64. Peggie Fariss on 50 Years at Disney and Producing Spaceship Earth

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I’m regularly amazed by the random chance that goes into the careers of even the biggest names in theme parks. Few had grand plans to become Imagineers or even work in the industry. The right personal connection or small choice prepared a trajectory into a specific role. Peggie Fariss has a similar backstory and did not plan to work for Disney. A part-time job on the Storybook Land Canal Boats in 1966 began a journey that led to a remarkable 50-year career. Fariss aptly calls it an “accidental career”, and I can’t think of a better way to describe her experience.

Fariss is my guest on this episode of The Tomorrow Society Podcast to discuss her 50 years at Disney. She retired in 2016 and has so many interesting stories from a diverse career. After working on the Canal Boats and at the Matterhorn, Fariss moved to Orlando for the opening of Walt Disney World. She also served as a show producer on the original Spaceship Earth, produced the Disney Galleries, helped secure attraction sponsorships, and managed Imagineering at Disneyland Paris. There is far too much to cover in a single podcast episode.

A Remarkable Disney Career

During this extensive conversation on Fariss’ Disney career, I spoke with her on the following topics:

• How did she initially get started at Disneyland in 1966?
• Why was Fariss so interested in working at Walt Disney World during its early days in the 1970s?
• How was the research put together to develop the story for Spaceship Earth?
• What were some of the details that advisors helped to place into that attraction?
• Why was the narration for Spaceship Earth changed to include Walter Cronkite?
• What was it like to work in such a different environment at Disneyland Paris?

I loved having the chance to speak with Fariss about her diverse time working at Disney. Her stories were much different from the typical history that I know about the parks. It was also fascinating to hear about how Fariss learned new skills and moved into a leadership role.

Show Notes: Peggie Fariss

Orange County Register Article, “From Anaheim High School to Disneyland: Looking Back at Her 50-Year Disney Career” (May 20, 2016)

Tiara Talk Podcast Interview with Peggie Fariss (May 31, 2017)

Transcript

Dan Heaton: Hey there. Today’s podcast looks back at a career of 50 years working at Disney, which includes the development of Spaceship Earth at Epcot Center with my guest, Peggie Fariss. You’re listening to the Tomorrow Society Podcast.

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Dan Heaton: Thanks for joining me here on Episode 64 of The Tomorrow Society Podcast. I am your host, Dan Heaton. I’ve read and heard so many stories about key figures in theme parks, and few of them seem to take a direct road to get there. The combination of skills and being in the right place at the right time, and most importantly, a willingness to try something new seem to make the difference. But every story is a bit different. A perfect example of this is my guest, Peggie Fariss, who started out at Disneyland in 1966 with a part-time job as a hostess on the Storybook Land Canal Boats. She calls it an accidental career, which ended up lasting 50 years.

It included work as a show producer on Spaceship Earth and managing Imagineering at Disneyland Paris. Peggie reinvented herself multiple times at Disney and accomplished so much, including being directly involved with the Disney galleries and working with corporate sponsors and so much more. She has some really great stories from her career, especially about Spaceship Earth, which is close to my heart.

So I really appreciate getting the chance to talk to Peggie. It was a lot of fun to hear her stories and she was so generous with her time to give such detailed information about her background. I think you’re going to really enjoy this. So let’s get to the conversation. Here is Peggie Fariss.

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Dan Heaton: There’s so much good stuff to talk about, and I’m really excited to hear some of your stories. So I want to go back to the beginning, though. Back when you got started, what got you interested in working for Disney back in the 1960s?

Peggie Fariss: I think it started because we lived in Anaheim and, you know, home of Disneyland. My mother would take my brother and me out of school on our birthdays to visit the park for the day. And so I had a really warm feeling about Disneyland. It was always fun to go to. We looked forward to it every year. But honestly, I never thought about working there. To me, it wasn’t a place people worked. It was just a place where everybody had fun.

So as I approached my high school graduation, I applied to one school. I thought UC Santa Barbara was just the most beautiful campus and it wasn’t too far away. And some of my friends were going, so it was the only school I applied to. Somewhere along in July, I got a letter saying, Thank you very much, but you’re short a credit I hadn’t taken Spanish for because I hadn’t really shown any particular flair for language. I had taken a new science class, a physiology class that I thought was fascinating, but it was not accredited. If that had happened to me today, I probably would have appealed and sought, you know, some guidance. But at the time I thought, well, okay, I’ll go to a local school and then I’ll transfer to Santa Barbara.

When a good friend of mine heard that I was going to be local for the fall, she said that she’d been working at Disneyland all summer and it was so much fun and I should get myself down there and apply. So I did. I had an interview with a young fellow and he handed me a script for Storybook Land and asked me to read it to him. And he said, okay, you’re hired. That began my Disneyland career.

And I worked Friday night, Saturday night and Sunday from noon to four. So I was working about 12 hours a week. But it didn’t feel like work. It was just so much fun to be able to spend time in the park in costume. And Storybook Land was a wonderful place for me to start because you had a chance to meet guests in very small groups and then spend about 10 minutes with them. So I just thought it was magical.

Dan Heaton: Well, that’s interesting how you kind of had a roundabout way to end up working there. So when you started doing that and working part time, when did it shift to where I know you had to take this class and I assume finished it, but when did it shift where you started to think this is something that might be more than just a part time job on the side.

Peggie Fariss: Oh, that came much later. So I’ll tell you a little bit about my early Disneyland days. So I was working on Storybook Land, you know, as I mentioned, Friday and Saturday nights and I met there was a young fella, he was an assistant supervisor in the area as many companies have rules about not dating the people that you supervise. And so this young fella arranged for a transfer for me from Storybook Land to the Matterhorn. I was terrified because Storybook Land was this tranquil, floating down the canal, pointing out the beautiful little topiary is in the character architecture. And it was beautiful. The Matterhorn was much faster paced, 17-second dispatches and a rotation that included being in the tower, actually pressing the button to dispatch the sleds.

