Bill Walsh

Bill Walsh was born in New York to immigrant parents father from Canada mother from Ireland In his teen years he lived with relatives in Cincinnati OH and later attended the University of Cincinnati In 1933 he joined the stock touring company of husband wife team Barbara Stanwyck and Frank Fay as a writer but the couple divorced the next year and Walsh found himself stuck in Hollywood with no job and no prospects He wound up working as an agent for a publicity agency one of his clients being ventriloquist Edgar Bergen Walsh joined Walt Disney Studios in 1943 working for both the Publicity and Story departments One of his jobs was to write jokes for the syndicated Mickey Mouse comic strip he continued doing that on a voluntary basis for more than 20 years long after he left those departments Walsh brought his former client Edgar Bergen to Disney to narrate some cartoons and TV shows Walt Disney who at first saw television as basically a tool to promote his films was impressed with Walshs publicity savvy and chose him to head the studios television division His first few projects were resounding successes and when Disney made a deal with ABC Television to invest in its Disneyland amusement park in exchange for Disney developing a TV series Walsh was named the series producer The show turned out to be The Mickey Mouse Club 1955 Walsh developed the show basically by himself with little input from Disney who was more concerned with developing Disneyland He hired both the child performers and adult hosts on the show came up with the basic formatrotating theme days animated opening and closing sequences and recurring liveaction series among other innovationsand even helped to develop the famous Mousketeer ears each performer wore After several seasons on The Mickey Mouse Club Walsh wanted to get out of television production and left the show to produce liveaction films He produced quite a few of Disneys comedies and adventure films the most famous being Mary Poppins 1964 which was one of the studios biggest successes and pleased critics as much as it did fans Most of the films he produced however were derided by critics as dull and lowquality and helped to cement Disneys reputation for turning out unimaginative repetitive assemblyline pap The films made money for the studio though and Walsh and Walt Disney remained close until Disneys death in 1966 Bill Walsh died of a heart attack in 1975