Now that was a wrap party

In June 1938, staffers at Walt Disney Productions were treated to a wrap party for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, six months after the movie's boffo opening. In those days, back before everyone in the studio could expect a bonus after a blockbuster was released, parties like this were the reward for hard work...

The Norconian Club was located in what's now called "The Inland Empire," not far from Palm Springs.

Right: Jack Dunham, Joe Rinaldi and Curt Perkins at the diving board.

There have been numerous tales about the Disney Lake Norconian party over the years. Ward Kimball described how it started relatively sedately, then turned into a drunken bacchanal, with Fred Moore falling out of a third floor window into a tree while relieving himself, and general carousing and mayhem.

And there was the story (perhaps apocryphal) of Walt, Roy and wives arriving at the celebration and then hurriedly departing when they saw all the rowdy debauchery.

Above: At 3 am, the party continues ... Willis Pyle (at the upper right, with his hands clasped) admitted he "really wasn't unhappy ..."

To our minds, these photographs don't show anything out of the ordinary (well, maybe Dunham, Rinaldi and Perkins on the diving board are a little bizarre -- particularly Rinaldi), but maybe unloosing a thousand twenty-somethings at a resort where the liquor flows freely is a recipe for, ahm, robust celebration. Certainly Disney never threw a party to rival it ever again. But then, the boys and girls of animation never had another record-breaker like "Snow White" during Walt's lifetime. The Norconian Club/resort in its heyday... and the place as it stands today; a boarded-up shell of its former glory.