I was so afraid that I might mistakenly dispatch a sled that would get too close to the sled in front. So if there were Cub Scouts in the first sled and linebackers in the second sled, the weight of the second sled would just encroach upon the safety zone of the first sled. And all the breaks in the Matterhorn would set up and the attraction would come to a complete stop. Then a crew would have to go up and release each sled one by one. I was terrified. I thought, I’m going to shut this attraction down and it’ll be all my fault. And, you know, honestly, there were gals on Storybook Land who were eager to go to a coed attraction that was fast paced and I sort of went there under duress.

I was really interested in getting to know that young supervisor better. So I took the transfer and I’d been there about six months when the foreman, a fella named Chuck Abbott, who was adored by all those who worked for him, Chuck suggested that I might be interested in a program called Disneyland Ambassador, and it was a new program. This would have been 1966. So Julie Reihm had been the very first ambassador, and then Connie Swanson was the second ambassador. So this program was really new. The idea was iif you were a young woman, single, and you were interested, they would tell you a little bit more about the program.

It meant that they would do a series of interviews and select one young woman to represent Disneyland, and she would travel to foreign countries and she’d host visiting dignitaries and she’d visit children’s hospitals. And I thought, wow, that sounds like a wonderful way to represent Disneyland. So I applied and I found myself within the top five finalists, which meant that we had a chance to go to the studio for an interview with Card Walker, who was the chief marketing officer at the time.

I don’t think my interview with Card went really well because he asked me something about motion pictures and I thought, well, hey, I work at the park. I don’t know about movies and motion pictures and what you should what they should be titled. But it was an interesting experience. And then they took us over to the executive dining room and Walt Disney was having lunch in the dining room. And that was really a special experience because I’d grown up watching Walt Disney on television.

I thought of him in the same way I thought about my grandfather. He was so familiar and so beloved. There he was at the neighboring table. And I think had he not been so sick at the time, I’m sure we would have been introduced to him. And in that case, that was kind of as close as we got. He passed away shortly after that. I think within the next month.

Anyway, they chose someone else to be the Disneyland ambassador that year. She was a very poised VIP hostess, spoke Spanish, but I thought, you know, I got into the finals with no preparation at all. So maybe if I really applied myself, maybe that’s the trick. So I spent the next year, I studied the annual report backwards and forwards. I knew all the subsidiaries; I knew the leaders of all the subsidiaries, and I would fish memos out of trashcans to read up on Mineral King.

I discovered, too, that once you start looking for things, there actually were little notices in my local paper about movies that were in production. So it was a year when I really applied myself. I took out a loan, I put braces back on my teeth to straighten out a little a little chip that I acquired. I took a modeling class to learn about how to descend stairs and how to get in and out of a car and never to wear pearls whiter than your teeth, you know.

So I was as prepared as I could be. And the next year, they had another open call. Any young woman from Disneyland who was interested could apply. And I did. My interview was so much fun because I knew the answer to every question. I made my way into, you know, they selected me to be one of the five finalists. Each year the process was changing a little bit. There I was among the five finalists, and they selected someone else. In this case, I think she spoke Russian and was a communications major at USC and blond.

I thought, okay, I gave this my best shot, so I’m happy. I learned a lot about the company, but I still wasn’t thinking about Disney as a career because all I really knew was the park. And in those days, there were no women in management, with the exception maybe, of Sicily who led the tour guides. You know, I was thinking maybe teaching. I don’t know. So another year passed. I did not go out for the ambassador program that year, but because I’d met so many people in the interview process, I got a call one day and they asked me to come in to the director’s office and he said we are we’re taking 10 young women from Disneyland to Florida to announce the first phase of Walt Disney World, and we’d like you to be one of the one of the ten.

AIf you’re able to take time out of school, it was going to be about two weeks in Florida. And I thought, wow, that sounds fabulous. So I was one of three ride operators, attraction hostesses, as they’re now called. And then there were seven young women from the tour guide VIP hostess group. We flew to Florida and we were there for two weeks and we were studying details of the project. We were going to be taking busloads of journalists out to the site to show them where that balloon is flying. There will be a castle and behind you there will be the Contemporary Resort Hotel and this area.

They’d moved four and a half million cubic yards of Earth to the theme park site. So that would enable Disney to build a tunnel complex on essentially the first floor. Then the park would be built on the second level. Then all of this area in front of the park will become the Seven Seas Lagoon. And we met with Bill Evans, who was starting the tree farm. We had presentations by people who were going to be managing the central energy plant and the central food facility and the hotels. That’s the point where I took a look around and thought, this is going to be a magnificent project. I know they will need people with Disney experience. By then I had four years and I thought, you know, I want to be part of this.

So I went back to California after the press conference and started talking to people about what opportunities there might be. And eventually they introduced me to a fellow named John Carey. And John was the vice president in charge of the two hotels. So the Contemporary Resort Hotel and the Polynesian Village were both joint ventures with U.S. Steel. And John was looking for people with Disney experience. So he hired me to be supervisor of guest activities, and I was thrilled. So I moved to Florida about six months before Walt Disney World opened, and by then I’d graduated from Cal State Fullerton. I had a degree in English. So that was when I started thinking, wow, this is really a wonderful opportunity.

Dan Heaton: So that’s a great story. I’m glad I asked the question to set up that long story, though. That was great. I feel like there’s so much I could unpack from there, including almost meeting Walt Disney. I’d like to focus on when you went the first time to Florida because now we look at Disney World. It’s this massive resort and there’s so much to it. So what was that like, seeing that and how did you see the potential there to make you want to be interested in working there?

