 There's history here. And here. There's history there. History is everywhere. So guys, this is whom we'll be talking about today. This is Pinto Colvig. This picture is taken around 1944 when Pinto and Andrea Castellotti did a nationwide tour promoting the re-release of Snow White. And Pinto's holding the statue of Goofy because he created the character of Goofy and was Goofy's voice until he died in 1967. And Goofy was actually modeled after a Medford resident. You have a question? Why was he touring for the re-release of Snow White? He was one of the voices of, actually he voiced Grumpy and he voiced Dopey, I believe as well. Two of the dwarves, I know. Grumpy was also modeled after a local character after a bartender named Stoughton P. Jones. He knew as growing up in Jacksonville. Yeah. So, and of course, but Pinto's probably best known for this character, Goofy. No, that's not Goofy, that's Bozo, whom we won't be talking all that much about. Partly because Bozo's kind of a mystery to me. There isn't a whole lot about early Bozo that I've been able to find in the newspapers. And partly because subsequent to Pinto's tenure as Bozo, the character Bozo was bought by Larry Harmon, was it? I think that was his name. And he was the guy who syndicated Bozo so you had Bozos all across the country doing kiddie shows all across the country. But Pinto originated that. He was hired by Capitol Records to write and record the Bozo records. And he was the first Bozo. Did you like them? Or your Bozo albums? I think we have some of them. But, you know, it would be great to have Bozo records that we could actually play instead of treating as precious artifacts that can only be touched with white gloves. Donations are happily considered. You might want to wait until after the election to see if there will be, see what kind of historical society we'll have after November 8th. So we won't be talking much about Bozo. We'll be talking about Pinto's early years which came to light recently when I helped discover the Judge Colvig papers which were being preserved by one of his descendants who wasn't all that interested in them and just had them stuck under the stairs. And in those letters, in the box are a lot of the early photographs and early letters of Pinto. Pinto was a local boy made good. And this is the town that created him, Jacksonville. Pinto was born in 1892. This picture was taken around 1890. Jacksonville at the time was 700 people, small town. And that was the biggest town in the valley. It was a very, very insular community. The Jackson County has only recently been opened up to the rest of the world by the railroad. Before then it was very, very remote. You had to drive, take a wagon or horse for days to get to anything, to the nearest civilization. And this is what shaped his humor and Pinto had admitted that he was a very corny comedian who was not ashamed about using that term at all. Never had any pretensions to sophistication. And of course this is downtown Jacksonville. Looks pretty much the same way today. And this is the Colvig house where Pinto was born. He was born in the house. And the house still stands on Oregon Street in Jacksonville. This picture was taken in 1971. And in the box were some early photos of Pinto. This is the first one, about eight months of age I guess. 1892 or three. And here he is about three years of age. And you can kind of get an impression from the next one that his family was pretty well off. They could afford to dress their son like little Lord Fontleroy. I'm sure this is not what he looked like on a daily basis. Certainly not judging from his reminiscences. He was a pretty rough and tumble kid. There's one story that survives. It was in the newspaper about a green grocer who was driving his wagon in Met Jacksonville and his horse ran away, throwing the young Colvig boy off into the bushes. And he was shaken but basically unheard. And so that was Pinto. This was an era when you would allow your children to free range. It's a small town. Everybody knows each other, knows everyone's business. So parent and we not only have Pinto's word that he was free ranging as a child. We have this one little newspaper story as evidence, as corroboration. And here he is with, I don't know who the boy in the army outfit is, but that's his brother Don on the banister. And Pinto is sitting on his father's lap. Judge Colvig, William Mason Colvig was a very well respected lawyer and like most well respected lawyers, he acquired the sobriquet of judge. He was always called Judge Colvig, but he was never a judge. Pinto said that he was, the only thing he was ever a judge of was Irish whiskey. Pinto was a nickname. He was a Chris and Vance Debar Colvig. Debar was the doctor who delivered him. And the story is that the doctor filled in the middle name and that was, you know, and then gave the certificate to his father and that was how he paid for the obstetrical bill. This was pretty common at the time. He had lots of, or lots, we had several children named after doctors. And this was an era when lots of children were given surnames as first names. There were Vances. We don't know exactly which Vance Pinto was named after, but there was a Vance family. But he was called Pinto because of his freckles. And the schoolmates called him Pinto the human leopard. And here's a close-up of Pinto on his father's lap. Apparently a very loving relationship that then the love comes through in the letters that were in this big tin box. And here's Pinto all cleaned up about the age of 10 or 11, probably around 1903. He didn't look like this, though. They didn't have airbrushes in those days, but they used crayons and an oil painting to smooth out the freckles. And then this is Christmas 1904, and this is what Pinto really looked like, this freckle-faced, disheveled boy on the far right who really didn't quite fit in with his much older, very accomplished siblings. He was the youngest and was probably accounted for his closeness with his father. And Pinto's, did