People of Disneyland

Disneyland was built by a few hundred people whose names most guests never learn. Some of those names are hiding in plain sight. Look up from the sidewalk on Main Street, U.S.A., and the second-story windows advertise dentists, detectives, sign painters and singing teachers. The businesses are make-believe. The people are real.

Each window is a credit, the way the end of a film is a list of credits. Former Imagineering head Marty Sklar set the rules: a window goes up "only on retirement," and only for the highest level of service and achievement. Park management and Imagineering must agree on the design and the words (Wikipedia: List of Disney Main Street window honors). The joke in each window usually points to the person's real work, or to a hobby the person loved.

This chapter begins with three people who shaped the park, only one of whom has a window, then lists everyone who does.

Ward Kimball

Ward described shaking a locomotive engineer's hand as "the biggest thrill of life." (Walt Disney Family Museum)

Ward Kimball was born in Minneapolis on March 4, 1914, and came to the Disney studio in 1934. He stayed until 1972 and worked on most of the studio's animated features. He drew Jiminy Cricket in Pinocchio, Tweedledee and Tweedledum in Alice in Wonderland and Lucifer the cat in Cinderella. He directed two Academy Award–winning shorts, Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom and It's Tough to Be a Bird. On weekends he played trombone and led the Firehouse Five Plus Two, a Dixieland band made up of studio employees (D23: Ward Kimball).

His other passion was steam. In 1938 Ward and his wife, Betty, bought an 1881 Baldwin locomotive, the Emma Nevada, and laid about 500 feet of track behind their house in San Gabriel. They called it the Grizzly Flats Railroad. On October 20, 1945, Walt Disney came to a steam-up party there and took the throttle of the Emma Nevada himself. In 1948 the two men rode the train together to the Chicago Railroad Fair, which Ward later called "the last dying gasp of the railroads" (Walt Disney Family Museum). The trip led straight to Walt's first written plan for a park (see The Dream).

Ward was also Walt's guide to the future. In the 1950s he produced and directed three hour-long space films for the Disneyland television series. The first, Man in Space, received a command performance for President Eisenhower (D23). Those films helped Walt imagine Tomorrowland (Walt Disney Family Museum).

When the Disneyland Railroad was being built, Ward questioned whether it was safe to have passengers stand in open cattle cars. Walt kept the cattle cars anyway (see The Trains). In the early 1990s the Kimballs gave their own locomotives to the Orange Empire Railway Museum in Perris, California. Ward died on July 8, 2002, at 88. Three years later, on June 25, 2005, a restored 1902 Baldwin entered service on the Disneyland Railroad as engine No. 5, the Ward Kimball, the first engine in the park named for an artist instead of a railroad man. A gold-leaf Jiminy Cricket rides on it (Steam Giants). He was named a Disney Legend in 1989.

Emile Kuri

"The artist's work should be the focal point, not the frame." — Emile Kuri, in a 1965 Disney newsletter (Jim Hill Media)

Emile Kuri was born in Cuernavaca, Mexico, on June 11, 1907 (Wikipedia). He became one of Hollywood's busiest set decorators, the person who chooses every lamp, chair and curtain in a scene. He worked on Spellbound for Alfred Hitchcock and won an Academy Award for The Heiress in 1949. Over his career he earned eight Oscar nominations and two wins (Jim Hill Media).

Walt hired him in 1952 as the studio's head decorator. His second Oscar came for 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. He went on to dress The Absent-Minded Professor, Mary Poppins and Bedknobs and Broomsticks, and he decorated settings at Disneyland and Walt Disney World (D23: Emile Kuri).

At Disneyland his work is everywhere and easy to miss. He bought old gas lamp posts in Baltimore for Main Street in 1955. He furnished Walt's apartment above the fire station, the lower deck of the Sailing Ship Columbia, the Plaza Inn and Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln. He turned a salvaged street light into the base of the Town Square flagpole. Jim Hill Media reports that the pipe organ he worked on for 20,000 Leagues ended up in the Haunted Mansion (Jim Hill Media). He also designed the rooms of Club 33 (D23) and, with Lillian Disney, the family apartment above Pirates of the Caribbean (MiceChat).

Of the Plaza Inn he said: "everything that Walt has anything to do with" was done to perfection (Jim Hill Media). He died in Los Angeles on October 10, 2000, at 93. He is the one person in this opening trio with a Main Street window: above the Market House, it reads simply "Emile Kuri – Interior Decorator."

Mary Blair

Mary Browne Robinson was born in McAlester, Oklahoma, on October 21, 1911. She won a scholarship to the Chouinard School of Art in Los Angeles, where she met the painter Lee Blair. They married in 1934 (Britannica).