Peggie Fariss: Well first of all, the scale of the project was so impressive and we’d seen a scale model. We saw it first at WED Enterprises later to be called Walt Disney Imagineering. We’d seen that model in California and then the model and a lot of artwork was sent to Florida for the press conference. And there we occupied a hotel, the Ramada Inn, which is kind of like behind it’s north of the property.

There was a big circus tent and it was filled with artwork that would showcase what the resort would look like, what the park would look like. So it’s one thing to see those models and artwork and then you drive out to the site and I have a picture of us standing at the entrance to the north south Road, and it’s just a dirt path and a little like a little kiosk for the security has to be stacked to be waiting.

Just the magnitude of this, it was so big they were draining Bay Lake at the time and bringing the white sand up to adorn the beaches. And honestly, I just you know, I’d had such a great experience working in the park. And, you know, I was able to move from Storybook Land to the Matterhorn. I was part of the opening of New Tomorrowland in 1967 and then later working Great mMoments with Mr. Lincoln. And I just loved Disneyland and I loved the chance to meet with guests and have those conversations about where are you from and what are you what are your favorite attractions.

To me, that was just so it was such a great experience because you really got to meet the world. You know, they came to Disneyland and I got to meet them. It was clear that Walt Disney World was going to be an opportunity to expand that Disney experience, that Disneyland experience to a guest’s entire stay. And I just thought that was really an exciting concept.

Then we were looking at the themed resort hotels. So if you thought about standing at the hub of the Magic Kingdom, the Florida park, and looking beyond Tomorrowland, the Contemporary Resort Hotel was just off in the distance. So it was like an extension of that Tomorrowland experience. Then, if you were looking beyond Adventureland, the Polynesian village was directly across the lagoon. So just the whole idea that we could take that Disneyland magic and extend it to guests’ entire stay, I just thought it would be really, really satisfying to be part of the first team that was taking that step to see can how how will it be.

What kind of a place will this be if we take those Disneyland ideas and extend them into, I guess their entire vacation. You know, there were many people from Disneyland who moved to Florida to be part of that first opening experience. There were lots of people from the East Coast and the Midwest who came to Walt Disney World to be part of that, too. So there was just this excitement and sense that we’re about to do something that nobody else has done. It was, you know, we were really proud of it and we were excited about it.

There were so many new technologies that were being built into this park. We knew that the whole idea was something that Walt Disney had nurtured because with Disneyland he was only able to do the park and then the development. He couldn’t control the development that happened around him on Harbor Boulevard and other places. So this was a chance to really control the entire guest experience and try to deliver on that magic. So I thought it was a project that was ambitious and the scale of it was just so exciting to me. And so I was thrilled to be part of it.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, I love the idea of that. You were there at the start. Like you mentioned with the tunnels and some really cool things they were doing right at the beginning or even with the Contemporary kind of how interesting that hotel was to build. It’s just sounds like such an exciting time. So you mentioned that you were working in a different role, not inside the park. So what what did you do the first when you went out to Florida?

Peggie Fariss: My assignment was supervisor of guest activities for the hotels. That meant that for the Contemporary and the Polynesian hotels, we would have a staff. And in that case, they were all young women. We had an information desk in each lobby. The hostesses’ responsibility was to provide guests with information about the activities available and how to sign up for the tennis or how to make a reservation for the golf resort or a restaurant or something.

It was because, again, this was new to guests as well. Then we also had child care. Now, my mother had been an elementary school teacher and even in night, gone to her classes and read to the kids and helped her set up her classroom in the summer time. I was well versed in things like games and rhythms and loved children’s literature. So the idea was we would provide child care for guests who had young children, but really between the ages of maybe two, six, or seven.

We take care of them for a couple hours. And it turns out there were Florida regulations that said if you took care of a child beyond. It might have been something like four hours, then you have to provide a separate area for naps and you have to provide a hot meal. And so this wasn’t. Drop your child off and pick them up at the end of the day, because the idea of Walt Disney World is you’re going to experience this resort together as a family. But, you know, for the tennis game, for the hair appointment, that for that sort of thing, a couple hours. So we had Mousekateer clubhouses in each of the resorts and a staff of people to to take care of the kids and play games with them and then just have fun.

Then I got my first taste of reorganization. I think I mentioned earlier that the hotels had been a joint venture with U.S. Steel, so it meant that there was a hotel company that was an entirely separate entity from the Walt Disney World Company. Then Roy Disney, Walt’s brother, who had really championed the idea that we’re going forward with this Florida dream of Walt. Roy engineered a buyout. So Disney bought US Steel out of the hotels, and then those hotels became part of the Walt Disney Company. That meant that we had redundancies in certain areas. Mine happened to be one of them. So my team and I were merged into the Recreation Department, which reported to Operations, and that meant we had beaches and pools and lifeguards and boats and all kinds of things that I had no experience with.

About a month or so into this, I came in one day and they said, you better go talk to…my name wasn’t on the schedule. So that was kind of a tip. They said, You should go talk to Bob Matheson, who was head of operations. And I did. Bob said, Well, you know, Peggie, I know you love Operations, but we’ve got all the supervisors for the park that we need.

So you’re going to marketing and you’ll work in convention sales. So I reported to convention sales, and it turns out that the entry level there is really coordination. I found myself checking the set-up for meetings and conventions, and then after a while I got the hang of it. So pretty soon I was planning meetings and conventions and traveling and representing the convention amenities at trade in Chicago and New York and San Francisco and Boston, and meeting with executives and talking to them about the amenities that Walt Disney World could provide.