I skip a picture? I need to pay attention to what I'm doing, I guess. Okay, so here's a picture of Pinto a couple years later, writing his calf. Pinto was a town character later on his, one of his schoolmates, reminisced that one summer Pinto organized a kid's circus, trained dogs, trapeze, snake man magician, and our Willow Whistle Band played. Pinto was the band leader, black-faced clown and ringmaster with a big whip he would crack. As I remember, the admission was two sticks of gum or 10 marbles, which was not his first theatrical experience. Pinto was kind of starstruck, which wasn't easy to do in a remote little town, but whenever a theatrical troupe would come to town or a circus, he would try to insinuate himself into the performance, and he reminisced that he was successful sometimes, even managing to find his way on stage as an extra performer. But his first actual professional experience was in 1905 when his father took him to the Lewis and Clark Exposition in Portland. This is a photo of the trail, which was the midway. This is where all the sideshow and all the lowbrow entertainment of the exposition took place. And Pinto reminisced, when I was about 12, my dad took me to the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition, 1905, but I never got past the crazy house on the midway. I spent long and hard trying to find the crazy house on the midway, because he capitalized it. There was no crazy house, so it had to be this, the temple of mirth. But Pinto remembers, there was a guy outside beating a drum and roaring, hubba, hubba. I went up to him and told him I could play squeaky clarinet. Okay, come back tomorrow and I'll give you a listen, he said. No, sir, I'll be back today. And I ran back to the hotel for my clarinet. I went to work that day just squawking. And the next day, the guy put the clown white makeup on me for the first time. Then he made me put on an old derby and some big old clothes, and he stepped back and took a look at me. Now you make a good bozo, he said. Bozo was the term for a tramp clown like Emmett Kelly. I got four bits a day and all the goop I could eat, like popcorn and peanuts. And his dad was probably happy to be able to go through the expo without Pinto tagging along. And I've looked long and hard for pictures of this little kid playing clarinet in front of the temple of mirth, so far they haven't turned up. Also hoping to find a picture of hubba hubba, but a blow up of this is probably the best we'll ever ever get of hubba hubba, the clown who introduced Pinto to clowning. The next year, 1906, was a big year for the Colvigs. That's the year they moved to Medford. This is their house, which was on Laurel Street, right across the street from where the courthouse is today. Back then, the courthouse site was occupied by Washington School, where Pinto went to school. And what could be better for a 14-year-old freckle-faced kid than to be living on Main Street in the biggest town in the valley? And not only the biggest town, but the town that it was in the process of quadrupling in size in the space of five years. This is Main Street in Medford, just a few blocks from Pinto's house. That's the depot on the right. Pinto recalled loving, hanging around the depot and got to know everyone who worked at the depot. And later, he would work there very briefly. And that's contemporary taste. I beg your pardon? That photo is contemporary taste, right? Yes, that's picture was taken in 1909. And you can see how busy it is on the streets, sidewalks thronged with people because of this huge real estate boom that the entire Jackson County was going through at the time. And what could be better? And here's a picture from the next year, 1910, just as busy in 1911. And this is all going on just a few blocks from Pinto's house, which is one of the reasons that Pinto was not all excited about school. This is Pinto's classroom. And Pinto has a way of standing out in every group picture he takes. He didn't need to make an arrow. He's the only one who's half asleep with his face partially obscured by his hand. He was an indifferent student in a 1917 letter to his nephew. Pinto explained that what he was suffering from was called cartunitis. Cartunitis is a peculiar malady which affects me, which affects one at about the age of seven or eight years. Like tuberculosis and housemaid's knee, it is a germ for which there is no cure until death alone stops the hand which guides the pen. The first symptoms are that upon close observation one will find crude looking, stone age drawings in the victim's school books. And one of his school books survives. It's in a box in the library here. It's an ancient history school book and you can see from Pinto's illustrations how interested he was in ancient history. That was the death of Pericles. Here's the reign of Hadrian. Not a sophisticated comedian at that age either. The ruined spendthrift, Catalina. The Punic Wars, Joe Dokes, which may be the prototype of a character he based on one of the employees of the railroad depot in Medford, whose name was Frank Wilkie. Later on he based a vaudeville character on him. He called the Oregon Apple Knocker which was a standard Hick character. Frank Wilkie was, you know, he was the flag man. He guarded the crossing there in the days before automatic signals. And the job usually went to a retiree or an amputee, someone who was a charity job. Frank Wilkie was neither. He was a young, healthy, strapping young man but he had been dropped on his head when he was five so he was dim-witted and Pinto based this Hick character on Frank Wilkie and that may be a caricature of him. In 1930 when Pinto went to work for Walt Disney he did this character who had this shambling gait, very happy-go-lucky nature and a very distinctive laugh and that became the genesis of Goofy. Goofy was created by Pinto Kovig based on a Medford character. I beg your pardon? Can you do the laugh? Can I do the laugh? Yuck, yuck, yuck. Everyone can do a Goofy laugh. I'm not going to do it on