Jupiter Jack and the Seven Dwarves

Well friends, it probably comes as no surprise that my current transitional employment status has led this extraplanetary disc jockey to reflect on the highs and lows of the ol' curriculum vitae. Though I've spent the better part of my adult life in the Steel Tower of Radio, I've also held my share of odd jobs here and there. Some of you may recall my mentioning, in a Tweet of Solidarity with the costumed characters rousted from Hollywood Boulevard last summer, that I once spent two months portraying Happy the Dwarf at Disneyland. I figure I owe you the story.

Like many boys and girls of the 1950s, I spent a large portion of my childhood engaged in a fervent love affair with all things Disney.  I was a committed Mouseketeer, an avid collector of Uncle Scrooge comics, and a dedicated viewer of the Disneyland TV series.  (I was a little young for the height of the Crockett craze, but I was a great fan of some of their subsequent frontier serials, particularly the ones about Elfego Baca, a Mexican-American lawman portrayed surprisingly convincingly by Robert Loggia.)  My preteen imaginative romantic energies were entirely focused, in succession, on Annette Funicello, Haley Mills, and Julie Andrews.  And I was fascinated by the feature films about boy genius college student Merlin Jones, whose experiments inspired many failed invention attempts on my part: hovercraft, robot servants, hypnorays.  (I also liked that Annette Funicello played his girlfriend.)

By the late sixties, however, my Disney loyalties had been supplanted by a new fixation on rock n' roll and the thriving counterculture.  From my parents' Southern California living room, I jealously watched the Summer of Love play out on The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite.  I vowed that the following June I'd be making my own way to San Francisco, as many flowers as possible in my hair.  It was only when the next school year ended, and I discovered how much a bus ticket alone would cost, that I realized I was going to need to save up some money.  I volunteered to mow our neighbor Mr. Sanderson's lawn, and he paid me a generous fifty cents.  When I showed up the next afternoon offering to mow his lawn again, I think he realized I was looking for a more long-term sort of employment.  Turned out his brother was mid-level management at Disneyland, and he put in a good word for me.  And that's how I, somewhat reluctantly, took a summer job at the Happiest Place on Earth.

When I decided to work at Disneyland, my main anxiety was that some classmate of mine was going to show up to see me loading little kids onto the Flying Elephants.  (It was a task I had a really hard time imagining Jimi Hendrix or Bob Dylan performing.)  In my interview, I suggested myself for more of a behind-the-scenes role, perhaps something that involved patrolling the vast underground network of tunnels rumored to exist under the park.  The supervisor interviewing me, however, had different plans.  I guess he liked my height (gangly) and my clean-cut appearance (a regretful product of my high school's dress code), because he said to me, "Son, how'd you like to be an astronaut?"

It was too good an opportunity to pass up.  This was 1968 after all.  And anyway, Tomorrowland had always been my favorite as a kid.  So I donned a shiny suit and a helmet and went to work that very day.

It turned out being an spaceman was a lot easier than all those NASA officials had led us to believe.  Basically, I just had to stride around Tomorrowland, greet the park guests, and occasionally point the way to the People Mover or the Flight to the Moon ride.  That first day, I was very disappointed to learn that at some point they'd torn down the TWA Moonliner rocket that had made such an impression on me as a youngster, but I cheered up as soon as a met the lovely Diane Stackhouse, who had just completed her freshman year at UC Irvine and was working as a spacewoman for the summer.

The job only really had a couple of challenges.  The first was the vertigo that could take hold of you surprisingly quickly after you'd spent a few hours in the sun with a fishbowl over your head.  (The closest Diane and I came to a romantic moment was when she held my hand while I recovered from a dizzy spell in the shade of the Matterhorn.)  The second challenge was how to deal with the questions younger parkgoers would ask about space and the future.

We'd been given some simple, pre-scripted responses, but they didn't really cut it in the face of relentlessly inquisitive children.  My second afternoon, a seven-year-old girl walked up to me and demanded to know why I was I wearing my helmet.  "To breathe in space," I replied confidently.  "But we're on Earth," she explained.  I looked around desperately for Diane to intervene, but she was posing for a photo under the Monorail twenty yards away.  "Well," I began, grasping at straws, "I just want to be prepared.  The air around here could go at any time."

It rapidly became clear that the Disney-sanctioned answers were not going to satisfy questions like that girl's, not to mention those that followed from other kids, everything from "How do you go to the bathroom in a rocket?" to "Are there wars in the future?"  I was going to have to come up with my own material.  So I did.

I based my descriptions of my spaceman's life largely on the sources I was familiar with, like Robert A. Heinlein and Star Trek.  I cribbed from the best in a fluid and freeform way, lifting details where I needed them as my conversations with my juvenile interrogators progressed.  Before long, a consistent vision had taken shape.  My spaceman hailed from the only human future that really made sense: a fantastically advanced socialist utopia based on the principles of scientific exploration, racial harmony, gender equality, and free love.

Anyway, my stint as an astronaut lasted about a week-and-a-half.  I arrived at my locker one morning to find a note requesting my presence in my supervisor's office, where he informed me that they didn't think I was so cut out for Tomorrowland after all: "But we think you could do great things as a dwarf."  He clearly wasn't joking.  "Aren't I little tall for a dwarf?"  "Oh no," he smiled, "We've got that all figured out."  I handed over my helmet with as much dignity as I could muster and headed over to Fantasyland.

The dwarf costumes, I discovered, were actually quite large.  The Imagineers had employed a kind of crazy forced perspective in the design.  When I put on the suit, Happy's enormous, bearded face covered my chest and arms, and his waist rested somewhere around my knees.  To move from place to place, I could sort of waddle around, Happy's dummy arms dangling limply from my sides.  My head and shoulders were swallowed up by Happy's hat, and my sole connection to the world outside was a small, gauzy window in the fabric.

"How do I talk?" I asked the young man climbing into a Grumpy suit next to me.  "You don't," he replied.

So that's how I spent the following ten weeks: silently, inside a dwarf.  All in all, it was still a good time, and I made good money for '68, almost $1.50 an hour.  Unfortunately, I spent a large portion of my newfound wealth inside the park.  I could ride the rides for free, but I had to pay for food, and I probably dined too regularly and too extravagantly at Aunt Jemima's Kitchen in New Orleans Square.  Most of the rest I spent on records.  I never made it up to San Francisco that summer, but I rode It's a Small World about a hundred times, so I felt pretty traveled.  And I made some good friends and learned some valuable lessons about crowd mechanics.  Oh, and one time I met Richard Nixon.  But that's another story.