Floyd 'n' Gary

Saturday night, the Comic Art Professional Society honored Floyd Norman and Gary Owens. Floyd is a great talent from the world of animation who started his career in comics. He assisted artist Bill Woggon with the Katy Keene comic books. About half past Sleeping Beauty, he was hired by the Walt Disney studio, thereby becoming the first black man hired in a true creative capacity. He worked on all the Disney features up through The Jungle Book (the last one Walt himself supervised), then soon departed for other venues. He and several partners had their own animation studio for a number of years, then he went back to work for others. I worked with him at Hanna-Barbera but he intermittently returned to Disney, working on their films and also their newspaper strips. He can pretty much do anything in cartooning and it was about time CAPS honored him as they did. (If you'd like to know more about Floyd and learn a helluva lot about animation history, check out his blog, which I believe has moved since the last time I sent you there.)

Gary Owens, of course, has been a fixture of broadcasting for decades. If you grew up in Los Angeles when I did, you grew up with his voice coming out of your radio. He was always one of those personalities who played records and disappointed you when he did because you'd rather have heard him. Animation fans know him as the voice of characters like Space Ghost and Roger Ramjet. Other TV watchers know him from Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In and hundreds of network promos and commercials. He is also, as I explained in my speech about him, one of the nicest human beings in his fields of endeavor.

I spoke about Gary. A buncha folks — Scott Shaw!, Jerry Beck, Bob Foster, Ken Mitchroney, me again, Floyd's longtime partner Leo Sullivan and Floyd's wife — spoke about Floyd. Adrienne (that's Floyd's wife) revealed that on their first date many years ago, he took her to a CAPS Banquet. The lovely Kayre Morrison favored us with a medley of Disney songs, accompanied at the keyboard by Gary Calvin. And the current CAPS President Pat McGreal and our evening's M.C. Bill Morrison kept things moving even when the servers of the putative dinner could not. Others present for the evening included June Foray, Bill Stout, Tim Burgard, Dean Yeagle, Tom Luth, Todd Kurosawa, Mike Kazaleh, Don Jurwich, Tone Rodriguez, David Folkman, Jim McQuarrie and Chad Frye. A good time, to coin a phrase, was had by all.