WDI FC: Did you assist in creation of concepts for attractions like the Flying Saucers, or was your position more that of a technical designer?

Bob Gurr: You can’t really subdivide the jobs like that. We can say today that…in the most recent decades…designs would go through concept, they’d go through preliminary estimating, preliminary engineering, they’d get into production engineering…all the different things that make a project last for a long time. In the early days of designing Disneyland, an idea would get started…generally, it was from Walt…and everybody would start to work on it, but there was no cut and dried point where somebody said, "OK, we’ve got a concept," "OK, we’re going to have meetings and then we’ll vote on it and then we’re going to have estimating, and then we’re going to have the President of the company come down and attack all the estimate numbers." None of that was ever visible to the designers at WED. Once an idea got started…I would have to say in my case, that the projects I was assigned to…with a very modest input on Walt’s part or art directors or something…I basically picked up my pencil and I put it on the paper and I started drawing the final design right from the get-go, without a lot of screwing around on concepts and meetings and proposals. I didn’t realize how easy and natural that was until later years when the Company began to…as it matured, design got very complicated. I also feel very lucky from the standpoint that my immediate boss—Roger Broggie, Sr.—totally left me alone. In other words, if I started on something that Walt wanted done, I just started drawing it and that was that. For some of the earlier vehicles I made all the drawings myself—I didn’t have any drafters to help. And then when it came to the Monorail, and the little Viewliner train in the preceding year—1957—I would have people help me draw some of it. Basically, I picked out what we were going to do, how we were going to do it, what parts we were going to buy, what it was going to look like—both from a styling standpoint and also from a mechanical standpoint. Roger was in charge of the machine shop to expedite getting things manufactured either in the shop or through outside suppliers. In the days of design and development, Walt would come in every couple of days to see what you’re doing. I don’t ever remember—at any time—Walt coming in to stop me at this or stop me at that or change this or change that. It was a case of "he wants it, I’m drawing it, he’s happy, we go all the way to the opening day and that’s that."

WDI FC: Could you tell us a little about the Flying Saucers and what eventually caused them to be removed?

Bob Gurr: What killed the Flying Saucers was that they were very difficult to get that system so it would work every hour of every day. It was primarily because the control system was before computers had been invented. We now know—looking backwards—that if there had been a way to monitor the air pressure in the underground plenums underneath the deck in such a manner that these great big damper valves that control the air flow and the localized pressure in each one of the plenum chambers…had that had computer sensor inputs to a processor and really high speed servo-operated damper valves, we probably could have made it work. But you’ve got to remember, that was back in the old days of analog equipment and air cylinders for control that were right out of air conditioning control equipment and buildings at that time. The concept was completely correct because the essence of how the saucer worked was very simple. Ed Morgan and Karl Bacon at Arrow Development came up with the idea that if you have a deck that has holes in it and has valves on it, and you have air pressure below it, and then you put a contained device on top of that that would contain the compressed air once the valve would allow that air to flow from the bottom of the deck up into the bottom of the vehicle…just enough to barely support the vehicle, with the rest of the air escaping outside the skirt of the vehicle. The trick then is how that valve opens and closes, and then how is that valve controlled by itself. It’s all mechanical…a very simple valve with a little silicon dash pot so it doesn’t close or open too fast. The valves were opened and closed by the vehicle passing over the individual ports. That whole thing was a wonderful idea, but it was subject to the vehicles—as they would pass over the ports—and the combination of vehicles on the deck and the different chambers underneath, you could have surges in the air pressure going back and forth in the plenum chambers. That was almost like little tiny sonic booms going back and forth and the valves would become slightly unstable and all of a sudden the saucers would start to dance and then all the valves—thousands of valves—all opened at once. All the air escapes out of the plenums while the blowers are going at full speed and the blower dampers suddenly go wide open. All of the debris in that area of the Park blew straight up and it made such a sonic boom that it almost was going to knock the windows out of the Wardrobe building next door. Everybody in the Park knew whenever the Saucers went down because you had this humongous "whoom!" that went off. It took like a whole hour to get it reset.