tape though. So we're going through this 1908 schoolbook of Pinto's. There's his character of Herodotus and his little modern art thoughtfully dated for a September 29th, 1908, beginning of the school year. And in those school years he also played on the school band. I didn't bring a pointer but this is his brother Don who also played clarinet and Pinto is two over from his brother. The only one with his hat tilted looking as scant at the camera. And we have another picture of the Medford band and it's kind of a similar situation. Don is standing second from the left and Pinto again has his hat tilted and this time he seems to be a little put out maybe because he wasn't allowed to stand in the front row. We don't know. About this time his father sent Pinto and Don both to Portland to a business college where Pinto took drawing lessons. This is the first drawing he sent home from Portland. That you can see his signature V. Colvik in the left. He spent a lot of experimentation with his signature these days. And there's a little Medford Mail Tribune story that says that Vance for a number of months has been dabbling more or less with his pencil and recently went to Portland to take up the matter seriously. He now hopes to develop his talent to a point where it will be of some commercial value. I hope soon to be a member of a class Homer Devonport is thinking of giving in Portland State's fans. I am number one on his list and I hope he will decide to open a studio. Homer Devonport was a big deal in the time. He was a nationally known political cartoonist. The class may not have materialized. I haven't found any mention of it but he did give a series of lectures in Portland and we can presume that Pinto was there. Here's a letter he sent home three months later signed a completely different signature and for the first time he's drawn a little horse next to his signature, a freckled horse which he developed into a character he called Pinto's Nightmare and would appear on all of his cartoons for the next 10 years. And then three months after this in July of 1910 little tiny notice in the mail tribune says Fance Kovig has forsaken cartooning for a while and will take a position with the Southern Pacific in the local depot. His father was a lawyer for the Southern Pacific and you can just read through this that this was not Pinto's idea. And his father's probably trying to ground Pinto either making him be more serious about cartooning or more serious about working in the real world. This apparently didn't last very long. The last next year in 1911 Pinto is in college with Don again in Corvallis at the Oregon Agricultural College the predecessor to OSU. And there's an article in the OSU newspaper in 1955 says that Pinto, in Pinto's case the term student was a magnificent overstatement except for the band and here's a picture of Pinto in the band. He really took none of his courses seriously. The records show him taking drawing one, auditing it for one semester and getting a C in the second. In the year 1912 to 1913 he signed up to portray Christmas in history and art courses but didn't finish any of them. His was a lighthearted approach every spring off to the circus or vaudeville he wrote which is the beginning of his career of lying to journalists. He didn't go off to the circus of vaudeville every spring which we'll get into. He toured with the circus for only two summers and he also inflated his college career into having graduated from OAC when we see here that he only completed one course. So there's a little difference between completing one course and a full course for four years. And it doesn't show up on the screen but again Pinto Kovic is showing up is in this group picture. He's the only one who looks like he's hung over. And we just noticed that inside his makeup case his tin makeup case back there he has this photo pasted in. With OAC he did his just got into commercial art. He did illustrations for the yearbook and the student newspaper and probably for some local businesses the commercial art I found of here is isn't dateable or not easily dateable. And he also sent commercial art home sent political cartoons home to the Medford male tribune which would typically be printed on the front page. This one's from 1912 about Medford's explosive growth during the last four years, the last five years and of course the title says how that boy does grow. Of course what Pinto Kovic would have known is that the boom went bust just a couple months later. And the cartoon from 1912, the April of 1912 just four months later is illustrating that the boom has gone bust and there's an election for county judge and the two candidates have different opinions as to what to do about the ailing Jackson County economy in the center of the illustration there. And he did, here's one that he did a political cartoon about the Phoenix speed trap. They had a six mile an hour speed limit in Phoenix which made a lot of autoists unhappy. And here's the 1913 New Year's cartoon showing that it's the boom is over, everyone knows the boom is over and those years are gone forever. And here's some of the art that he did about this time. You can see Pinto's nightmare has developed into a full character and he's already calling himself a break beam tourist painting up this history of being a hobo of hobo-ing for years. Well, he's a kid, he's not even 20 years old and he's painting himself as an experienced hobo. He did reminisce that when he was a kid, when he was like preteen years, he would hop a freight train and ride up to Canyonville or to the Siskius which was something kids did at that time but that's not exactly hobo-ing around the country which is what he claimed. And during his OAC years, he also toured with the agricultural college band. Pinto did this illustration. The sad ran in the Medford Mail Tribune and with the band, he not only played his clarinet, I guess this is a self-portrait of Pinto, he also performed his vaudeville act and from the descriptions, apparently the