She joined Disney in 1940. In 1941 she joined a government-sponsored tour of Latin America, and her watercolors from the trip shaped Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros. Her bold, flat color then set the look of Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan. She left the studio in 1953 and worked as a freelance illustrator, including children's books for Little Golden Books (Britannica).

Walt brought her back for the 1964 New York World's Fair. When early designs for a boat ride about the children of the world disappointed him, he gave the look to Mary Blair. Her style, built from folk art, cut paper and cellophane, became "it's a small world," which moved to Disneyland on May 28, 1966 (see Fantasyland).

For the New Tomorrowland of 1967 she designed a pair of huge tile murals of children, together called "The Spirit of Creative Energies Among Children." The south mural, on the Adventure Thru Inner Space building, was covered for Star Tours. Much of it was destroyed in the work. The north mural, on the Circle-Vision building, was walled over for the 1998 New Tomorrowland and survives mostly hidden behind it (Yesterland). Sources differ by a year on when each was covered: Yesterland says 1986 and 1997, AllEars says 1987 and 1998 (AllEars).

She also made a ceramic mural for Walt Disney World's Contemporary Resort hotel, which opened in 1971. She died in Soquel, California, on July 26, 1978, and was named a Disney Legend in 1991 (Britannica).

The names on the windows

There are more than ninety names on the Main Street windows. The table lists them alphabetically, with the window's words and who each person was.

How to read the table. Window wording is quoted as transcribed in Wikipedia's list of window honors, except where a newer source gives it. Locations come from MiceChat's walking survey of 2023 (part one, part two) where it covers the window, and otherwise from Wikipedia. The two sometimes disagree on which building a window sits above, because shops on Main Street are renamed often. The short biographies draw on MiceChat, Daveland and MousePlanet. A "Disney Legend" is someone inducted into the company's hall of fame.

The newest windows

• Make-A-Wish (April 2023). Three windows at the First Aid and Baby Care Center, the first in the park for a charity. The center window honors every wish child. The side windows honor Chris Greicius, whose wish led to the founding of Make-A-Wish, and Frank "Bopsy" Salazar, who received its first official wish in 1981 (MiceChat).
• Lillian Disney (July 13, 2025). Unveiled on what would have been Walt and Lillian's 100th wedding anniversary. It reads "Lilly's Bountiful Blooms / Flowers and Fancies / Lillian Bounds Disney / Inspiring Worlds of Color and Happiness," a nod to her love of gardens (Walt Disney Family Museum).
• Kim Irvine and Leota Toombs (April 2026). A mother and daughter on one window, a "Crystal Ball Glass Co." above Crystal Arts. Leota Toombs was the face of Madame Leota in the Haunted Mansion; Kim Irvine spent decades as the Imagineer who kept Disneyland looking its best (Theme Park Shark).
• Bob Iger (August 16, 2026). The former Disney chief executive, credited as "Chief Architect" of "New Century Builders," in an Emporium window overlooking Town Square (DAPS Magic).

Every name, A to Z

Windows beyond Main Street

A few honors sit in other lands. A window over the Crockett & Russel Hat Co. in Frontierland honors Fess Parker, television's Davy Crockett. Nearby, "Texas Glenn's Honey Bee Farm" honors Glenn Hicks, a ride operator on the old Mine Train. In Adventureland, a window above the Bazaar offers "Oriental Tattooing by Prof. Harper Goff," for the art director who laid out the Jungle Cruise (Wikipedia; Daveland).

Fun facts: the windows

1. The windows only go up after a person retires, which is why some famous names arrived decades after their work was done (Wikipedia).
2. Walt Disney did not get a Main Street window of his own until the park's 50th anniversary in 2005 (MiceChat).
3. Elias Disney's window is one of the few for someone who neither built nor ran the park. It reads "Elias Disney – Contractor – Est. 1895."
4. Rolly Crump's window misspells "bizarre" as "Bazaar" on purpose, after the Adventureland shop he designed (MiceChat).
5. Three doctors on Main Street are drug-company men. The Upjohn company ran the park's first pharmacy, and their windows dub its people "MD" (Daveland).
6. Wade Rubottom, who designed Main Street itself, had been an art director on The Wizard of Oz (MiceChat).
7. Ron Dominguez's window, "Orange Grove Property Mgt.," is a family joke: he grew up on the land where the park now stands (MousePlanet).
8. The oldest story on the street belongs to "Doc" Sherwood of Marceline, who paid a boy named Walt to draw his horse (MiceChat).
9. The Make-A-Wish windows of 2023 were the first in the park for an organization instead of a person (MiceChat).
10. Kim Irvine shares her window with her mother, Leota Toombs, whose face still floats in the Haunted Mansion's crystal ball. Kim's great-grandfather, Dr. Alexander Irvine, has a window a few doors away (Theme Park Shark; MiceChat).