The funny thing was, you know, Disney people were so familiar with the concept of Disneyland as the theme park, but the word hadn’t really gotten out that Disney also had championship golf courses and tennis and fine dining. So, you know, we were competing with places like San Francisco or the Greenbrier or, you know, any number of first-class resorts.

We would say, but this is a place where you have all of those amenities and you can bring your family. So it wasn’t what I planned to do, but I ended up enjoying the process. I had been there about five years in Florida, and I realized I’d never planned to stay in Florida forever. I knew Disney had other things going on back in California. There was the Magic Kingdom Club. There were other things back in California, and I thought, well, maybe now that I have five more years of experience. By then I had 10 years of experience. Maybe there’s something back in California I could do.

It just happened that that young supervisor who’d moved me to the Matterhorn had been in Florida for a time, and then he was back in California, and I thought that would be a draw. And my little brother was growing up and I was just a voice on the telephone to him. So I had a couple of reasons to want to explore what might be possible in California. And one day in front of the Contemporary Resort Hotel, I bumped into Marty Sklar, and I had met Marty at the press conference back in 1969.

It turns out Marty had written the entire presentation for what the first phase of Walt Disney World would be. He had been editor of the Daily Bruin at UCLA. He’d been hired to develop the Disneyland Gazette at Disneyland in its early, early days. He’d been hired then when Disneyland opened to work in the press and public relations area at Disneyland. And then he ended up writing for Walt Disney. So many of the things that Walt said about Epcot and Walt Disney World were things that Marty had translated out of what Walt’s ideas had been. So Marty said, well, you know Peggie, back in California, back at WED Enterprises in Glendale were actually starting to work on Epcot.

I’d like to kick this effort off by hosting a series of conferences on topics that we’re going to be featuring in Future World. With your meeting, planning experience and your deep Disney knowledge and your familiarity with with Imagineering, with Disneyland and everything, why don’t you come back to California and start working at at WED in Glendale and help us with those conferences? So in the fall of 1976, I drove back across country and started driving from Orange County up to Glendale. Every day. Something I would do, I didn’t know at the time, but I would end up doing for 40 years. So I started working on Marty’s team to develop the Epcot future technology conferences, and we hosted a conference on energy, agriculture and food production.

We hosted a conference which was co-hosted with Johns Hopkins on Good Health in America for what would become the Life and Health Pavilion. We hosted a conference, sort of a little mini conference on space, and from these conferences we were able to introduce not only content experts who could help us with, you know, who’s doing interesting work in this or that field, who’s doing the most groundbreaking work in the seas or in space. Then it introduced us to prospective sponsors, participants for those pavilions. It also introduced us to groups of people, small groups of people who would comprise our advisory boards. The idea was with Disneyland when we developed Disneyland and Magic Kingdom, we were really sort of drawing upon legends and stories and myths and folk tales, and we had a lot of artistic license for how those stories would evolve.

But we felt that with Future World, we wanted it to be something that was really substantiated by real world work, but translated into shows and attractions that people would find entertaining and inspiring and informational. We wanted to make sure that as these pavilions were sponsored by someone that, unlike a World’s Fair. It wouldn’t just be that company’s view of that topic, but it would be something that we could say. We’ve really sort of rounded out the topic by consulting with others who hold a range of opinions and perspectives on these topics. I worked with on the Epcot Future Technology conferences and the advisory boards in those early. Well, I guess it would be the late seventies. Then Marty asked me to do the historical research on Spaceship Earth.

Dan Heaton: Well, that’s so interesting. I definitely want to talk about Spaceship Earth. Before we move on, I’d love a little a little more because Epcot was Walt Disney has big plans for his futuristic community. And that eventually became Epcot Center, which I loved and still loved to this day. But what was the atmosphere like at that time? Was there a lot of discussion on how do we make this, like you described, have these important issues, but also still kind of paid tribute to that original idea? Was that something that was a challenge or people were talking about?

Peggie Fariss: So I was not at Imagineering when the earliest Epcot conversations were happening, when they said, okay, well, you know, are we going to do this? It was kind of the core idea for going to Florida and acquiring all of that land. And I think Mark had been very clear about this. This community, this experimental prototype community of tomorrow will be a place where people live of life. They can’t live anywhere else, a very ambitious vision. So I think people felt like, well, we mere mortals, how do we how do we do that? And how do you really build a community that is where people are living in houses that are always on the cutting edge? How do you rip out a kitchen every 10 years and, how do you stay ahead of the curve?

Tomorrowland had always been enough of a challenge. Yeah, I think when they broke it down into what this mean for the people living there, they felt that maybe the idea is something else. Maybe it’s about inspiring people at Epcot Center to then go back to their own communities where they live and develop the ideas that are going to be leading us into the future.

But people doing it kind of in their own way based on what their communities needs are. So I think the clarity was, okay, we’re not going to start with building houses and futuristic kitchens. You know, we did that with the House of Tomorrow at Disneyland. So let’s focus on topics that we know will be important to the conversations about the future. So starting with Spaceship Earth, the theme show, and recognizing that we have a long history in 40,000 years as what we represented within Spaceship Earth of sharing information with one another, recording that information, disseminating that information.

Spaceship Earth is the communications story, then Universe of Energy, the Living Seas, Imagination, World of Motion, those being the kind of the theme shows for those topics. And then in the early days, you know, we were really grappling with it. So a company wants to be associated with a big visionary project, but they have their own perspective on certainly Exxon had their perspective on what the future of energy should be. And they, like a World’s Fair, wanted to be able to show our guests what they were doing and we wanted to keep the pavilion stories more pure and more balanced.