vaudeville act was actually successful. We have two descriptions of it. One from the Ashland Tidings says that Vance Kovig, built as Pinto the Nightmare of caricature, was a star of the first magnitude. Kovig made a few scratches that form nothing in particular, said a few magic words, made a few more scratches and a fine likeness of Teddy Roosevelt or Mutton Jeff or finally Pinto the Nightmare would appear. Kovig is a Hummer with real ability and his stunt will prove tremendously popular anywhere. And then another newspaper said just about the same thing for 15 minutes, Pinto, known off the stage as V.D. Kovig, no one called him V.D. understandably, of Medford, kept the audience interested and in the best of humor with his caricatures and witty sallies. He's certainly gifted both as a cartoonist and as a comedian. In those days, this was kind of one of the standard vaudeville acts, either a chalk talk or on a big pad of paper artists would draw drawings and say humorous things and Pinto was setting himself up for a career doing just that. And actually, just a few months after this tour with the Agricultural College, he gets a birth on the vaudeville circuit and writes to his father, dear dad, this has been in my mind for over two years and the only way I can get it out is to do it. I've seen so many cartoonists in vaudeville that really got their $100 a week and they did nothing but draw four or five common pictures and say a few lines. I talked to two or three of them and they said they really saved money but the work got tiresome after a few months. Now keep that in mind, tiresome after a few months, how is that going to fit into what we know about Pinto Kovig? This is a kid who craves excitement. And I've looked long and hard for evidence of his career in vaudeville and professional vaudeville and this is all I've been able to find. One Salem newspaper did actually bill him, pretty high billing and I don't know how he did that because he was complete unknown in vaudeville and other than that he left no mark on vaudeville at all and this was his entire vaudeville career, maybe six weeks long. He did make his way in vaudeville up to Seattle and in May of 1913, as Pinto wrote much later, said before the end of the second term at OAC, the spring time and show business beckoned again, not again for this is the first time. I did a stint on the Pantages vaudeville circuit when playing in Seattle, the Al G. Barnes Circus Parade past the theater. I recognized some old friends on the clown bandwagon. I wanted to ramble, one day stands, that day I signed with Barnes. So as he himself had kind of anticipated, doing the same act night after night in vaudeville, just a few minutes at a time and having the rest of your day to yourself and not anything to do was no life for Pinto Colvig so he joins the circus and these are Barnes Circus posters from the teens. We only have one picture of Pinto from the 1913 tour. This is taken in, it would be June 29th, 1913. There's Pinto on the far right. And after, but after less than six weeks with Barnes, Pinto writes to his father, well, my wild and checkered career as a trooper has come to an end. Thank the Lord. Eight band men quit last night owing to the fact that there were too many hippodrome bugs, bed bugs to sleep with. The food was starting to decrease in flavor. There's too much scandal and dirty work being displayed by the management. But watch me dad. This is the turning point of my life. I'm here, thousands of miles from home have nothing and don't know a soul. The basement of my pants has worn out cause from sliding to and fro on the bandwagon seats. But I'm going out tomorrow and get a job. Don't care if it's juggling horse apples in the street. This is in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. So he's going, and so he gets a job in Cedar Rapids paving in the heat of an Iowa summer, paving the streets in Cedar Rapids. Writes to his letter, ran my shoes off for three days looking for something to do. Started to work this morning for a paving company. Nine hours a day in the heat of an Iowa summer. And that lasted less than a month. A month later, another letter from home on the letterhead of the consolidated Roman Carnival companies. Writes to his father, well the piccolo and bass players of Barnes band and myself signed up yesterday with the above company at $12 per week, board and birth. My reason for doing it is that they were working westward. In a 1926 article Pinto wrote, he described this circus. He said the carnival featured a Roman circus and our uniforms had Julius Caesar's looking to their laurels. We opened in Cheyenne and went broke three weeks later in Colorado Springs. So this is Pinto's first year with the circus. His first year with the circus is about two months. Did more, made his way back to Oregon. We don't know how, maybe he actually hoboed his way back, maybe he got money from his father. A lot of these letters he's asking for money for his father. This is probably from 1913, some commercial art that he did for Zans brooms, which was a Portland company, a broom manufacturer. And then he made his way back to Medford by 1914. And this is a, in March of 1914, he was working for the Coronet Veterinary Company who in Medford was making horse medicine and publishing veterinary books. And there's Pinto's nightmare as well. That didn't last very long either. This time it was actually interrupted by a legitimate reason. He got appendicitis for which he was operated on at that Sacred Heart Hospital. Then we have this mysterious gap. The brief mentions that he's in Eugene's, then he's in Portland. We don't know exactly what he's doing. But during this time, in 1914, the Eugene Gard, predecessor to the Registered Gard, writes a story about Judge Kovig, Pinto's father, and mentions Pinto in one paragraph. He says, it says, young Kovig ran away from college a year or so ago and joined a circus with which he spent a year. And later he made good on the Pantages-Vodville circuit as a comedy