Biography | Raymond Watson — The Burbank Lot That Put a Ranch Planner on Disney's Board

People assume Disney directors come from the lot.

Raymond Watson came from a ranch plan.

In the mid-1960s Walt Disney asked the Irvine Company's chief planner to come to this studio and talk through an early version of EPCOT, then still imagined as a working city rather than a park.

Watson later said Disney wanted help thinking about what an experimental community should look like.

The conversation did not make him an employee. It put his name in the company's orbit.

In 1974 Walt Disney Productions invited him onto the board. Shirley Temple Black joined at the same time. He was one of the few outside directors.

D23, Variety, and The Hollywood Reporter all date the appointment to 1974. A 1983 New York Times note said he had then been a director for ten years, which can be read as 1973. The company's own memorial uses 1974.

The lot at 500 South Buena Vista Street was already the corporate headquarters. Board meetings happened here, not on the ranch.

From this table Watson watched Walt Disney World expand, River Country open in 1976, and EPCOT Center open on 1 October 1982 — a private land project on a scale that looked, to a planner, like another new town.

He was not yet chairman. Card Walker still held that title.

The ranch work had taught Watson how to hold a long plan when owners and markets changed. Disney was about to need that habit.

Photo: Junkyardsparkle, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons