A MOUSE CLUBHOUSE EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW
DAVE SMITH
talks about starting the Disney Archives

by Scott Wolf

I met Dave Smith in 1988 on my first day working for The Walt Disney Company. He told all of us new employees about the Disney Archives, which essentially is the department that, through their own collection of materials, has the answers for anybody who needs to know about the Disney history.

As an employee, I visited the archives countless times often without any need to or reason to other than it was fun and I usually saw Dave piled in work at his desk.

Dave has a very casual demeanor, almost as if he doesn't realize the importance of his role in creating such an important entity of The Walt Disney Company, the Disney Archives.

While Dave probably is asked more questions than any other person I interview, and he is answering questions every work day, this time the questions aren't about Walt Disney or the history of the company, but about Dave, and it's a pleasure to share these interviews with you.

Scott Wolf: Were you a fan of Disney before working for Disney?

Dave Smith: I guess I was, I never thought of myself as one really. I enjoyed going to Disney films when they came out but I don’t recall searching for them specifically. When I went to cartoon shows I was just as intrigued by Tom & Jerry and some of the other characters as some of the Disney ones. But, I think I probably got more interested in Disney after Disney’s television show started in 1954 and I started watching that regularly and started realizing that Walt was building a park in Anaheim, so that intrigued me and I guess I got more of an interest then, and I wanted to go to Disneyland right after it opened but my parents wouldn’t take me.

SW: Were you living in California?

DS: Yes, I grew up in Pasadena. So, they said, “Oh, let’s wait awhile until the park is running smoothly and then we’ll go.” Well, in the meantime my grandmother went and I was so disgusted that she got to go and I didn’t get to go. So I looked at the guidebooks and the things that she brought home and I was so excited about it but I think it wasn’t until 1956 that I finally made my first trip.

I think comparing me to Disney fans of today I can’t say that I was really a huge Disney fan. I enjoyed Disney, I enjoyed the movies, I enjoyed the park, but I didn’t know a lot about Disney. I never read any books about Disney, and of course there weren’t many in those days. So there wasn’t an easy way to learn a lot about Disney history.

SW: What were you doing before you worked for Disney?

DS: I was a librarian. I got a library degree from University of California in Berkeley and was selected for an internship at the Library of Congress so I spent a year and a half in Washington and then came back to California. I got tired of the weather in Washington and also all my family and friends were out here in California so I moved back here and got a job at UCLA in the library and worked there for five years.

SW: So what brought you from UCLA to Disney?

DS: Well, I was sort of in the right place at the right time when Disney started thinking about doing something with their history. Walt of course died at the end of 1966 and that was while I was at UCLA. I got interested in doing a Disney bibliography. I had done several other bibliographies and I thought a Disney one might be fun and I contacted the studio and they agreed to help me find the information I needed, so I had some contact with the Disney Company in the mid to late 60s.

I finally finished the bibliography in 1969 but that was also the time that the company was starting to think, “Wow, Walt’s gone for three years, his office had been shut up. We really need to do something about preserving his memories.” And, at the same time UCLA had contacted Disney, suggesting that Disney deposit Walt Disney’s papers at the library.

Well, they had a meeting and I sat in on this meeting since I had the contact with Disney before, and out of the meeting it became obvious that what Disney was thinking of was not just the history of Walt, but preserving the whole history of the company and that’s not something that the university library could handle, so the librarian suggested that Disney consider setting up their own archives which some other companies have done in this country, and sitting in the back of the room that sounded like an interesting idea to me and so I went home and wrote the Disney people a letter suggesting my services.

SW: So how did it go from there?

DS: Well, they didn’t have anybody on their staff that knew anything about archives or libraries so I took a two month leave of absence from UCLA and did a survey of the whole company to find out sort of the quantity and the quality of the material that was available, and out of that I wrote a proposal about what they could do with it and I got that by doing a lot of reading on archives and also visiting business archives in places like the presidential libraries around the country.

The proposal went in around the first of January in 1970 and it took them about six months to figure out they wanted to go ahead with it. They finally decided and they asked me to come and do it.

SW: What did you find when you were doing your research initially?

DS: I found a lot of departments had saved things but nobody knew what anybody else had and there were areas where there were major gaps in what had been saved, but I did find that there was an awful lot of material around and that could make a very good start for an archives program.

SW: So where did you begin once you started?

DS: Well, they gave me an office up in Walt’s office suite in the Animation building. SO I had an empty room and an empty file cabinet and they said, “Start.” (laughs)

SW: So what did you do…

DS: So I just started gathering things. I went around the studio and found where everything was hidden and a lot of things had been stashed away and the people that stashed them were no longer here and nobody knew what was there, so I found all sorts of interesting things. I also had to convince a lot of departments that the archives was going to be around for a long time and that we would take better care of their file sets than they were doing. So like the sets of all the books, and the sets of all the records, and the sets of all the sheet music, and the sets of all the publicity photos, and the sets of all the movie posters and that sort of thing.

SW: What about correspondence and letters, was that all part of it, too?

DS: Well, first the correspondence of Walt Disney was the basis, and yes that had been boxed away in a basement closet in the Animation building so I moved that into the archives right away.

SW: What exactly is the Archives? What is its purpose and how it pertains to the public and to employees?

DS: Disney is a company that reuses its past all the time and a lot of people working for the company today have no knowledge of Disney’s past and they are expected to work on projects that deal with Snow White, and Pinocchio and Steamboat Willie and all sorts of things that they don’t know anything about. So our job is to work with all the people within the company that have need for information from Disney’s past that they can use for the current projects that they’re working on.

Now, we used to be open more to students and writers and others outside the company but we’ve had to curtail that because the company has just grown so big and the demands on our time are so great that we really cannot work with people outside the company anymore, at least having them come in and do research. Now that doesn’t mean we won’t answer phone calls and letters if people have specific questions for us. We’re glad to work on those, but there’s a limit of course on what we can do. We can’t write a kid’s term paper for them. (We both laugh)

SW: They should get an “A” if you do.

More from Dave:
Talks about his job
His favorite Disney memory and Roy O. Disney

See other interviews

NOTE: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in the interviews are solely those of the interviewee and do not necessarily reflect the views of Mouse Clubhouse. Mouse Clubhouse accepts no legal liability or responsibility for any claims made or opinions expressed within.