So, today on the podcast, we continue our story of Disney legend Mary Blair. When we left off last

time, Mary, though living in New York, was back in California for many weeks at a time, to work on

the children of the world attraction for the New York World's Fair. Walt would later call this

attraction, it's a small world,

but as we start out our episode today, we aren't quite up to the point where that name change

has happened. Mary is still working through problems with her husband, Lee, problems that stem

partially from his frustration as an artist, but in California, on her own,

Mary was able to devote her artistic vision fully to the attraction that she was designing

for Disney, and that more or less is where we pick up our story today.

In 1964, Mary faced a number of problems at home. She could see that her older son Donovan, a budding artist, was struggling a bit at school,

and that her younger son Kevin was far better, but his interest were centered in computer technology and engineering,

which were two fields in which she had little experience.

She was supportive of the interest of both her sons, but at time she worked

to find points of connection, particularly with Kevin and his fascination with space exploration.

Her larger struggles, though, were centered on issues that spiked up around Lee. Lee remained

jealous of her opportunities in Los Angeles. It wasn't

her professional success so much, though that was part of it. Rather the opportunities to work

on highly visible projects with Walt. Walt viewed Mary's talents as central to developing

the children of the world attraction, a job

that placed Mary in a prestigious role, while Lee himself sold clients on his company's

services, oversaw scheduling, and supervised production, both in live action and animation,

for various commercials, corporate documentaries, and TV segments.

...