sketch artist. Judge Kovig is very proud of his son in spite of the original way which the latter chose to gain an education. So Pinto has learned to lie to journalists. And this actually saw him in pretty good stead because he's an entrepreneur. He's an entertainment entrepreneur and you don't wanna tell, paint a picture of hard times to journalists. You always wanna puff yourself up to be bigger than life. And this is something that was very successful for him. And then, so a few more months passed in September of 1914, this picture and story runs in the Oregonian announcing that Pinto has a job. And there's no explanation in the story or anywhere else in the Oregonian why this is news. Who Pinto Kovig is, why we should know about him or why we do know him in Portland, but they go to all this effort. And the job that Pinto has secured is in Carson City at a brand new newspaper, the Nevada Rock Roller. And I think the newspaper was just a few weeks old when Pinto took up with them. And one of the gaps in my research is I have not tracked down issues of the Rock Roller to find the work that Pinto's doing. This was in Pinto's, I forget this is, I think there are clippings of this here at SOHS, this is a complete paper that was in the tin box. And Pinto reminisced later that the editor of the Rock Roller was sent to the Pest House with smallpox, so this didn't last long either, and I landed in Carson City as a cartoonist for the Carson City News during a legislative session. And as this letter shows, he's asking his dad for money again. And one of the products of his time in the Nevada State Capitol was this book, which is here, this is in the SOHS collection. And again, there's the nightmare and it has illustrations caricaturing the various personages and dignitaries in the Carson City legislature. Now this is not representative of Pinto's best work, Pinto was never a really great cartoonist, but the way he did this and his work at the Rock Roller and the Carson City News was what was called the scratch plate method. You'd prepare a layer of chalk, of plaster rather, over a tin sheet of steel, and then you'd scratch out the image. So all this lettering had to be done backwards. And as you can see, scratching in chalk is not exactly conducive to fine art. And then you'd pour hot molten type metal over this and wash away the plaster, and then you'd print directly from that type metal. So what's next? And then here's his last Carson City cartoon. And now bidding farewell to Carson City because the circus is in town. He writes back to his father, rather, saying, geez, I didn't know how badly criticized I'd be at home for joining with the show again. Anything, I wouldn't have thought anything about it. But the show's much larger and better now, and the trouble in 1913 makes them appreciate a good band now. I get $11 a week and nothing to pay for but my laundry. And this time we actually have a couple pictures of him with burns, that's the top of that helmet picking up there is Pinto's helmet. So that's one of the bandwagons that he slid back and forth out and wore out the basement of his pants. And here's another, here's a group picture of the Carson, of the barn's band. This picture was taken in, or it was in Idaho, and I don't think I wrote it down here. So then we have another, no, there's a little bit more. This is, yeah, this is in Wallace, Idaho. And once again, Pinto is standing out. He's the only, this time he seems to be a little put out either with, I don't know, the circus management or having to get up in the morning to have his picture taken, we don't know, of course. And so he stays with barns and makes his way back to Medford and all indications are that he jumped the circus when he got back to Medford. So this is his second year with the circus. The second year with the circus is about three months long. Apparently deserts the circus in Medford. And now we have another maddening gap in Pinto's history. We don't know anything from what happened to him in December of 19, September of 1915 and then 1917, except that somehow in April of 1916, he gets married in Portland. We don't know why or how he met his wife, anything like that. Then the next thing we know about Pinto, he's in 1917, he's in San Francisco making cartoons. He's a pioneer animator making advertising cartoons. This is the same era when Walt Disney is in Kansas City doing exactly the same thing, making advertising cartoons, which would be shown before the feature in movie theaters. He writes to his father, I'm drawing 10,000 pictures per day and I've been doing advertising scenarios for the company and in my spare time, I draw on my nightmare, so he's got side projects at home, apparently animating a project involving his horse. He says the office is busier every day and we will soon occupy the whole top floor, put in two more cameras. Harry Hicks wants the nightmare films when they're done. He says he has a place for me in Chicago when I learned the business. Of course that didn't happen. And we have a picture of the studio. This is the animated cartoon film corporation, these four guys. From the left we have Angel Espoye who went on to a career in fine art. You can find his paintings online. Tac Knight was a very good cartoonist, had a syndicated cartoon strip called Lil Folks. It was a pretty good strip but it's best known now because I think in the fifties, another fellow wanted to start a cartoon strip about a group of small children and he wanted to call it Lil Folks but he couldn't use that name because it was taken already so he had to call it a strip, Peanuts. And there's Pinto standing and Byington Ford who became a lifelong friend is at the animation frame. And he named one of his sons, Byington. And you can see what Byington Ford is holding. He's holding a paper cutout and this is how they did their animation. This animation was still being invented in these days and I don't know if anyone was doing cell animation, celluloid, where they would draw celluloid sheets. I haven't