We also recognized that we need those corporate sponsors and their sponsorship dollars, and there’s got to be something in it for them or their brand. People will never will never buy into the idea. So Communicore was sort of a place where there was real estate dedicated to these individual companies where they could tell their story. So Exxon could have could showcase drill bits and things like that, and General Motors could show cars. That was kind of the approach for early Epcot.

Dan Heaton: That’s so interesting to think about with the sponsorships, especially because, you know, some of the messages are very complicated, especially with energy. But I definitely want to hear about your work on Spaceship Earth. So you mentioned having to narrow down so much time into what’s like a 15-minute attraction. So how did that come about? How were you able, working with advisors and such to kind of pinpoint how to put that together?

Peggie Fariss: So first of all, Ray Bradbury had been a friend of Walt Disney’s. And in those early days, Marty Sklar was reaching out to to writers who they might be writers of books, they might be filmmakers. I mean, the idea was storytelling is the core of what we do. So let’s bring people in and talk together about what their ideas might be for a Spaceship Earth or for a Living Seas pavilion or a World of Motion or Universe of Energy.

It turns out that Ray Bradbury wrote a treatment where we traveled from caveman to outer space. He had really kind of framed that story and he wrote a very poetic narration that began. “Who are we? Where do we come from? The answers begin in our past, in the dust from which we were formed. Answers recorded on the walls of time. So let us journey into that past.” And that’s when your ride vehicle starts ascending through that time tunnel.

So we had a basic outline from Ray’s story treatment, and we had the architecture of the attraction being this sphere, which would make such a strong statement right at the entrance to Future World. Then we worked with the you know, because in our early days of the Epcot conferences and such, we’d reached out to universities and foundations and business. So when it came to looking at, well, exactly which cultures should we be showcasing, what were the developments in communications that we ought to be highlighting? We worked with the founding dean of the Annenberg School of Communications at USC and one of his graduate students.

So she and I filled a conference room with three by five cards. Those cards identified what was going on in terms of communications technology and what was going on in the arts, what was going on in politics, what was going on in terms of other developments and other kinds of technologies. So we began to trace a path that said we start with people speaking together. And in the case of hunting the woolly mammoth, the hunters are shouting to one another. So that’s oral communications. Then we move into the cave, the Cro-Magnon cave. There are the most beautiful paintings on the walls of the Cro-Magnon caves. National Geographic was just coming out with with these gorgeous pictures of the art they were discovering in the caves. So people are painting on the walls of the caves and really recording the hunt that we had just seen.

And a shaman is standing before a campfire and he’s telling the story of the hunt. So we’ve got the oral communications. Then we have the storytelling that shares that experience with people who weren’t in the hunt. Then we’re recording it on the wall of the cave. You see a little boy putting his hand against the wall of the cave, and then they would blow pigment on it. And, you know, those caves have many of those hand prints. It’s really a very touching thing. So we said, okay, now, writing on the wall of the cave transitions to hieroglyphics on the walls of Egyptian temples, these hieroglyphics very stylized. It takes a special class of scribes to understand, to master all of those symbols.

We found a gentleman in Glendale as it happened, and he was teaching at a local college. He taught Egyptian history and hieroglyphics. So we brought him over to Imagineering. We took him out to our production facility in Tujunga and we said, okay, here’s an example of a wall. Right now we’re looking at how to create what materials will give us the look of sandstone. I turned out it was crushed walnut shells and the sculptors had carved just kind of random hieroglyphics into this big wall because they were interested in how does it look and how does it hold the color and dimensionally. He looked at this and this really puzzled look came over his face and he said, but it doesn’t say anything because exactly we don’t know what it should say, but we’re counting on you to help us.

He was such a wonderful resource for us; he would send me large sheets of paper and he’d painstakingly draw on the hieroglyphics that would appear on the wall and then told me how to read the hieroglyphics and what they said. Then in the story we go from writing on the walls of the temples to papyrus, to people harvesting and creating papyrus, and then a scribes sitting at the feet of the pharaoh writing in her attic, writing, because you can’t really you needed more of a shorthand for the hieroglyphics.

So this more cursive writing came into being, and he gave us his name was Leonard DeGrasse. He gave us a letter that a Pharaoh had actually written to one of his administrators out in a far flung district. And bless his heart, when it came time to record the voice of the Pharaoh, he came in and read it for us. It said, “You are my representative and people look to you and I expect of you the highest performance”. And you know it was it was so fascinating to see these pieces from ancient history coming together.

We had to go into detail about which Pharaoh would it be, what period of time gives us Hieratic writing and hieroglyphics. And then we’d get questions from the people in costuming and people who are dressing the audio-animatronic figures to say, Can you give us an idea of what the makeup should look like and what the wall paintings should be, what colors did they use? You know, it was I had the most fun because we talked to people who gave us Phoenician dialog. There was a wonderful professor, I think he was in Minnesota who gave us the dialog for the Phoenician trader who’s going to take this shipment from this port to Tarshish. He was so excited when I called him.

And again, our wonderful library was later called the I.R.S. or Information Resource Center. They found him for me. So I gave him a call and told him that Disney was interested in his help to figure out what this Phoenician scene should look like and what the captain and the merchant would be saying to one another. So another little piece of the puzzle came together and in that case, the Phoenicians, of course, were able to take a very complex system of writing and reduce it down to essentially the first alphabet, and then they could use it for trading around the Mediterranean.

Because they’re traveling to these different ports, the whole idea of the alphabet spreads around the Mediterranean shores. And then we went on to Greece and Rome and the Middle Ages. One of my colleagues came back from a review of the show sets which were being built in the North Hollywood facility. Pat said to me, John Hench says that we need something from the 12 tables of Roman law. And I thought, Oh, I’ve never heard of that. But I called the I.R.S. and they sent to the UCLA Law Library. And the next day I had this tiny little book in my office, and it contained the 12 tables of Roman law.