They never did get that control system ever figured out. It aggravated everybody, but it was one of the slickest, neatest, mystery rides because…you go down there for the first time to ride it, and you’ve got to ride it two or three times before you catch on to how it really works, then you’ve got to keep going back to the end of the line. I used to ride and re-ride that thing over and over again and when I got done riding I could really ride it well and I could bump the daylights out of all the other little kids on it. The ride was pretty short, and you had to be in the right position so that when the boom began to sweep you home, you were in a spot where you could ride the longest. You never wanted to get over where the boom was because the ride was over when the boom began to sweep you.

WDI FC: What’s the most recent Disney theme park attraction you’ve provided input into?

Bob Gurr: That would be Tokyo DisneySeas.

WDI FC: What kind of work did you do for that?

Bob Gurr: I’m still doing a little bit of work on it. The Little Mermaid theater has a large character in the show—the Ursula figure. The Ursula figure has a very, very large animated head—kind of like a puppetry head—done by Michael Currie’s company. That, in turn, is mounted on a big mechanical device called the "Ursula Mechanism" which I did the original concept for. It then got engineered and re-engineered over several years and at various parts of Disney. Then as time and money ran out, Disney placed this job with an outside fabricator in San Bernardino. The engineering still wasn’t finished, and some parts of it wouldn’t work, so I was called to come in and see what’s wrong with it and then help the company in San Bernardino re-engineer it to get it to where it would now work. I just got a call from the company yesterday reminding me that they are building all these other parts to do with this mechanism…and the parts they’re having difficulty with they’re about ready to start production on. I will get called to go back over and fine-tune the final part of the design. Even after all these years designing all kinds of stuff from scratch I still am asked to come in and help on all sorts of little bits and pieces. I’m 68 and it seems like Disneyland’s never going to let me go.

WDI FC: How fast have you been able to get an Omnibus to go?

Bob Gurr: Well, the first one was built in 1956. Before we took it down to Disneyland, we used it for several months around the Burbank area. It was a regular street vehicle, and I got a temporary moving permit so we could drive it around. We built it at the Studio and we had to put a muffler and a tailpipe on it so the first time we drove it out of the Studio I went up to my favorite muffler shop (where I used to get my Model A fixed when I was in high school) and thought nothing of just driving around on the street. At that time, they were also getting publicity of Disney vehicles with some of the car magazines. One of them was Watertrend Magazine who had an office on Hollywood Boulevard. I went down there with this bus one day and it was during a bus strike. I remember pulling up to a corner and this little old lady got on who remembered there was double-decker busses on Hollywood Boulevard back in the 30s. She thought that they brought them back because of the bus strike! I had an awful time getting her to get off…so that was my first passenger. It was on Hollywood Boulevard around Christmastime of 1956.

A day or so later I drove it down the Santa Ana Freeway. It was a standard International Harvester truck chassis—what we call a beer truck drop frame—that we built on our body on. We built it right there at the Studio. I drove it about as fast as all the rest of the traffic was going, so it would have been 65 or 70. The first one didn’t have a windshield. I remember it was a cold morning and very damp…when I got down to Disneyland I was frozen. I had water all over me from the cold dew and the fog…driving this thing down the freeway with no windshield and no window behind me. The next one we built in ’57 and we put a windshield on it. Then they retrofitted a windshield to the first one.

WDI FC: Will you build us an Omnibus?

Bob Gurr: [laughter]

WDI FC: Do you build GurrMobiles in your spare time?

