In observance of Mother’s Day, Pam Burns-Clair, daughter of Disney Legend Harriet Burns, and co-author of Walt Disney’s First Lady of Imagineering, Harriet Burns, offers this reminiscence of a unique and talented “Disney Mom.”
It’s taken me a while to appreciate what a privilege it was growing up as the daughter of Disney Legend Harriet Burns.
As a young child in the 1950s in the Los Angeles Valley, my mom was not the Harriet of “Ozzie and Harriet”—she was at work during the day. When I passed out at school in the fourth grade, and the school had to call my mom at work with the news, I was sent by taxi to meet her at home (with my cello in tow) while she drove home from work! Instead of selling Girl Scout cookies door to door, which was the custom then, we bought my allotment of cases and stored the boxes under the grand piano for months, until we consumed them or gave them away ourselves. It wasn’t so glorious being the daughter of a working mom back then.
However, there were perks, for sure. One of my earliest Disney memories was at about age four, meeting the Mouseketeers, and being given a Lady and the Tramp dog that bounced on an elastic leash! (I still have it in a case, a treasured childhood memento.) Occasionally we got to attend previews of Disney movies at the Studio (like Old Yeller,The Parent Trap, The Absent-Minded Professor, The Love Bug) and sometimes we got to go into the model shop to pick my mom up (my parents shared a car when I was young), and that was pretty fun!
When I was in the third grade, my mom brought home a box of rock candy “remains” from the Big Rock Candy Mountain attraction that she had helped make the model for. Walt had canceled it on the spot when inspecting it with John Hench (Walt had concluded, “It’s too much sweet”). I was the most popular kid in my class the day I snuck some of that rock candy to school to share with my friends, and the rest became ornaments on the Christmas tree as “icicles” (which, again, I still have some relics of).
Whenever the grandmas or cousins came out to visit, we showed them a good time at the Happiest Place on Earth, which was ever evolving. My mom and dad remodeled our 1950’s style home during much of my childhood, Mom applying her creativity in ways that made our home one-of-a-kind in true Disney fashion: I remember helping her cast (from some mysterious noxious substance) doorknobs for her bedroom closet doors, she then painted them to look like aged metal…she meticulously covered glass panels with thin gold leaf, which my dad then bolted to our dining room ceiling!
Coming into my teens in the 1960s, my mom was often on deadline, such that she had to work weekends or late hours as so many of the now-beloved Disney projects of that era came to a head. The 1960s were the heyday of the Disney legacy—my mom worked so intensely on the 1964-1965 New York World’s Fair that Walt took her and my dad with him in his private plane for the opening.
And of course, Walt himself passed away in 1966—I remember how dark that day was. My mom was in disbelief, and we were close to Bill Cottrell, who lived down the street from us (and whose wife Hazel was Lilly Disney’s sister), so I remember my mom on the phone with Bill.
There was much buzz around the development of Audio-Animatronics in the 1960s. and the creation of "it’s a small world," Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln, Carousel of Progress—all of which debuted at the New York World’s Fair…as well as Walt Disney’s Enchanted Tiki Room, Pirates of the Caribbean, and The Haunted Mansion—each of which my mom played a central part in. I was well aware that WED Enterprises (as it was called back then—now it’s Walt Disney Imagineering) had a color Xerox® machine, which was cutting edge at the time…I remember visiting the model shop in Glendale as they were developing the pirates when I was about 14 (also in 1964—the year of the World’s Fair).
The whimsical sense of humor in the shop was quite evident as the pirate mannequins were positioned and dressed “all goofy,” as I would have described it then. I got to visit with the myna bird, Joker, when we would go in to pick mom up—Joker was the live bird that Walt gave my mom to study in preparation for designing the Tiki birds. He was quite a character, and I enjoyed my mom’s stories about him interacting with her comrades, as he had become the shop mascot. After that visit, security was tightened and families could no longer enter the shop. Mom brought home interesting scraps and leftover materials from projects, which I used in my school art projects. We had intended to cover the walls of my room with a bolt of yellow felt, but never got around to it!
So these years were a mix of getting glimpses of, and being in the midst of my mom’s world of “firsts” at Disney. I had no idea then that all of this would become so shape-shifting in the industry in the years to come; I was a teen caught up in my own social world and teenage “firsts,” and feeling like she was distracted and unavailable. But she was very proud when I won a national design competition with Seventeen Magazine my senior year of high school, and was sent to New York in style as the prize.
Fast forward through my college years, 20s and 30s and 40s, when I was caught up getting my career established (I started out as an art major, but see in hindsight that my mom’s art career was a hard act to follow, and switched to psychotherapy), marrying, and having babies.
Two moments stand out in my mom’s retirement years (she retired in 1986): when she asked me to accompany her to the Disney Legends Ceremony in 2000 and she was honored with that award, and again to Walt Disney World for Walt’s 100th birthday celebration in 2001, where she was on a panel of Disney Legends. At those two events, I began to get a glimpse of how revered she was for her diverse ingenuity, what a pioneer she had been, what an entertaining storyteller she was, and how Disney had given her the license to imagine, create, and experience teamwork that her childhood had not.
I’ve come to realize that where my mom was pretty preoccupied and atypically career-involved for the times, her delight and reverence for what Walt and his vision was about over time rubbed off on me—that’s where my own imagination and “dare-to-dream the impossible” came from!
And as my daughters come into their own, both widely diverse artists, the magic of “the Tinker Bell Grandma”—as my youngest referred to her in a birthday poem—continues.
Pam Burns-Clair, daughter of Disney Legend Harriet Burns, created (along with Disney Historian Don Peri) an illustrated tribute book, commemorating Harriet’s legacy as a Disney Legend and as a real person who touched many lives. Walt Disney's First Lady of Imagineering, Harriet Burns is available now at our Museum shop. Visit Harriet’s official website at http://www.imagineerharriet.com.
Images above: 1) Harriet finishes a Tiki Room host at the WED workroom. ©Disney. 2) Pam and her mother, Harriet.