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Mattinson had wanted to be an animator ever since his mother had taken him to see “Pinocchio” at a theatre, in San Francisco, when he was six years old. He soon developed a knack for art. “He would draw endlessly,” his son, Brett Mattinson, told me recently. “If he drew a bee, he would draw every single hair on that bee.” Burny’s father was a professional musician, and the family had moved to Los Angeles; auspiciously, they lived within striking distance of Disney Studios. In a bold move that can, perhaps, be attributed to the guilelessness of youth, Mattinson showed up at the studio gate with his portfolio as soon as he finished high school, in 1953. The magical part of this story is that, instead of shooing him away, the security guard liked his drawings and called the head of personnel to take a look. Thus, Mattinson became a messenger at Disney, beginning a career that would eventually make him the longest-tenured employee of the company (just shy of seventy years) and one of the last still at the company to have started there when Walt Disney himself was running it. As it happens, one of Mattinson’s tasks as a messenger was to go to Walt’s office every Friday and pick up a check, cash it at the studio cashier, and bring the money (three hundred dollars) back to Walt. (It was Walt’s weekend spending money.)
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