Bob Gurr: Uh…yeah. Outside, in the side yard, see that yellow car out there? That’s a GurrMobile. That’s a motor home. I designed that in 1971. I lived in LA and I built that in my front yard over a period of about a year and a half. I bought a bare chassis with just the cab and designed the body and built the entire car—a whole body. I also put an interior in it. So that’s like…yeah, I go to work for WED, designing vehicles all day, and then I go home and on weekends I build my own car from scratch on my own front lawn. It’s a totally normal way to do things.

WDI FC: Tell us about some of the other projects you’ve been working on since you left WED.

Bob Gurr: After I retired from WED in 1981, I got invited to do a big, big variety of projects. So as I look back on the design of different projects, I say that all the Disneyland projects are the closest to my heart, because those were designed for Walt. I’d have to say that the most interesting projects by far are all the ones that I did outside of Disney. Each one of these projects was usually something that was sort of off-the-wall, had never been done before, was very risky and was with an entirely different set of clients.

One of those jobs was where Michael Jackson and his brothers and his sister came out to a factory where I was working at the time and wanted to know how animation is done. We showed him around and showed him everything for two hours and then he asked me a question. He said, "Can you design a lighting device for my upcoming victory tour for 1984?" I barely knew who Michael Jackson was—I knew he was famous because he had a hat on because he had just got his hair burned in a Pepsi-Cola commercial. I remember all the girls were going gaga over him. I said, "Yeah, Michael, why don’t you get up in front of the conference room here and dance a few bars and I’ll see if I can figure out what it is that you want." Within about 45 seconds we had a connection of "this big, this fast, doing this, doing that." I don’t know anything about rock and roll touring, but in a matter of a couple of days, we were hired to design the lighting device called the "Spiders," which was a very different type of machine. We did that whole job in 9 weeks and Michael was just tickled pink with it. In the meantime, I got to meet all these rock and roll artists for touring and traveling shows, not knowing that was the biggest piece of equipment ever built ever built for traveling rock and roll shows.

Working on the Michael Jackson job, we were invited to participate in the "flying saucers" for the Olympics in 1984 at the Los Angeles Coliseum. So now we got a chance to learn about overhead lighting devices and how helicopters work and how you design something in five weeks—start to finish—a total project. The machine had to work perfect the first time because it was a live show being transmitted over the entire world. That’s entirely different from building something for Disneyland where you can test and adjust it. Of course that led to all the other jobs—one referral after another…sinking ships in Las Vegas, designing King Kong—a 30-foot-tall animated figure, Spielberg calling and wanting me to help design the Tyrannosaurus Rex right up through people calling and wanting me to design an animated Godzilla. So there were always jobs that were totally different from Disney that I found really fascinating.

WDI FC: Now we have some questions about the Electric Runabouts. What were the four colors [of the Runabouts] and where are they now?

Bob Gurr: I picked out four colors—a combination of the seat upholstery, the body color, and the striping color—making them really nice, elegant colors. There was one that was kind of a very soft yellow, there was a dark maroon one, there was a dark green one and I think one was a blue one with a very pale yellow stripe. The green car—the last time I saw it—is sitting over at the Walt Disney office display. I’ve lost track of where the other cars went. That job was really a favorite job to do because Walt wanted a car to run around Disneyland in because when he walked and took people around the Park, he walked so fast he’d wear everybody out. Several years before I had designed a little car for him to run around the Studio in for exactly the same way in which we built a little car that didn’t cost anything (because there was no project job number for it). We went to the junkyard and bought an old Crosby for the main parts and we rigged up an Electric Car—real cute—and Walt used it. He liked that and said, "Now I want one for Disneyland." So we designed that car in 1960 with the idea that it looked like a curved-dash 1901 Oldsmobile, but have an electric battery in it, but be very faithful to a copy of an Oldsmobile. It had an all-aluminum body. We made a lot of our own castings for wheel spindles and the little chain cover in the back. The little tires were racing tires from Italian motorcycles. We made our own hub, and then the rims were Ikle Churchill motorcycle racing rims from Italy. The whole thing was made so that it was very authentic, but of real modern materials.

