Sunday, December 07, 2008

Passings

Two deaths in today's paper jumped out at me when I read them.

Elizabeth "Libby" Meador died last month at age 94. Who was she? The widow of Josh Meador, head of the Disney effects department on a wide array of animated films. (Josh designed the ocean effects surrounding Monstro the whale in Pinocchio, the soap bubbles that reflected Cinderella's image in Cinderella, the special effects in the live-action Forbidden Planet, the volcanic eruptions of bubbling lava in Fantasia's "Rite of Spring," and on and on.)

Libby and Josh married young and spent two decades in La Crescenta, raising their son Philip and entertaining. Josh left the studio before he was fifty to pursue his passion for painting. Settling in Caspar on the northern California coast, he created seascapes that sell briskly to this day.

Josh died at age fifty-five, staring out at the Pacific ocean as he sat on his Caspar deck. Libby followed him in death forty-three years later, leaving her son Philip and daughter-in-law Hildur, multiple grandchildren and one great grand-child ...

The other passing? Miss Beverly Garland, star of screen, television guest shots and My Three Sons. We note her death here because she was also the owner-operator of the Beverly Garland Hotel, the longtime home of the TAG Christmas Party before we pulled up stakes and moved the festivities over to the Pickwick Center in Burbank.

May both ladies rest in well-earned peace.

1 comments:

Floyd Norman said...

I had no idea Josh was so young when he passed away. He was a great guy, and we learned so much from him while he was at Disney.

By the way, I saw his drawings of the "Id Monster" from "Forbidden Planet" on Josh's drawing board. He did the whole thing in pencil, you know. He was amazing both as an animator and a painter.

Site Meter