done that research but this is how they did a pretty quick and dirty process and the camera is above Byington's head there and in the background through the door where you can see their dark room with a safe light hanging and that big drum is what they dried the film on. And of all those drawings, all those cutouts, only a few of them survive. We don't know where these are. We have a photocopy of this in the collection here at the Historical Society. Pinto put this piece of paper together in the 60s commemorating one of the projects they did which is pretty well acknowledged to be the world's first feature-length cartoon. Pinto created this collage in 1965, a little in advance of the 50th anniversary. The collage says that these three figures on the photocopy there are original composite drawings used in the world's first feature-length animated cartoon. The title was creation. Before Disney, radio and television, conceived, executed and produced by Tachnite, Pinto Colvig, and Byington Ford. Besides creation, we produced hundreds of animated film ads in equal to today's TV commercials for which we received $1 per foot. And also in the collection here, we have an earlier creation collage. Again, that's Pinto on the left, Tachnite in the middle, and Byington Ford on the right. And as far as we know, that's an original collage and those five frames glued to the collage are all that survives the creation. The first feature-length, what? That's here, yeah. Yeah, it's in MS7, I think. And when this tin box turned up, there were lots of little envelopes, and I opened up one of the envelopes and poured it into my hand, and it was famous frames of film. I think, oh my God, more of creation and it's more of the same. They're adjacent frames to these frames. So what was creation all about? We don't know. And we have the title frame. Now, it might have been satirical. A couple of years before this was produced, there was a big production under the same title. This may have been a take-off in that. We don't know. Here's Pinto, of course, in live action, and here's Pinto maybe pondering a creation. We don't know. And of all those hundreds of thousands of drawings they did, other than the cutouts, this is all that survives. And it looks like they were doing cell animation at this time. Again, this is all we have to go on. And one of his memoirs, which was recently published, is right here, and you can buy a copy after the talk. It's called It's a Crazy Business. Pinto talks about his years with Disney and warns while Disney what's going to happen after his success is over. Warns while Disney was going to happen to Snow White when people are tired of it and don't wanna see it anymore. He gives this long description. He's gonna take it to a back alley where there'll be a guy with a big vat and all the original negatives of Snow White and the film of Snow White is going to go in this vat to soak off the silver to reclaim it for its silver content. And I suspect that's what happened to creation and that's what happened to all those other hundreds of animation projects that they did. Because no one wanted to see them anymore. He didn't wait for TV. So in 1919, Pinto gets tired of animation. He gets very tired of animation. His letters make that abundantly clear. He takes a J-O-B. He's working for a newspaper. Again, working at the San Francisco Bulletin where he becomes the self-described bulletin board. Bullet, not bullet. This self-described bulletin boob. And here he is booping around. And with the bulletin, he creates a character. He does a column, a daily column in which the central character was a thinly-described Pinto called the Duke of Windy Gap. Windy Gap was a thinly-described Jacksonville. Although Windy Gap was supposed to be a Nevada town. And here's a caricature of Pinto shaking hands with his alter ego. And this strip ran for 203 episodes in nine months. And all the episodes are on my website. You can take a look at them. And here are a couple more. Sometimes he'd appear in the column in real life. Of course, that's Pinto being confronted by a visiting opera star. And the Duke of Windy Gap is down there in the bottom. And here's Pinto, the new father. And this is kind of mysterious because this looks just like a letter that he had sent to his father a couple of years previously. So is this Pinto's memory at work? Because I don't imagine that he had this. Maybe he'd kept a preliminary sketch of this. Let's see. There are two babies there. He eventually had five children, five sons. Yeah, that's right. So a baby's been added. Interesting. And in the San Francisco years, he also gets involved in movie production, in live action movies. And he reminisces that he got to know Frank Capra who was making movies in San Francisco. And if the text under this illustration can be believed, Pinto actually performed in this movie called A Tramp There Was, there's no historical reference to that movie. There's no historical reference to the director, Jack McHenry, there's his caricature there. There's very little recorded about the San Francisco movie scene at all. Someone did write a book about it which mentions neither the movie nor Jack McHenry. But it looked Jack McHenry in the 1920s census and he is described as a movie director or producer, something to do with film in the census. So this is not invented, this all actually did happen, it just didn't make it into the history books. And there's Pinto on the far right working at the bulletin. And then 1921, the very next year, again out of the blue, letter to his father. All papers and agreements have been signed up, office space rented, camera being built and preliminary work in general is being rushed. The company will be called the Pinto Cartoon Company. Pinto Cartoon Commedies. And I don't know, he writes his father will surely be a busy fella during the next few weeks but 24 hours work a day will seem a pleasure to me. Just two years later, late earlier he was writing to his father how tired he was of animation, how