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by Judith Gayle Smith-Owens Vitouswykegardinerclark
11/13/23
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Barely the size of a deck of playing cards, this wee Swiss handmade music box vibrates in my cupped hands, tinkling "Whistle While You Work" in a shrill tone larger than itself.

Lovely, innocent Snow White, surrounded by one, two, three, four, five and six of Seven Dwarves, the evil-eyed wicked queen and her poisoned apple-foisting witchy self, the impossibly handsome Prince on his resplendent steed adorn its tiny top.

The once brilliant colors are fading, appearing whispered on.

Scrolling for a musical that plays "The Twelfth of Never." I was searching the mundane 18-note to the impossibly expressive (expensive) 144-note music boxes. I imagined a simple music box in which to store trinkets, about the size of a miniature cedar chest.

This impossibly small vintage treasure was crafted between 1940-1969 is antique - like me, born in 1943. No discernable opening for storage.

Squinting at the faintly discernible characters to find which of the Seven Dwarfs was hiding where - a long forgotten memory plunked me down at the foot of a very tall easel, where Snow White, busily sweeping a very dusty floor - charmed seven odd little fellas.

My daddy had drawn the entire magical scene.

Unapproachable, imposing Daddy was a gifted sketcher when he wasn't "in his cups." Colorful characters danced from his fingers, advertising Santa Claus with his ever-present bottle of thirst-inducing Coca-Cola, muscle-bulging Popeye and evil Bluto, to the impossibly curvaceous Vargas Girls in all their sports finery.

How could these memories escape me?

This remembrance is priceless, as I now struggle with confusion. This little box, this handful of beauty makes me realize my childhood was far brighter than my fading memories.

Daddy's drawings were so good.

Our uncle Al (mom's favorite brother) was visiting us in Cleveland, Ohio (from Burbank, California) and took several of daddy's best works to a friend of his in Burbank - Walt Disney, who immediately sent daddy an invitation to come to California to work with him.

Daddy, a steelworker, snortingly refused - saying "who is Walt Disney that I should quit my job and haul my family clear across the country?"

Daddy horribly died just a few years later, when he was thirty-six, hit by a freight train.

What would our lives have been like if we had left our frigid Ohio winters for impossibly bright California?

I wanted to draw like daddy. My beautiful older sister could. She could paint exquisite landscapes and wound up giving her instructors pointers. With just her very fertile imagination.

All I could do was copy cartoon characters and faces from my beloved comic books. Pretty good, actually, but heartbreakingly uncreative.

It wasn't until sixty years later that my mother revealed daddy had been a copy-artist.

I did take after him - after all.

But I did wind up working for Mr. Disney - at Disneyland, from 1965 through1969. Not as a cartoonist (I had given up that dream), but as an unofficial assistant supervisor of data processing.

I wonder, if we had moved to California, when Mr. Disney had invited daddy to work with him, if daddy and I both would have been cartooning together in his Burbank Studios?

Lovely, ironic dream...

But I sure enjoyed working for a Mickey Mouse outfit.

true story

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