Biography | Donn Tatum — The Burbank Lot Where a Lawyer Became Disney's First Non-Family President

Walt Disney Productions did not hand the presidency to a relative in 1968.

It handed the title to a lawyer who had been on this lot for twelve years.

Donn Tatum joined the company in 1956 as production business manager.

D23 records that Walt Disney recruited him for that job.

The Los Angeles Times adds the next rungs.

In 1964 he was elected to the board, named vice president and administrative assistant to Roy O. Disney, and placed on the three-member executive committee.

In 1968 the board elected him president and chief operating officer.

Roy remained chairman and chief executive.

Tatum became the first person outside the Disney family to hold the presidency.

The address was 500 South Buena Vista Street, Burbank.

The public face of that lot is still the studio gate.

After Walt died in December 1966, Roy stayed to finish the Florida project.

The succession plan Roy set in 1967, the Times wrote in 1993, already pointed at Tatum for the chair.

That plan matured only after Roy's death in December 1971.

Until then the work of the presidency was here: television sales, administration, and the unglamorous business of keeping a studio solvent while a second park rose in a Florida swamp.

Mineral King historians later noted that Tatum had also served as executive vice president of Disneyland, Inc., then returned to the Studio after 1960 as vice president of television sales and of administration.

The Burbank lot is therefore not a ceremonial pin.

It is where a broadcast lawyer learned the company from the inside before he was asked to run it.

Card Walker, who had been on the lot since 1938, would take the presidency when Tatum moved up.

The two men then ran Disney together through the 1970s.

The first non-family president of the company learned that job behind this gate.

Photo: Donn Tatum (left) and Roy O. Disney inspecting Florida land, circa 1963, Florida Memory / State Archives of Florida, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons