Biography | Donn Tatum — The Quad Where the Class of 1934 Elected Him President

People assume a Disney chief arrives already inside the studio gates.

Donn Benjamin Tatum did not.

He was born in Los Angeles on 9 January 1913 and raised in the city.

By the spring of 1934 he was senior-class president on this Quad.

The Stanford Daily recorded him that April appointing the Class of 1934's permanent executive committee and the Senior Week committee.

The same paper, on 1 June 1934, listed him among the seniors preparing for commencement exercises on 9 June.

He left Stanford magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in political science and economics.

The Los Angeles Times repeated that degree and the honors in its 2 June 1993 obituary.

The Daily's files are the primary record for the class office.

Later summaries often slide the degree to 1935.

The campus paper puts him in the Class of 1934.

From here he went to Oxford for two degrees in jurisprudence.

D23, Disney's official archive, names those degrees as a bachelor's and a master's in jurisprudence.

He passed the California bar in 1938 and entered entertainment law at Lillick, Geary and McHose in Los Angeles.

Counsel work for RCA, NBC and ABC followed.

None of that is visible from Memorial Court.

What is visible is the sandstone arcade a political-science undergraduate walked through before he ever saw a studio lot.

The Quad was already the university's front door when Tatum held the class gavel.

Memorial Court still opens the Main Quad toward the Oval.

The visitor who stands here is not standing in a Disney building.

That is the point.

He later chaired the Stanford Club of Los Angeles and sat on the board of CalArts, the school Walt and Roy Disney helped found.

Variety's 1993 obituary listed those civic posts beside the Oxford degrees and the bar date.

The first non-family chairman of Walt Disney Productions learned how to run a room on a campus that had nothing to do with cartoons.

Photo: Olaf2, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons