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Disney connections with Council Bluffs and Omaha.
Louis Grell-- Walt Disney's Drawing Teacher
Louis Grell was born in Council Bluffs to a Council Bluffs butcher and his wife in 1887. Young Louis showed talent early, outstripping the abilities of his local teachers by age ten. He was sent to live with his grandparents in Germany when he was twelve, where he studied at the Royal Academy of Applied Arts in Hamburg, the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, and the University of Munich.
Grell is best known for his 20th-century murals. His works can be found in buildings across the country, from the Pottawattamie County Courthouse to the Times Square Paramount in New York City and beyond. Though primarily known as a muralist he was also an accomplished portrait artist.
In addition to creating his own pieces, Grell worked as an instructor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Chicago starting in 1916. It was during this time Walt Disney took art classes at the Academy. According to the Grell Foundation based on information from the Walt Disney Archives, Walt Disney studied at the institute in 1917 and 1918 when he was beginning his career as an advertising cartoonist. At this time Grell was an instructor in the use of decorative painting in commercial illustrations and in advertising drawings.
Louis Grell later became a teacher at the Art Institute of Chicago where he taught various design and illustration courses. He won many awards during his career, including the Harry Frank and the Municipal Art League prizes.
Louis Grell passed away in 1960.
(Above) Self portrait Council Bluffs artist, Louis Grell
Ann Rosenblatt Ronell
Ann Rosenblatt and The Big Bad Wolf
Ann Rosenblatt and The Big Bad Wolf
Ann Rosenblatt was born in Omaha in 1905 to Morris and Mollie Rosenblatt, and she showed her musical talent early on. Young Ann loved to dance, and learned to play piano by ear. She wrote her senior class song for the Omaha's Central High class of 1923.
Rosenblatt left Omaha to attend college. When at Radcliffe she wrote music for college plays and did music reviews and interviews. One of the people she interviewed was George Gershwin, who was impressed and hired her as a rehearsal pianist for one of his shows. It was Gershwin who suggested that she change her name from Rosenblatt to Ronell.
She penned “Baby’s Birthday Party” in 1929, which became a hit when recorded by Guy Lombardo and Rudy Vallee. She also wrote “Willow Weep for Me” in 1932 which has become a jazz classic and recorded by over 120 different artists.
Though many of her songs enjoyed tremendous success, it took a partnership with Walt Disney to yield a tune that is recognized worldwide. Disney was turning fairy tales into cartoons at the time under the name “Silly Symphonies” and in 1933 chose the tale of The Three Little Pigs. It was the film’s “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf” that caught on, leading the picture to an Academy Award for Best Animated picture and becoming Disney’s first hit song. That unforgettable tune was cowritten by Ronell and Disney composer Frank Churchill. She also composed background music for other Disney animated shorts.
Ann Ronell’s 1945 “Count Me In” was the first major Broadway production in which a composer wrote both the music and lyrics. Being talented and comfortable with both, she continued to do double duty on several projects.
Ann Ronell amassed an impressive legacy of credits in a career extending forty years. Her career isn’t just remarkable for her success, but that she managed to accomplish it in a field that was heavily male-dominated at that time. She and her husband, producer Lester Cowan, had no children. Ann Ronell passed away in 1993.
Omaha's Green Brothers Provided First Sound Cartoon's Music
George Hamilton Green and Joe Green have been hailed as the most influential xylophonists of the first part of the twentieth century.
Joe Green was born in Omaha, February 9, 1892, and George Hamilton Green the following year on May 23. Their father, George, was a leading bandmaster of Omaha. Their grandfather was likewise a musician.
When the brothers were about nine years old they saw a xylophone for the first time. This instrument was of a very crude table top design and had only two octaves. They convinced their father to buy the instrument, but both wanted to play it at the same time. To solve the problem they copied the design and built their own xylophone out of maple purchased at a local hardware store.
According to an article in the Omaha Wold Herald, George was hailed as “the world’s greatest xylophonist” at age 11.
Joseph Green studied piano for many years with Professor Letovsky of Berlin and later studied timpani and drums with Joseph Zettleman of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. George Green studied piano, harmony, and composition with Professor Sigmond Landsberg as well as violin.
Through many years of practice and performing, the Green brothers developed xylophone playing to an all-time high. The years 1890-1925 were known as the Golden Age of the Xylophone. The brothers became an authority on the subject, publishing a book about 1900 entitled “Green Brothers Advanced Instructor for Xylophone.”
The brothers formed the Green Brothers Novelty Band. The music they recorded consisted primarily of dance music, such as the Foxtrot and One-Step, and some Waltzes. Occasionally, a vocalist was used to sing for a single chorus. After about 10 years of this instrumentation, the Green brothers added saxophone and banjo to the group. The banjo was played by Lew Green, the younger of George Hamilton Green and Joe Green. This ensemble recorded hundreds of sides for virtually all the 78rpm record companies during the acoustic recording period, including Victor, Columbia, Edison, Okeh, Emerson, Vocalion, Pathe, and others.
The 1939 death of Joe Green, who served as the business manager as well as lead musician, brought an end to the band.
George Hamilton Green retired from music, and the group's impressive 22-year tenure came to an end. Following George's retirement from the music business, he relocated to Woodstock, New York, and worked as a cartoonist from his home. His cartoons were featured in the Saturday Evening Post and Colliers. He died in 1970.
