For much of his professional career, Gurr was a closeted gay man, coming of age during the 1950s era of Joseph McCarthy and the Lavender Scare, the anti-communist purge of LGBTQ+ people from the U.S. government.
Gurr isn’t shy about the topic today, and he knows there’s curiosity, especially because, at least publicly facing, the Walt Disney Co. has at times leaned conservative. In 1987, for instance, Disneyland hosted an AIDS Project Los Angeles fundraiser as a mea culpa for once banning same-sex dancing. As Gurr says, “You can have a very stiff Disney company. Mickey Mouse. Everything’s sweet.”
Yet Gurr stresses that topic rarely came up during his time at Disney. Once, he says, he caught two peers placing a bet on his sexuality at a Walt Disney World event, but he laughed it off. And as far as his big boss was concerned, Gurr wants to state for the record that Walt Disney had little interest in the personal lives of his staff.
“Walt ignored all of that,” Gurr says. “He saw the talent. He had a bigger, broader picture.”
Gurr is, however, asked if he wishes the Walt Disney Co. and others would be more progressive in their storytelling, Disney recently removed a transgender athlete storyline from the critically acclaimed Pixar animated series “Win or Lose.” In a statement at the time, Disney said it recognized “many parents would prefer to discuss certain subjects with their children on their own terms and timeline.”
Gurr doesn’t hide his feelings about the current political climate. He worries, for instance, that Hollywood may avoid such narratives during Donald Trump’s presidency. And yet he takes a wide-angle view, noting that at his age he’s lived through numerous cultural ebbs and flows.
“Everybody’s quieting down because we got Trump a second time,” Gurr says, criticizing the administration’s crackdown on DEI-based programs and labeling the president a “bully.” “So I think everybody is laying low. The DEI pushback is quite serious. But long term in civilizations, these pendulums swing back and forth. I grew up in the era of Sen. McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover, an era where you dare not leave the slightest hint and you never used the word gay. It was assumed gay people were a diseased threat, and you had to design two lives for yourself.”
The film “Living by Design” digs deep into Gurr’s history, complete with footage of him from the 1930s. The focus is primarily on Gurr’s passions, the hobbies and subjects that shaped his design work and led to his projects for Disney. It aims to show, says director Frank H. Woodward, Gurr’s curiosity and fearlessness; for instance, he was the first man down an unfinished Matterhorn track.
“We hadn’t gotten it all the way to bottom yet, so we had hay bales to stop the car in case it didn’t stop,” Gurr says. “My boss looked at me and said, ‘Robert, you designed it, you ride it.’”
Gurr hasn’t seen the film yet. He wanted to wait to experience it with an audience. Woodward says after the Alex Theatre showing on Saturday, he and Gurr plan to tour the film, visiting other locations around Southern California and hopefully a trip to Florida for the Walt Disney World crowd. With Disneyland’s 70th anniversary on the mind of many a park fan, the timing for the film should be right.
As someone who has never slowed down and never stopped looking ahead, Gurr is asked what his message would be to those entrusted with ensuring that Disneyland is prepared for its next 70 years.
“Just do it right,” Gurr says. “Every detail of everything you do, make sure you’re doing it in the best possible way that you can. The choices a person makes, whether it’s legal work, medical work, science, cartoons or Disneyland vehicles, do it your absolute best. That will make sure you’ll be much more successful than if you just clock in and out to do the job and go home.”
Gurr’s defining Disney creations — the sci-fi-inspired monorails of Disneyland and Walt Disney World, the first implementation of a tubular steel coaster in the Matterhorn — are just a small fraction of his résumé. He would architect a 30-foot animatronic King Kong that once stood at Universal Studios Hollywood, work with Steven Spielberg on the dinosaur figures for “Jurassic Park,” construct a constantly sinking ship at Las Vegas’ Treasure Island and build a flying UFO for the closing ceremonies of the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympics.
In his spare time, he regularly flew glider planes, a hobby of his for 50 years. He’s not piloting these days, but almost daily he’ll sit in his office and get behind a simulator to operate digital planes or helicopters. It’s how, Gurr says, he works out his mind. “Somebody told me, ‘You’re a kid playing ‘Fortnite.’ I’ve got rudder pedals on the floor and all these controls. The airplane is extremely real to fly.
“This is the way I test if Alzheimer’s were to come,” he continues, gesturing to his computer setup in his office. “The first time I would see that is that if I had difficulty flying a helicopter — taking off and flying. It’s a severe test of your brain.”
And it’s safe to say that today, Gurr’s mind — in addition to his body of work — still soars.
The post He worked with Walt Disney to shape Disneyland. Now at 93, boy, does he have stories appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