tired he was of 24 hours a day of work, drawing all these hundreds of thousands of drawings. But he says, when I hold the thought that my best friend, Bygton, fords behind me, that he's being supported by all these wealthy men, this is what he wants at the moment. Oh, okay, he's up to three sons. But then, this only lasts a year in 1922, June, oh no, okay, with Pinto Cartoon Company, they did a local promotion. They showed a lot of their cartoons or several of their cartoons to local theater audiences and this was published to promote it. And it looks like Pinto's work, it looks like Pinto's composition but you can see that the actual drawing is much more finished. And you look in the corner, it says Pinto and TAC and you can see that TAC actually did the ink work on this, TAC was a much more finished, much more accomplished artist, TAC Knight. But June 19, June of 1922, he goes to work for, oh, well, he syndicates this cartoon strip called Life on the Radio Wave, which runs June through October of 1922. And the premise of this was, it was, you know, satirizing the brand new American obsession with radio, which was, you know, this was, radio was brand new, this was before radio speakers, you know, people sat with their radio sets and headphones on and so it was brand new and Pinto was on the crest of this wave and some of them are actually amusing. But the strip quickly devolved, he started following the adventures of one elderly gentleman who makes contact with a flapper over the radio and carries on essentially, you know, an internet romance, you know, a sight unseen, he's romancing this one and of course it goes nowhere and very quickly results in the death of the comic strip. And then, once again, kind of mysteriously, 1923 finds him in Hollywood. He's moved from San Francisco to Hollywood and in January of 1923, a trade magazine has a one line mention, says Pinto, popular cartoonist of the United Features Syndicate and known from coast to coast, according to Pinto, has been made gag man for century comedy productions and in the collection here, we have a few headshots of Pinto which makes it look like he was an actor. I've been able to find no evidence that these movies were ever produced. I think these are headshots that he produced to take from place to place to get jobs in front of the camera and maybe to show his facility with makeup. We really don't know. And we don't know how he made it to Hollywood either. He does say in a 1926 article, this is the closest story thing we have to how he ended up in Hollywood. He says that when he worked at the bulletin, he used to take movie actors out to lunch and in writing up their stories, got to know them pretty well. They began to ask, why don't you come down to Los Angeles with the rest of the nuts? And they said it so often that the idea began to get inside his skin. After trying for six weeks, I finally got an interview with Jack White of the Jack White comedies. That was the beginning. And since that time I've written scenarios, titles, subtitles, acted some seriously and in comedies, created gags, devised all sorts of funny pieces of screen business, created sets for 25 weeks at Fox and now have a two year contract with Max Senate. Much of that work is lost like most silent comedies. But some of them survive. Here's an ad of a film that played in Medford. Keep going, that film is lost. But you can see he got big play up in the local papers because this was our local boy returning home in celluloid form. And he wrote titles and was a gag man for all of the Buster Brown comedies, for Century comedies and performed in a couple of them. This one's lost. This was called Oh Teacher. That's Pinto, of course, circled. And down at the bottom is his son, Vance Jr. Who also performed, I guess, as one of the students. We don't know much about that film. This one does survive though. This was the picture from a trade magazine. This was called Oh Buster. That's Pinto on the far right. He played the butler and the film survives. And I think I have it with me. I can put it on your thumb drive if you want it. Want to take it home. It's not very good. But one interesting thing about this is that it has several examples of Pinto's animation because Pinto was not only working in front of the cameras and behind the cameras, he was continuing to do animation. So if a gag was impossible, Pinto would draw it on the frames itself. And so if you see a movie from a silent movie from 1925 to 1927 where the hero is chased by a swarm of bees, it's very likely that Pinto painted those bees on the film. In Oh Buster, there's one scene where someone, I forget what he sits on the dynamite or something has blown hundreds of feet in the air and comes back down to earth. And when he's in the air, those are all drawn on the film by Pinto. And in his book here, he mentions by, he describes several other gags that he did, some of which still survive on film. So that's what he did in the 20s. And then sound came along. First, and once again, Pinto's on right there on the crest of the wave. And in 1928, he partners with a guy named Walter Lance who is now known for Woody Woodpecker, right? And creates the character Bolivar the Squawking Ostrich or Bolivar the Talking Ostrich. The name changes from one account to the next. And it was intended to be a talking cartoon but apparently sound was never added to the cartoon. Apparently the film was completed though. Pinto later explained that I played the part of a goofy wandering minstrel clarinet player in live action while Bolivar, my partner, was a bull-legged cartoon to ostrich. Bolivar was a pest and I couldn't get rid of him. When I tutored my clarinet, he danced and sang. During a certain passage in the music, he leaned over and gave me a peck on the head. Resenting this, I put down my clarinet and while I was rolling up sleeves to take a poke at him, he picked up the clarinet in his beak and ran over the horizon. I hope there was more going on in the cartoon than that. But in Pinto's book