1957 — NOW

I'd never been frightened of anything in my life, but I'd be lying if I didn't admit that my stomach had a bad case of the flip-flops just standing there in the middle of the night, the street pretty much deserted save for the occasional car going by.

The street was glistening with the rain that had been steadily coming down all night, the few neon lights that were still lit reflecting up at me like some alternate universe that was beckoning me to enter.

It had been years to get to this moment. They'd all become a blur, the years, one after another, but it had all led to right here and right now. In a few minutes I'd know if everything I'd been working toward would stand the test of time, to coin a phrase that was, if everything worked as planned, about to take on a whole new meaning.

I guess I was what they called a child prodigy or whatever they called weird kids who just knew things or did things that other kids or even some adults couldn't do. I never thought much about it, it just came easily, a gift from somewhere. Some kids were good at playing sports, I was good at playing quantum mechanics, math, physics, and anything to do with science.

Why? Why me? Who knew? Mozart was composing at five and wrote his first symphony at seven. There was no explaining it, it just was. Of course, child musical prodigies sometimes got great acclaim and attention and fawning. Science and math whiz kids mostly got ridicule and no friends. Other kids didn't like that a six-year-old could divide eight digit numbers in his head while they were mastering addition and subtraction and trying to form coherent sentences, and not very well at that. My father would parade me in front of his friends, like some parlor trick. They were both mesmerized and put off by a six-year-old who had the ability to outthink them.

I'd grown up in Burbank, when Burbank was a lazy little town of budding businesses and a lot of empty land. We lived in the Magnolia Park section in a pleasant little house my father had bought when he and my mother had moved there in 1931, the year my father had begun working at Lockheed, next to the United Air Field over on Hollywood Way.

I'd come along a year later, a happy accident my mother would say. I was an insatiably inquisitive child, always asking questions no one could answer, and I was a voracious reader as well. I read everything I could get my hands on. I loved the books by H.G. Wells and Jules Verne most of all, because they conjured up worlds that were so different from my own. I also read scientific books as if they were ABC books. I devoured those. My mother would look at those books, shake her head and say, "I made a regular Einstein."

I hadn't minded school at all. In fact, if it weren't for all the nasty little kids belittling me relentlessly, I would have loved it. High school was better, thanks to the math and science classes, which I couldn't get enough of. While my fellow students struggled with their algebra, then geometry, I breezed right through those things easily, occasionally even surprising my teachers. As I said, it was a gift I was lucky to have been given.

Right after high school I went to the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. It was like coming home for me, and not a day went by when I didn't love being at Caltech, working on problems and projects, sparring with my teachers, and graduating at the very top of my class.

It hadn't all been easy, of course. When I was ten, my mother died from cancer. It had come on swiftly at the end of 1941. They'd tried the new chemotherapy drugs on her, drugs made from nitrogen mustard and folic acids, but they did nothing to stop what had rapidly spread throughout her entire body.

She spent her last month at the newly opened St. Joseph Hospital on Buena Vista. On the day she passed, I sat with her — my father had been there all night and had left for an hour to shower and get a change of clothes. She was in and out of consciousness — sometimes talking to herself, sometimes just lying there quietly, her breath coming in raspy spurts.

My mother had always believed in me and encouraged me and loved me as much as any mother could love a son. She'd been so vibrant and beautiful that seeing her like this — thin and gaunt and ravaged by this horrible disease, looking a decade or two older than her thirty-two years — made me want to scream at the doctors that they should have had a cure. We weren't living in the Middle Ages, this was 1942, how could they have not found a cure?

At some point, she turned and looked at me with such love in her eyes that I almost couldn't stand it. She took my hand and squeezed it as tightly as she could and said, "Hey, Einstein, do something important." An hour later she was gone.

I remember walking out of St. Joseph with my father. As we came into the bright sunshine, I looked across the street and there was the newly built Walt Disney Studios. My mother had taken me to see Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and we loved it so much we stayed to see it a second time. And now the man who made that movie had a studio right there in Burbank, right across from where my mother had just died at thirty-two. I wondered if Walt Disney knew how many lives his movie had touched. Right now, seeing the studio, it seemed like a bond between my mother and me and Walt Disney.

At that moment, I could not possibly have known or even imagined that one day, about a month after graduating Caltech, sitting in my room, looking at the paper pinned to my wall, the one I'd written in my very neat ten-year-old handwriting, the paper with my mother's words staring back at me — "Hey, Einstein, do something important" — wondering what exactly I was going to do with my life and what the future held for me, that the phone would ring and the voice on the other end would say, "This is Walt Disney calling."

It was 1954. As it turned out, one of my professors at Caltech had recommended me to Walt Disney, who was in the process of making a reality of a bold new adventure, a dream to make a new world called Disneyland. Walt, as he told me he liked to be called, was looking for people to help him realize his dream. He called them Imagineers, a combination of imagination and engineering.

"I hear you're pretty good with ideas and making things happen," Walt had said. "How'd you like to come work here?"

It was the perfect question at the perfect time. And so I joined WED Enterprises as an Imagineer, WED being the initials of Walter Elias Disney.

Walt was a fountain of ideas and the Disneyland plans were well under way — the first Imagineers had been with him since 1952, and they were barely six months away from the park opening. My first day at the studio, Walt himself walked me around the lot, introduced me, and then showed me everything they were working on, all the different rides and places and lands. Of course, the land that was immediately of interest to me was Tomorrowland. Walt must have seen the glimmer in my eye right away. Walt could always see the glimmer.

He had the ideas, he was the dreamer, and the Imagineers were the ones who had to figure it all out. But from that very first meeting, Walt knew that he was dealing with someone a little different. I became Walt's odd man out, I became Walt's secret weapon, the one Walt turned to when he wanted the impossible to be possible. I worked away from the other Imagineers. That's the way Walt wanted it...