In April of 2007, Michael Labrie, Lynne Phillips, and Hugh Chitwood embarked on a journey to a town outside of Chicago, IL called Ottawa. Their mission was to sort and pack one of the first donations to the Walt Disney Family Foundation. This collection would not only double the size of the already existing collection, but it would also help fill innumerable gaps in the permanent exhibition at The Walt Disney Family Museum. Dean Barickman, an avid collector of Disneyana, had amassed a gargantuan collection of Disney merchandise, publications, figurines, posters, anything and everything with the Disney name. His passion for Disney started as a young child watching Walt Disney on television, and carried over into adulthood. The details of the trip, the objects that were collected, and the man at the center of it all, Dean Barickman, will be the subject of an in-depth article on this blog next year.
In light of the holidays, we thought we would take the opportunity to introduce you to just one facet of that donation, the Christmas ornaments. To date, we have catalogued over 252 ornaments. There are still more than 300 ornaments left to catalog. The ornaments range from balls to figurines to garland, all of them Disney, and all of them unique. Mr. Barickman took such good care of these jolly treasures that we were able to use a select few on the Christmas tree that decorated the Diane Disney Miller Exhibition Hall last year.