I was looking for an inscription that would fit nicely on the wall as you transitioned from the Greek scene up to see the centurion and the senator. And I found it. Then I thought, Oh, I wonder what it says. I better check. So the footnote said, “If you are summoned to appear in court, you must appear. If you cannot afford transportation, it will be provided for you. But the cart need not be covered with pillows”. I thought they had travel departments back then if you go in coach. We found graffiti for the section where Rome is burning and went to the Huntington Library and they had one of the pages of or maybe they have the entire Gutenberg Bible on display.

We were able to take a photograph of the page and reproduce it for our attraction. They showed us manuscripts that were written at the time of Charlemagne. It was just I mean, I had loved history and cultural anthropology in school, and I think Marty maybe remembered that I’d taken classes in Celtic mythology and Indian lit. So I don’t know if he knew exactly how much I would love doing the research on this project, but I just loved it. I felt like, you know, I love projects where you dive in and you look for details and then you satisfy the requirement because you find the answer. But that information is then always a part of you. So I just felt like back when I was studying the annual report, I learned so much about the Disney organization and doing Spaceship Earth.

I had a chance just to spend two years sort of stepping my way through world history. And then for the next 20 years, Marty would send me every guest letter that came to him from guest relations in Florida saying, you know, if a guest had a question about why we chose this culture and not that culture, it was my job to answer it. But by then I had an 18-page bibliography and we’d talked with lots of scholars, so we felt pretty comfortable with what we had done.

But after the attraction opened, we began to get letters that indicated that people were a little confused about the story we were trying to tell. Our conclusion was that their eyes were kind of overriding their ears. So that beautiful poetry that Ray Bradbury had given us about the journey we were on was somehow just getting lost in people’s fascination with with the scenes, and they weren’t really making a connection.

So the solution, which was pretty, I think pretty brilliant for the time, was that we needed a new narration and we needed a kind of a new voice. And the voice was Walter Cronkite. At that period of time, he was the most trusted man in America because people saw him on television every night. And he had that very authoritative. That’s the way it is or that’s the way it was. We thought his style of speaking and people’s familiarity with the fact giver will maybe be the key. We need to make sure that this attraction is conveying what we hope it will convey. And so young Tom Fitzgerald, who was a writer in those early days, went to New York with his script and persuaded Walter Cronkite to do the narration. It was great. And the letters, the tone of the letters changed really after that.

Dan Heaton: I love all those stories. There’s so much you just said that is great about developing it and that time and the Walter Cronkite version is the first version I remember hearing as a kid because I went a few years after it opened. It’s amazing how much this always amazed me about Spaceship Earth and some of the other early attractions, how much detail that work was put into it with, like you said, all those experts and everything. And there’s so many of those Epcot pavilions and a lot of them are gone, which is unfortunate, but I’m glad Spaceship Earth is still there. I mean, what do you think it is about from your experience about Spaceship Earth that has made it, you know, even though it’s changed a few times, that has made it kind of stick around?

Peggie Fariss: I think the sets were really beautifully done. You know, there’s just it’s each one of those scenes is like a little jewel box of, you know, the lighting. There’s something sort of warm and intriguing about each of those of those scenes. I think what’s really interesting is how many different narrations we’ve overlain on that attraction, and it’s still worked. The funny thing is, one of the things we learned about Future World and participants is that their businesses were changing.

So the AT&T that sponsored Spaceship Earth on opening day in 19, well, in 1982, it had an entirely different business model ten years later. And then when Semens became the sponsor, the tack there was really that one innovation leads to another that we share information and we’re able to build and build and build on the accumulated knowledge. But I think it’s I’m really pleased that it’s lasted as long as it has.

Dan Heaton: I think I could ask so many questions about Spaceship Earth, but I definitely want to get to some of your other career. So you mentioned that you were involved so closely with Spaceship Earth and all that. But what what happened next? Where did you go kind of after working on that project?

Peggie Fariss: So I was one of a number of show producers. One of my favorite projects was the Disney Gallery. So the space back at Disneyland above Pirates of the Caribbean had been built as an apartment for Walt Disney. And then he died shortly after New Orleans Square opened. So he never really occupied the apartment. And it served for a time as a VIP lounge. Then it was offices for the Disneyland International team that was working on Tokyo Disneyland. But if you remember or if you have experience with that part of Disneyland, it used to get really congested because the queue for Pirates of the Caribbean was, it was a very it’s a very popular attraction. And so the queue would be gathered right out in front and that would kind of pinch off the circulation from Adventureland over to toward the Haunted Mansion.

So the solution was to build a bridge that would span the queue area. Guests would travel under the bridge and queue, and then people who were moving from Adventureland to Haunted Mansion would have an easy pathway to make this look right. John Hench and Tony Baxter decided that there ought to be staircases on either side of the building that would lead up to a balcony that led into the apartment. And then it turns out, well, that would make the apartment available.

What could we do with that space that would could be used for something where guests could experience that space? Because it was really beautiful. So the idea was, well, let’s create this Disney Gallery and we can showcase art because we have we have so much wonderful original art in the Imagineering vault and no one ever sees it after the initial presentation, and guests have never seen it.

Work began on the Disney Gallery and it was pretty well along when they brought me into the project because there was also going to be a retail component to it. So there was going to be a really close coordination between Disneyland Merchandise and Imagineering and the idea of making limited edition reproductions, lithographs of some of the art that would be on display at making note cards and posters and things like that.

