I recently found out that Paul Maher died in January of this year at the age of 62. I am not surprised. In fact, I'm surprised he made it that far.
I'd lost track of Paul over the years and the last time I saw him — it must have been eight years ago at least at Comic-Con — he was sick and barely able to walk. He was selling pieces from his vast collection of memorabilia to raise money for the next in a long series of operations…and I made two observations about him.
One was that no matter how bad things got for him — and they got pretty bad at times — he remained at least outwardly optimistic. The next operation would be the one that would not only save his life but put him back to some amount of good health again. Just as he'd been convinced that the operation before that would make everything right and the operation before that and the one before that…
The other noteworthy observation came when I tried to purchase a few things, partly because I wanted them but partly to help his cause. All his adult life, Paul was a maniacal collector. By that, I mean he had to have everything relating to his chosen mania, which was Children's Television, and he had to have multiple copies. I kept taking cash out of my wallet and Paul kept trying to give me the items for nothing because he knew they'd be going to someone who loved and appreciated them.
This is a man who, let's remember, was trying to raise money for an operation he believed would save his life. I had to force payment on him…and even then, he insisted on giving me discounts off the marked prices.
Paul Maher loved cartoons, kid shows, anything for kids. He had a special place of worship in his heart for folks like Sheriff John and Engineer Bill and other hosts of local kids' shows when he was growing up.
He would go anywhere and spend anything, including money he didn't have, to accrue such items, all in furtherance of his goal. That was to somewhere, someday have a Museum of Children's Television. It would be nice to think that had he not had to deal with the stark reality of a bad heart, that dream would be open and operating somewhere today.
Paul was for a time a professional mime and puppeteer. For a while there, he worked up at the Universal Studios Tour, playing Charlie Chaplin for tourists and posing with them for photos. Interesting story how he got the gig: He took the tour one time and noted that in the post-tour area where the patrons milled and saw exhibits, there was a guy staggering about dressed as the Frankenstein Monster. There was a woman dressed like Marilyn Monroe. There were other Hollywood icons but no Chaplin.
Having decided that would be his new career, at least for a while, Paul found his way to the fellow at Universal who could hire such a person and made his case. He was turned down.
"No" had an interesting definition to Paul Maher. It more or less meant, "Not now, you'll have to try harder." He went home, devised a Chaplin suit for himself and the next day, he reported for a job he did not have. This meant stuffing the Chaplin outfit in a satchel, going up to Universal and paying to ride the tour…and then after the tour, when he got to the post-tour area, he'd go to the men's room, change into Charlie and spend the rest of the day tramping about, performing and posing.
After a few weeks, someone at Universal noticed that their Chaplin impersonator was a big hit and decided to find out who'd had the bright idea to hire him. It turned out no one had. Security guards hauled him off to an office where he was interrogated, threatened with arrest…and ultimately hired.
A few years later, he turned up at Hanna-Barbera, which is where I met him. His bio (link somewhere below) says he was there six years but I recall it more like six months. With the same kind of perseverance that got him the Chaplin gig, he pestered Bill Hanna into creating a position for him: Librarian/Archivist. There are many stories about why he was let go but they pretty much came down to his becoming obsessed with rescuing Hanna-Barbera history from its warehouse and storage rooms. He took his mission way too far, overstepping his bounds and displeasing Mr. Hanna.
He had more longevity when he landed a similar position with Walter Lantz, the then-retired producer of Woody Woodpecker and other cartoons. Lantz had tons of material in storage and Paul organized and catalogued it all…and wound up owning crates of Woody Woodpecker toys and dolls and comic books, most of them autographed.
Every time he came across an artifact of Children's Television, he wanted it signed by everyone with even a tenuous connection to the show or characters depicted. When he found out I'd worked on Scooby Doo, he started bringing me boxes of Scooby Doo merchandise to sign. He'd hand me a Scooby doll and I'd say, "Paul, I had nothing to do with the design or manufacture of this doll." He'd say, "You wrote his comic book and TV show. Please sign it." He would call Daws Butler or June Foray or some other great of the animation or kidvid fields and ask if he could drop by and get "some things" signed. Paul was a hard guy to refuse even though when he did show up, he'd have hundreds of items for them to write on.
At one point, he told me he had over 3,000 Woody Woodpecker comic books — multiple copies of many — all autographed by Mr. Lantz. He also had thousands of similarly-autographed toys. If you were ever wondering what Walter Lantz did in his last years, there's your answer: He wrote his name on things for Paul Maher.
In 1980, I helped him organize a one day event — a Festival of Children's Television at the Bonaventure Hotel downtown. It was a benefit for the L.A. Children's Hospital — a day of films and talks and appearances by former kid show hosts and folks in animation. Paul did a great job with the P.R. and a great job rounding up guests and exhibits and it was an amazing gathering. Alas though, it didn't raise much money for the hospital and it didn't get enough attention to bring forth a backer for the museum he had in mind to build, which was more or less the reason Paul did it. More on that museum idea in a moment.
Then not long after that, he bought Walt Disney's garage.
