Mark Kausler’s CatBlog

John Sparey on Allen Wade, Dick Hoffman and Money!

Hi Folks, the John Sparey letters continue! But first, there’s news of “It’s ‘The Cat'”! The Annecy Animated Film Festival in France has requested a print of “It’s ‘The Cat'” for a survey of American Independent Animation which will be screened three times during the Festival! We made the cut! I have no idea how many animated films the Festival considered for this program, but I’m surprised and happy that our cartoon will be included. Greg Ford, my Producer, is quite enthused as well. It will be screened during the Annecy Festival  June 6th to 11th, if any of my readers can attend.

    That’s a John Sparey drawing at the masthead of the post this time. For some reason, John caricatured me as a duck and Tim as a mouse, John took great amusement at Disney fans, since he had worked for the Mouse and “graduated” (as he put it). I’ve forgotten exactly what prompted this drawing, it was a long time ago  (1969). Here is a letter that John wrote from the Motion Picture Country House and Hospital in 2006, where he was living after his collapse. He writes this time about a mistake I made in identifying a caricature he made during his time at Disney. I thought a drawing he made of Gary Mooney looked like Allen Wade. By the number of times John mentions Allen Wade, and keeps underlining his name, I think it’s obvious there was some kind of ill-will there. Allen Wade was quite a character, Tim Walker and I both knew him and visited his place a few times. Allen was a key assistant animator at Disney, probably in the early 1950s, the same time John was there. I think he worked on Sleeping Beauty. By the time I met him, Allen was pretty dominated by intoxicants, but he was a funny guy, and  fun to be around. He loved movie history, Errol Flynn, Basil Rathbone, W.C. Fields (Allen could do a funny impression of Fields). Most of all, Allen was a fan of Bing Crosby, the early, pre-singer’s nodes Bing. I can see how a nervous type, which John tended to be, would be irritated by Allen, but to Tim and me, he was a friend and loved to share his collections and Bing Crosby records with us. Gary Mooney was an assistant at Disney, he worked on Lady and the Tramp, and a very good free-lance animator on commercials. I met him when he worked at Quartet Films, and he broke me in on some inbetweens on a Green Giant commercial. Gary worked for Bob Kurtz in later years. John Sparey writes about Dick Hoffman, who was another Disney assistant who came up the ranks with John.  Later, Dick became an animator at Filmation and stayed with them until the studio closed. It’s kind of sad to read about how Dick Hoffman wound up at the Motion Picture Country House and John’s attempts to remind Dick of the old days at Disney. John also reveals the various weekly wages he was paid over the years. $31.92 at Disney in 1953! I wonder how John managed on that. Leaving Disney was a pretty smart move on his part financially. (John spells Allen Wade’s first name as “Alan” in his letter, I’ve left it as he wrote it.)

Mark,

You may wonder why you are receiving all of this unsolicited material. Just lucky, I guess. You were the first person to advise me that the Anim. Guild was posting my Disney gallery of art on its website. That was on your Christmas card. And you mentioned my caricature of Alan Wade…alan wade??!! I had drawn Alan Wade? I had no recollection of it whatsoever. This prompted my deeper involvement in the computer lab here. The “Alan Wade” portrait was about the last of my drawings posted by the Guild. That was not Alan Wade! That was NOT Alan Wade!! That was NOT ALAN WADE!!! It was Gary Mooney. Gary is also in my mini-mural, “Disney Bull Pen, 1954”, seated at the desk. And Dick Hoffman was also in the group. And both Dick and Gary were in my seven dwarf line-up.I never worked with either of them after we “graduated” from Disney, but I kept some awareness of Gary’s moves in the business. However, I heard very little about Dick. At one point, I learned that he had been in a bad car accident. Some years later, I spotted him at a large Union meeting where Ed Asner delivered a prepared speech encouraging us to go on strike. His speech completed, he (Dick) pivoted quickly toward the Exit and was gone. Then he turned up at an art exhibit organized by Phyllis Craig at Film Roman. I hadn’t identified him; he seemed so shrunken, and he needed a voice box so that I didn’t even have his normal voice to identify. Having done my mental double-take on hearing his name, we tried some trivial chit-chat. We had never been “pals”. But he had managed to stay out of the hospital habitats all this time until now. So when I was told a few months ago that a “Richard Hoffman” I might have know from animation had recently joined us, I knew it couldn’t be good news. Following a physical collapse somewhat similar to mine, he has been spending most–if not all—of his time in bed. After going to ask about chances of planning a visit with him (in a different wing), I was led directly to his room. I was not prepared for a monologue conversation. His battery operated voice box was not working. The visit was not a success. I slunk away. Realizing that I had materials to use as an excuse for a second visit, I downloaded prints of my two pictures that include him. It went well. He’s alert and clear-minded. He knows that visitors can sometimes have trouble understanding him and is prepared to write notes. He recalls various events we shared, so I came up with a group of studio gags as an excuse for a third visit. But I still need props.

One of the records that I have kept from the time I started at Disney is a list of my weekly salaries. So I can accurately report that for my first week at Disney in April of 1953, I earned $37.84 as a beginning apprentice inbetweener, with a take-home pay of $31.92. By April of 1954, I had moved up to temporary breakdown and a salary of $69.94. That was almost exactly what I was getting on Crusader Rabbit in Hollywood in 1951, once you translate my $300.00 monthly pay into weekly terms. I neglected to keep payroll records for my 6 weeks with Jay Ward on C.R. in Berkeley in 1950. I spent 1952 in the Navy as my reward for staying in the inactive reserve. By the time I “graduated” from Disney in March, 1958 I was an Asst. Animator earning $104.08 plus “Sleeping Beauty” overtime. Moving over to TV Spots as a beginning animator on the new C.R. in color automatically bumped me up to $145.00 a week. Two years of automatic raises had lifted me to $200.00 a week. I was ROLLING in dough!

But Enough of That.

Felix is from 1-7 to 1-13-1935 this time. Danny Dooit enters the action in the 1-7, this time as a Boy Scout. Felix gets knots tied in his tail, so Danny can practice his Scout knots, and in the 1-11, Felix once again is pitched head long out of the house. Danny uses the opportunity to dress the Cat’s wounds. I love the drawing of Felix hitting the tree, beautiful cartooning. On the twelfth, Messmer builds suspense by a knock on the Dooit’s front door. I love the howling dog in the Sunday page, he reminds me a lot of the early Pluto. He might be an early version of Flub, the pup, which Otto used in the Felix comics of the 1950s and 60s.

Krazy this time is from 11-11 to 11-16-1940. The action centers mostly on Ignatz’s ‘Brick-Rocket’. Ig ties a brick onto a sky rocket and aims it at Krazy, Offissa Pupp unwittingly completes the firing in the 11-14. The ‘Brick-Rocket’ becomes a boomerang in the 11-16. I like the subtle rhyming gag in the 1-11 as well. By this time, we are so familiar with the “Ignatz+Brick=Jail” equation that we can complete it for ourselves.

Patrick is from approximately 9-9 to 9-15 this time, with “9-15” on top. There is almost a month’s gap between the strips from the last post to this one. Probably summer vacation took place and nobody was around to save the papers. I love Patrick’s “complex” about Godfrey’s color TV, pretty new technology in 1966, and his relentless count-down to Christmas shopping which pushes his “Mommy” over the edge. Sorry that I can’t date these more accurately. Back in my strip-clippin’ days I was lucky to have time to clip them, let alone date them and put them in the correct order. I’m much more meticulous about my newspaper clippings now, but I do a whole lot less of them. I love newspapers, but don’t even subscribe to one, I just accept my neighbor’s copy when she’s through with it.