Digital Electronics Historic Trail Leads to Council Bluffs.
Bluffs-born inventor Lee DeForest set out to improve the speed of telegraphy— the original form of digital communication. In the process he developed what some have termed “the invention that changed the world,” the vacuum tube. After selling rights to the vacuum tube, DeForest’s next project was discovering a way to synchronize sound with pictures for the film industry. Called Phonofilm, the process recorded sound directly onto film as parallel lines. This optical system photo-graphically recorded sound waveforms. Though over 200 short films were made with the process, there were competing systems being developed at the same time, and in part due to business setbacks, the DeForest system was never picked up by the major studios. Though Phonofilm wasn’t used by name to produce the sound on Disney’s “Steamboat Willie,” its technology was. DeForest had a falling out with Pat Powers, an investor with Phonofilm. Powers hired away DeForest’s technician who used the Phonofilm process for Power’s new company, Cinephone, using DeForest's technolgy but with a slightly different name.
Unfortunately, Lee DeForest proved to be as poor with business as he was great with inventions, once observing that during his lifetime he had made then lost four fortunes. Though he remained creative and revered by those in the electronics world, his attempts to create his own companies and profit from his own inventions typically led to failures from legal challenges and his falling victim to those pirating his ideas. One of his over three hundred patented inventions was used to provide the audio for "Steam Boat Willie,” Walt Disney’s first sound picture.
Lee DeForest was born August 26, 1873 at 523 Fourth Street, the son of Anna and the Rev. Henry DeForest, who was then pastor of the First Congre- gational Church. Henry moved the family to Alabama when Lee was five to become president of the American Missionary Association’s Talladega College. Henry DeForest was decades ahead of his time with his beliefs that education should be equally open to all, both men and women without regard to race.
This was not a popular notion in Talladega, Alabama at that time, resulting inLee growing up with few friends in the white community.Lee DeForest earned a doctoral degree in physics from Yale in 1899 and began working on ways to improve wireless communications. His most significant invention was the triode vacuum tube, which he called the Audion. The essential component of an amplifier, this tube allowed radio waves to travel further when transmitting and to detect weak signals when receiving. Radio waves were initially believed to be light-of-sight, thus becoming unusable after a short distance due to the earth’s curvature. It was later discovered that they do go over the horizon hugging the ground, but quickly weaken into static. DeForest’s tube was the broadcasting and communication game changer by amplifying these signals, and became the standard of all broadcasting and receiving for decades.
DeForest built wireless stations for a variety of customers, including the U.S. Navy for use in ship-to-shore communications. As the tube’s importance became obvious in the industry he acepted an offer from Bell Telephone to buy the rights.
At this point the value in radio was seen in two-way communications, not entertainment geared toward the public. DeForest himself was one of the first to envision the latter. Some hobbyist radio amateurs were building radio sets and though the potential audience was small in 1915 DeForest began to broadcast entertainment to them from a transmitter he built in New York City. Though he was not the first to do this, others just signed on when they felt like it. Some radio historians hold De-Forest’s station was the first to actually have a regular schedule and newscasts, all five years before commercial radio as we know it came on the scene, and a decade before Council Bluffs' first radio station, KOIL. When the latter signed on DeForest was in Switzerland and couldn’t attend the inaugural broadcast in person.
Though not present, DeForest sent a cable to be aired, reading in part, “It is with the keenest delight and greatest pleasure that I learned a modern broadcasting station was to be opened in Council Bluffs, the city of my birth.”
Lee DeForest died in 1961 at the age of 87, a well-respected but not wealthy innovator of the electronic age. The Lee DeForest Building at Iowa Western Community College and Lee DeForest Elementary School at 2912 9th Avenue in Council Bluffs were named in his honor. The former DeForest School later became St. Albert Primary School and today is home to Heartland Family Service Therapeutic School.
Council Bluffs inventor Lee DeForest.
Lee DeForest vacuum tube, in the collection of the Historical Society of Pottawattamie County.
Disney and the Dentist.
By the end of 1922, Walt Disney's "Laugh-O-Gram" studio in Kansas CIty was "down to its last penny," according to "Walt Before Mickey, Disney's Early Years, 1919-1928," by Timothy S. Susanin. Dr. Thomas McCrum, a local dentist, had a plan for an educational film geared toward youth about the importance of dental hygiene. And he had cash. $500, the came just in time to reinvigorate the discouraged Disney. Brian Burnes, Robert W. Butler, and Dan Viets explain in "Walt Disney's Missouri-- The Roots of A Creative Genius" the meeting with Dr. McCrum almost didn't take place, as Walt couldn't leave his studio because he had no shoes. He had taken his shoes to a repair shop but couldn't get them back as he didn't have the $1.50 to pay the bill. In addition to the $500 check, Dr. McCrum covered the $1.50.
("Walt Before Mickey" and "Walt Disney's Missouri" are available on Amazon).
Walt Disney imagineer Kevin Rafferty designed Walt Disney World attraction "Mickey and Minnie's Runaway Railway." At a conference in 2022 Mr. Rafferty commented the railroad connection extends deep in his family. His great great grandfather had been a real life locomotive engineer, and the man at the throttle of the first rain to be robbed by Jesse James and his gang. That train originated in Council Bluffs.
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