What Connection did Walt Disney have to Flin Flon?
When I was quite young I recall my mother telling me that Walt Disney had visited Flin Flon and had drawn a cartoon on the kitchen table of a friend of hers. Either my mother had misunderstood or I had misunderstood her. Walt Disney never visited Flin Flon, but if you permit me one degree of separation, an animator for Walt Disney Studios did visit Flin Flon and left a wonderful legacy of charcoal drawings and water colour paintings from head frames to miners underground.
In the days before colour photography, magazines hired illustrators such as Gramatky to accompany the journalists. He was hired to accompany writer Charlie Murphy to visit Flin Flon and write an article which became, “Josiah Flinobbatey Flonatin Esq. or the Tale of Hudson Bay Mining, and its Investment of $27,000,000 in Manitoba’s bush”, Fortune Magazine, June, 1938.
By the time Hardie Gramatky traveled to Flin Flon in 1938 to paint the pictures of Flin Flon that appear in the Fortune Magazine article, he was already a celebrated artist. Mr. Gramatky, N.A. (1907–1979) was born in Dallas, Texas and studied at Stanford University, Chouinard Art Institute (Los Angeles); He was a member of the National Academy of Design, the New York Water Color Club, the American Watercolor Society and the California Water Color Society.
Hardie Gramatky was raised in Southern California. He studied art with F. Tolles Chamberlin, Clarence Hinkle, Pruett Carter and Barse Miller. A dedicated student of watercolor painting, he produced an average of five small watercolors per day. By 1929, he had become a proficient watercolorist and was recognized as one of the true innovators in the development of California Style watercolor painting. These skills helped him to get a job as a head animator at the Walt Disney Studios.
In the early 1930s, he became active on the board of the California Water Color Society and it was largely through his strong initiatives that the California School of watercolorists was able to take control of the Society and expand it into a nationally recognized organization. In 1937 the Ferargil gallery became his art agent in New York City and began selling his watercolors. He also exhibited works in other cities in America and established a reputation as one of California’s premier watercolorists.
By the late 30s, he was producing commercial art to be used for magazine illustrations which included the paintings he made of Flin Flon for the Fortune article referenced above. During this trip Mr. Gramatky was amused that his editor had left his special sun glasses behind and then had them flown up the next day. (I can only surmise that he had read a few too many Jack London stories and thought he might go snow blind during a visit to Flin Flon in the dead of winter.)
Mr. Gramatky recalls some of his illustrating assignments in an article for American Artists (March 1947):
I had been exhibiting my work for years when it suddenly dawned on me that this was really pictorial reporting. Why couldn’t you do this same thing with a given assignment. Thinking along these lines, I got my first job from Fortune magazine. It was in January of 1937; and I was to “cover” the Mississippi flood. I remember how cold it was even for the South. Outside of Paducah, I stood in water up to my waist painting with my board on a floating barrel. It was fun. I even had to break the ice to dip my brush into the water. From there I was sent up to Flin Flon… to do a series of paintings, at 30° below zero. After that, the editors were kind to me and sent me to such places as the sunny Bahamas, etc.
During this period Mr. Gramatky also began writing and illustrating a series of children’s books. Hercules, Loopy, Creeper’s Jeep and Sparky were all books he created, but Little Toot was the one that would become an all-time best seller. By a strange coincidence, this thread of his illustrious career was aided by the trip to Flin Flon.
The classic children’s book, Little Toot, might not have been published if it weren’t for a Flin Flon connection! From a retrospective catalogue on Hardie Gramatky the following is printed:
In August, 1938, Hardie got lucky. He was having lunch with Charlie Murphy, a Fortune editor with whom he’d gone on assignment to the Flin Flon mine in Canada earlier in the year. Murphy loved the Little Toot manuscript and said, “Hardie, you should have this published!” Hardie told him that that was the idea, so Murphy turned around to a G. P. Putnam’s editor, Ken Rawson, sitting at the next table and said, “Here, Ken, take a look at this.” Putnams loved the manuscript and drawings and published Hardie Gramatky’s first children’s book in October 1939.
During World War II, he worked in Hollywood producing training films for the United States Air Force and after the war moved back to the East Coast.
Settling in Connecticut he pursued a career as a commercial illustrator producing art for Fortune, Collier’s, Woman’s Day, True, American and Readers Digest. From the 50’s on, he concentrated exclusively on fine art painting and writing and illustrating children’s books. His last book was published posthumously in 1989.
His daughter was delighted when I proposed to print copies of his paintings and drawings about Flin Flon in a book commemorating the 80th anniversary of the founding of Hudson Bay Mining and Smelting Co. And so, Gramatky’s early connection to the Walt Disney corporation is how this famous company is indirectly connected to Flin Flon, in case you didn’t know.