According to Disney history, when Walt moved to Southern California in July of 1923, he lived with an uncle in a house at at 4406 Kingswell Avenue in the Los Feliz area. Walt's original idea was to find some way to break into the moving picture business and when he had no immediate success, he decided to make his own. In the rear of his uncle's home was a one-car garage and in it, he set up a small animation studio. It had to be small because the garage was very tiny. After a while, he moved the operation into a room in a real estate office a few blocks away.
One day in 1981, Paul Maher was looking at slides of historical landmarks and he saw a photo of the garage, which to him was "The first Walt Disney studio." Some would insist that Walt's first studio was back in Kansas, and the current Disney Studio more or less recognized the realty office as its founding location. Still, one could say that garage was Walt's first studio, at least in California.
Paul did not live far away so he went to the address and discovered that the house was being renovated and that the garage was slated for demolition. Instantly, he decided it had to be saved and he had to be the one to do it. He located the owner and offered to buy the garage and move it. The owner agreed to a selling price of $6400, which is what it would cost to build a new garage in its place some day…but Paul also had to agree to lease the house for several years. He didn't have that kind of money but he signed the deal anyway and moved in. The garage would remain at that address as long as he did.
For over a year, Paul tried to stay afloat in a house he couldn't afford as he tried to use the garage to attract someone or some group with money. His first choice was that they would finance his dream — a Museum of Children's Television with him as the curator, his collection as the core of the exhibits and Walt Disney's First Studio (arguably) as the star attraction. As his financial situation got more precarious, he began to focus on his second-choice dream: Selling the garage to someone who'd pay him a lot of money for it and put in on display somewhere appropriate.
That didn't happen, either. He called newspapers and sent out press releases and bombarded people at Disney and…well, there were no offers.
One day in the midst of this, I gave into Paul's urging and went over to see the place. He sat me down in this home he couldn't afford and told me more about the museum. In his mind, he was but months from breaking ground on it and all the stuff in that house — crates and crates of photos and comic books and coloring books and toys and records — would be on display there. Then he took me out back to show me the garage. It was small and very old and there was nothing about it to indicate that either Walter Elias Disney or even any animation equipment had ever been inside. Once we were, Paul said, "I'll leave you alone in here for a while" and he went back into the house.
I thought he was making a phone call or using the bathroom or something…but after twenty minutes, I went back in there and found him doing paperwork. "Done already?" he asked.
"What did you think I was doing out there?" I asked.
He looked at me like I'd asked a very stupid question and he answered, "Meditating." Then he explained that Disney artists and fans had been coming by and asking if they could just stand out in the garage — there was nothing on which to sit — and try to somehow get in touch with the spirit of Walt Disney or the greatness of the cartoons that had begun in that sacred building…or something.
I said, "It's an old garage."
I didn't mean that in a bad way. That's simply what it was: An old garage. It was perhaps a historically significant old garage but it was still an old garage. We went into the house, Paul showed me more of his latest acquisitions in the area of animation collectibles, and then I went home.
Soon after, he revved up his P.R. skills again to publicize an auction of the garage with a minimum bid of $10,000. He told me he expected to clear ten times that but he didn't. There were no bids at all. Soon after though, a group of Disney fans raised and offered $8500 and Paul took it, broke his lease on the house and moved out. At great expense, the garage was removed from its foundation and relocated to a storage facility while he and its purchasers looked for a suitable place to exhibit it.
I kept getting updates from him. One day, he phoned to report the garage was going to be in a special exhibit at Disneyland. Then he called me a week later to say it was going to be on the Disney Studios lot somewhere near the Animation Building. Wherever it went, that would only be its temporary location. It would eventually stand in the Museum of Children's Television. The garage eventually wound up at the Stanley Ranch Museum in Garden Grove, which is operated by the Garden Grove Historical Society. As far as I know, it's still there, just a few miles from Disneyland.
Paul wound up working for a time as a caretaker or manager or in some capacity at the Wattles Mansion, which is a huge, preserved home in Hollywood that is the centerpiece of a park. It's a cultural monument used for film locations and private functions. At no point has it ever been turned into a Museum of Children's Television as Paul had hoped. At some point, he and his collection moved to Las Vegas.
In the nineties, he suffered an aortic aneurysm and began devoting his entire life to saving his entire life. He had a series of operations and treatments and that's when he began selling off items he'd earmarked for the dreamed-of museum. He died (like I said) earlier this year and his estate is still selling off remnants of that wonderful collection.
You can read more about Paul Maher at this site. I really liked the guy. Even people who thought he was pushy when he expected them to autograph hundreds of comic books and toys liked Paul…for the most part.
His heart, faulty though it was, was always in the right place even if his enthusiasm never quite found its proper location. It was so sad to see him devote so much time and energy and what little cash he ever had to further a dream that never materialized. It was even sadder to see him after his medical problems had made it difficult to walk and talk and he was getting by on sheer determination. Fortunately, he had a lot of it.
Oh — and an awful lot of Woody Woodpecker toys signed by Walter Lantz. I hope they found good homes. Paul would have been happy to know that.