about his animation career, he described screening this footage for Warner Brothers and doing the sound effects live. He says, Leon Schlesinger and Jack Warner seemed to get a kick out of it. I could hear them laughing and it made me feel mighty good. Not until sometimes afterward, did I learn that during the showing of the film, they'd kept their eyes on me watching my wild antics while supplying the sounds. They'd forgotten to look at the cartoon. And the last Pinto I ever heard about Bolivar was that the Japanese rights have been sold for $90. So maybe somewhere in Japan, there's a print that survives a Bolivar. Then in 1930, he goes to work for Disney. Disney's getting into sound too. Pinto goes to work as a sound man and a gag man. And this is his first, this is his 1930 Christmas card with the five Pintos and Mickey Mouse as well, his five sons. And we have a picture from 1931 of Pinto I work. This is a studio recording session and this is how they did it in the building. In the beginning, they screened the cartoon and did all the sound live in one go. Quite an operation. You can see there's Walt Disney in the upper left-hand corner and the sophisticated recording equipment. The singing group in another corner. There's some of the sound effects equipment. There's a siren on a mountain on a bicycle wheel and a tub for thumping, or a barrel for thumping, I guess. The sound effects table. Marimba, xylophone, clackers, cowbell and other unidentifiable objects. And then in the back there's a guy baying at a microphone hanging over him and over in the band there's Pinto playing his clarinet next to Walt Disney. And with Disney, Pinto co-wrote Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf. These are the original lyrics. This is in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum. And in 1933, he toured with the other voices of the other pigs doing radio shows and performing, doing the voices. And it looks like during these shows Pinto provided the sound effects. He's holding the flute for the, that was used during the song and there are sound effects equipment down there. This picture ran in newspapers all across the country. Then in 1934, Disney had a series of photos taken showing illustrating the life of a gag man. The life, what goes behind the scenes at a cartoon studio. And Pinto features prominently in a lot of these pictures and they are the most depressing pictures you'll ever see. They were taken between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Taken after dark with all artificial lighting and you can just see these people are exhausted and don't wanna be there and just wanna go home. Look at this guy, except for Pinto. Pinto's, one of Pinto's jobs as a gag man is he would use his expressive face to illustrate emotions and their other animators would copy his face and draw it. And here they are pretending to be interested in the, in the, what do they call it, the panel showing the storyboard, thank you. And that's Pinto just to the right of Walt Disney. And here's another picture of the same scene and you can see that they've moved the furniture around. So these are all posed pictures and people are just exhausted and just wanna go home. There's Pinto pointing at one of the storyboards. And this is, I think, is Pinto's office. Those are the tools of Pinto's trade on the top of the piano. Pinto's clarinets, that's his trombone there. And there's Pinto at his desk. No idea, no, no anything about the cat. There's an ocarina behind him. We use the ocarina for sound effects. But now this picture is an actual storyboard session and notice the difference in the energy. This is the storyboard session for, you know, a gag session for a cartoon which I've identified. And I don't know why I'm bothering to look it up. This is for the Grasshopper and the Ants during which, and Pinto wrote the theme song for Grasshopper and the Ant, and did the voice for the Grasshopper. But you can see the energy, you know, they're laughing. It's natural light, the light bulb is turned off. This time there's a guy who had a typewriter, or maybe it's a dictation machine, must be a typewriter, you know, trying to capture the energy, capture all the ideas that are thrown out so nothing gets lost. This is what it was actually like. And of course there's, Pinto has drawn an arrow pointing to himself, illustrating some emotion. Wrong way. Another thing with Pinto did was, you know, his biographies point to make a big deal of this. That's Pinto on the far right, in sitting in far right. He led the Bicky Mouse cartoon band. This band was only put together for one event. In 1936 there was an event for United Artists, I think. Here's another picture. That's Pinto kneeling to the right of the drum. And this event took place at Pickfair at Mary Pickford's mansion. There's Pinto, again, just to the right of Mary Pickford. He always seems to get right next to the big, to the important person in an illustration. And that's Roy Disney standing two people to the left of Mary Pickford. And this was about the time that, no, okay, in 1936, so that was 1936 and this was about the time when Pinto got fired from Disney. According to his book, Pinto went through what do they call it? Nervous breakdown at the time. There are intimations elsewhere that his nervous breakdown took the form of alcoholism. We may never get to the bottom of that, but he was fired and took Disney pictures with him and used them to promote his radio career. Used them as radio headshots. He did the lettering on these pictures with his credits. And then between his firing, or after he was fired, Snow White was released and Pinto took out this ad in a trade magazine, which is more than a little bitter about his separation from Disney. The text says, congratulations to my former associates at the Disney Studios. The animators who so skillfully and faithfully interpreted my characterizations through the doors, and it brings us back to where we began as goofy, doing the goofy voice and touring as goofy.