So my job was to be that interface, and it was so much fun because we had to write copy for each of the pieces of art that were part of the show, the exhibition, and many of those artists had retired by then. My job was to go to the homes of the retired artists and interview them about when did you do this work? Why did you do this work? What materials did you use?

It was such a fun project because I got to spend time with that first generation of Imagineers and people who had come out of the studio, people like Ken Anderson and Sam McKim and Marc and Alice Davis and Dorothea Redmond. It was just, you know, it was such a special experience. And then I also found myself in meetings where with the Chief Financial Officer of Imagineering and my boss, and they would be talking about projects and they’d be discussing the IRR and the NPV. And you know, I was an English major. So I was talking to my friend Rich, and he said, well, that’s finance. You could get a book, but no, I have to take the class.

So it turns out the prerequisite for finance through UCLA extension was Accounting A and B, So I signed up for that. I took vacation days so I could do the Accounting homework on Fridays and then go to class on Saturdays. And I got through Accounting A and B, then I took Finance. I did really well in it, and then I was hooked. And so for the next 20 years, I took classes through UCLA Extension, Organizational Development Management, I.T., you know, you name it. The joy was that I could use the things I’d learned the night before when I went to work the next day. So I used matrix math when I was preparing a budget for what will it cost to frame X number of paintings to go into the next exhibition?

We haven’t chosen the art yet, so we don’t know how many big ones and little ones and medium-sized ones. There will be matrix math gives you a way to figure that out. So I was hooked. I took all of these classes. Then about 1987, Marty asked me to be the liaison to corporate alliances, and those were the people at the studio who were responsible for finding companies who wanted to participate as sponsors in our parks. So there was a business development side of corporate alliances. They were the ones looking for the companies that had the right fit. Then there was an account management group, and they would work closely with those companies throughout the life of their agreement.

You know, if it was a food company, then there’d be issues about can you provide us with X number of this product that you make? They would have discussions about pricing and volume. Are we properly cleaning the or bricks, seeing the fountain machines and you know, what product mix are they introducing and what are the right places within the Disney parks and resorts for introducing those products and showcasing those products? So there were all those kind of business aspects. Then what that company’s presence in the parks looked like was the responsibility for me and my team. We were the kind of point of contact between the companies, the corporate alliance folks and the creative teams.

We were sort of the buffer so creative teams could just be creative and we would take the heat if there was a lot of pressure from a company to give them a bigger logo or use a color that didn’t work with the environment. We’re very sensitive to the color palettes for the lands and the font styles, and so we would work with each of the creative teams and sometimes we were encouraging them to do a little bit more. We’d be looking at their presence on a main marquee, their presence on sort of secondary signage, welcome messages, farewell messages, looking for what are the perfect integrations of that company’s brand into this part of the park or that part of the park.

You could work with Coca Cola, for example. The beauty of that was Coca-Cola has presence everywhere in the world, but it’s unique. So, yes, it’s going to be red, but if it’s in India, it may be in Hindi, and if it’s in China, it will be in China, you know, in a Mandarin or Cantonese script. If it’s in Japan, it’s a distinctive script. If it’s at the turn of the century, it’s going to have a certain script. So we got to work with companies to to encourage them to let us find the best way to integrate their brand into the parks. We worked with all the Disney parks around the world, all the creative teams and the corporate sponsors around the world. So I did that for about 25 years and I loved it. It was really fun.

It was fun and it was very challenging because companies, you know, have an expectation that their brand of which they’re very proud, will have a prominent role in the show. And our view was the show comes first. Then when people discover your brand, it will feel seamless. It will feel like, of course you belong. Because what we didn’t what we wanted to avoid was logo slapping where, you know, because people when they’re in the parks, they’re on vacation and they want to kind of relax and let down their guard. They don’t want to be bombarded by a lot of commercial messages. If you’re subtle about it, it was our belief that you could kind of draw people in and they would appreciate and remember the unique presence of that brand in that unique part of the park.

So I got a great education in diplomacy and patience and being true to what you believe. So that was great. And then one day my phone rang in January of 2010, and the voice on the other end said, Peggie, how would you like to go to Paris and lead the Imagineering team? And boy, that was a bold out of the blue. I just never thought about doing anything other than this brand management stuff that I had really kind of felt I had mastered. But I thought, you know, what an exciting opportunity. I happened to have two nieces in there. They were in their mid to late twenties at the time, and I thought, I want them to be brave. When opportunities come their way, I want them to be able to be open to an adventure.

So I thought, well, how can I want that if I’m not willing to live that? So I said yes and went to Paris in the fall of 2010, just as Disneyland Paris was preparing for its 20th anniversary, and I inherited a team of about 25 incredibly talented, immensely dedicated, wonderful, wonderful people. Many of them had been there from the very beginning. They had worked on the original park back in the early nineties, and they were continuing to be true to their craft and deliver the best quality experience they could. And Disneyland Paris, you know, it had some really serious hard times in terms of, gosh, we don’t have a lot of money. But it was such a beautiful initial investment and, and these people were so dedicated. So it was really a pleasure to be part of that.

We grew the team and brought more people in to help deliver on the vision. Then luckily, Disney has kind of recommitted themselves to the park. It’s so exciting now to hear about the new attractions they’re planning. So I just felt like my five years in Paris were just the perfect culmination to my career and all those classes I had taken at UCLA. Suddenly I felt like I actually know what we should do. So it prepared me well for it. I was coming up on my 50th anniversary with Disney, and I couldn’t imagine having a better experience to close my career on. So it was kind of the perfect ending.

Dan Heaton: I love Disneyland Paris. I’ve only been there once, but it’s gorgeous. That was about ten years ago. But it is really exciting to see, like you mentioned, what they’re doing with I mean, they’re doing a lot of rehabs, which is great to make it beautiful. Then the new attractions, it’s it’s great to see because like you said, it was tough for a while. So it’s so interesting to me how you kind of have your career evolved and how you went in to learn more about business and how it affected your career. So what made you decide ultimately that it was the right time to to retire from Disney after such a great career?

Peggie Fariss: Well, as I said, my experience in Paris was just so phenomenal. I accepted the assignment, having never led a large team. So going to a foreign country whose language I didn’t speak, I mean, I’d taken some French classes so I could pronounce things on a menu. But my conversational skills were were really limited, taking on the assignment, really thinking, well, I don’t really know what the job will entail, but I guess I’ll find out. I did my first meeting with the chief executive officer began something like, Peggie, you can’t have 30 people reporting directly to you. You need an organization.

I thought, well, you know, they’ve been organized this way for 20 years. So who am I to change that? But I thought about it and I thought, okay, well, there is an opportunity to create a design studio within our group and a show technical team and a group that’s focused more on coordination and show producing and documentation. So we came up with a new structure and I did kind of like speed dating where I interviewed everybody in the department.

So I got a chance to meet them and find out where they came from and what their hopes were and who they loved working with. I identified some people to become the managers, to lead those groups. What I discovered was it was so satisfying for me to know that my purpose there was to really build a team that felt ownership of their areas of the people within their areas to encourage people to think about, well, what kind of training do people need, what kind of tools do people need, and what, what do we need to do to provide our team with the with what they need to do their jobs?

Because they certainly have heart and they are so dedicated and we want to fuel that loyalty and that imagination and give them hope that, you know, their work counts and that they’re part of a larger community of Imagineers around the world who are looking for similar solutions. They want to be good partners to the operators they interface with and their maintenance partners. What I hadn’t expected, but what I got a great opportunity to do was just work on building this team and encouraging people and helping them see what their maybe undiscovered talents were in the same way that, you know, people had helped me discover things I had never imagined about myself.

I’ve called mine the accidental career because I wasn’t somebody who said, I want to be there just incrementally. I found that if you immerse yourself in the topic and you give it everything you’ve got, there’s a great satisfaction in that. Then other things begin to appear and the next challenge emerges. So I really felt such satisfaction in that knowing that I would be leaving because the expat assignment is a maximum of five years. And then after that, I guess you could leave Disney and maybe be rehired in Paris. But my time was I was ready to come back to California, and I just felt that this when I came back to California, it turns out that Imagineering, you know, they continued to bring new talent into the organization.

You know, when you’re the one with 50 years of experience, maybe it’s time to let the next generation figure out how they’re going to do it, because they’ve got all the energy and enthusiasm and nobody wants to be the person in the room thinking we tried that gala was 25 years ago. So I just felt that for me, it was the perfect time to sort of celebrate what those 50 years had meant to me and really make room for the new young Imagineers that are going to create the next 50 years of attractions. So it was it was perfect and 50, you know, I wasn’t leaving at 49.8. I was leaving at 50, which was a nice round number and something I never expected.

Way back at Disneyland when when Ron Dominguez was interviewing me to move from casual temporary, which, you know, was that Friday/Saturday night gig to better hours, a little bit more money and a more reliable schedule. I remember saying to Ron, this sounds really interesting, but, you know, I don’t plan to be here that long. And I saw Ron the other day. We had a little giggle about that. And he said, I have a similar story.

So, you know, I think it’s probably true. There are many of us who came into this because it was a great summer job or a job when we were in college. And then one thing led to another, and before you know it, we found ourselves exploring areas that were fascinating to us and feeling like we could really make a contribution. And, you know, the beautiful thing is you meet people anywhere in the world, and if you have that Disney connection, you feel like you’re meeting old friends.

Dan Heaton: I love the idea, like you mentioned, of the accidental career. I’ve heard a lot of stories like you mentioned, of people that worked at Disney or similar areas in the industry that it seems like a lot of people kind of I wouldn’t say not knowing at all what they wanted to do, but did not expect to be where they were. And I love the idea to, like you said, of after 50 years, kind of deciding this is the right time. It’s been awesome to hear some of these stories. Peggie, it’s been wonderful to talk with you tonight.

Peggie Fariss: Oh, thank you. Well, I think let me just say one more thing. That is what I found true of my experience with Disney. You know, I spent 40 years of that career in Imagineering, was people’s willingness to let you try something that maybe you didn’t have any expertise in. But if you were willing to throw yourself into it, then you got a great opportunity. There are so many people whose stories include that aspect that there are something like 140 different disciplines within Imagineering and, you know, 1,000 to 2,000 people working on a variety of projects.

There are certainly people with amazing academic credentials and people in the R&D area or the engineers and architects and show ride engineers and the color specialists and the writers. The collection of talent is extraordinary. But the fact that you’re not in a narrow little channel, you really have the opportunity to explore things that inspire you, I think is is one of the hallmarks of of Imagineering. And it’s I think it’s one of the key ingredients of its continuing success.

Dan Heaton: I love that idea. And while in any role but especially it shows, it shows in some of the amazing attractions and other wonderful things like you mentioned the Disney galleries and things over the years that have been created. I think a lot of it comes from that and it’s awesome to hear that that’s the case and that you had such a great experience there.

Peggie Fariss: Thank you. Well, thanks for letting me ramble on and reminisce about about all the fun. But you know people ask me, do you miss it? And of course, of course you miss it. But what you miss more than anything are the people and the challenges that you are able to take on together.

Dan Heaton: I think I could ask you just about Spaceship Earth for a few hours, so you definitely did not ramble at the time. It was great. It was great to hear from you. And I loved all the stories. Thanks so much, Peggie.

Peggie Fariss: Thank you. Dan.