WDI FC: Is it true that Walt put VIPs in the Runabout with the color that was most appropriate to their native land?

Bob Gurr: Now that I’ve never heard. We had the four colors…see, a lot of times the Art Department has to choose colors, like John Hench always chooses colors for everything. In the case of vehicles, I always got to choose my colors and Walt let me do that.

WDI FC: When were you first given the task of designing the Monorail? Did Walt come in and say, "Design this"?

Bob Gurr: Walt had made a trip with Lilly to Europe in really late September 1958. He came back all excited and he had Roger Broggie and Admiral Joe Fowler go right back to Germany and talk to the Alweg Company—that was developing monorails at that time that Walt had just accidentally run across. Roger and Joe came back and they had a lot of photographs of the German trains and I remember that we had a meeting where Walt said, "OK, we want to do this Monorail and we’re going to work with this Alweg Company. But we’re going to do our train our way here in America. Bob, you’re going to do it." I remember he gave me these pictures and I thought, "Boy, that’s an ugly looking thing." The Germans can make the ugliest looking vehicles. This thing looked like a loaf of bread with a slot in the bottom sitting on a stick. It wasn’t graceful at all. Walt had assumed that since we would do our own train our own way that we’d worry later about how it was going to get built. The project started in an instant. In the first part of October this whole project just got launched. I immediately took everything I learned on the Viewliner train, which we built the year before—in other words, the technique of body shell structure and how with the moldings it might work, how the sideskins might work—and then I immediately had to get some technical information from the Alweg Company because I had never seen such a train in my life. I always thought that monorails would be the type that would hang from a beam rather than sit on it. This was totally new to me. In the matter of a week or two, I had to figure out how in the world does the side suspension work and how in the world is the steering going to work with the vehicle riding on a beamway. So I adapted some local parts that we could buy in Los Angeles that were used for oil tank trucks at that time—a device called a Smithway. I could see how to configure this whole thing but I knew there was a lot of engineering we had to do to do with sidearms and everything. We were just going to do it ourselves, which meant we didn’t have anybody other than a couple of drafters to help start drawing it. Anyway, the worst part of it was, "How in the world are we going to hide the beamway in the bottom of this body section that will hold passengers. I remember one morning I sat down in the kitchen of my house thinking, "What are we going to do? We have to hide the beamway." I thought the old Buck Rogers was really cool because it had these fins, kind of like these sled runners that came off the front end of the rocket. I thought, "That would hide the beam! It wouldn’t look like a slot—it’d be a slot, but it wouldn’t look like a slot." That drawing right behind you…that is the sketch, the one and only sketch that I made of the idea that, "Ooh, we could make this thing really slick-looking and be a lot better than what the Germans were doing." So, with that one sketch, we took that back over to the Animation Building and I remember Walt walked up to that picture and he just tapped on it and said, "Bob, can you build that?" I said, "Yeah." And that was it! Just a thirty-second meeting. Now we had to take those drawings that I’d done to date, with a draftsman helping me with some of the drawing, and Roger and I flew to Germany. This would have been in mid-November of 1958, just barely a month after it was started. We were now going to tell the Germans how we were going to engineer the train around their configuration. They were very upset that we were going to do this because they knew we weren’t engineers and knew we never knew anything about monorails. They had a guy in Hamburg who was going to build the bodies. He was all upset that he was going to lose the job. They already promised him that he gets to build it. He didn’t like our train because it was too modern. So somehow Roger Broggie and I left Germany with some kind of an agreement. They said they would send one of their engineers to help me and they’ll grit their teeth that we’re going to do it ourselves. And do it ourselves we did. By Thanksgiving of ’58, we were back in Germany and away we went. We started sourcing materials and figuring out the design and teaching myself calculations to do roll stability in monorails and started making production drawings and getting somebody to start to build it right there.

WDI FC: Tell us about the time the Monorail almost killed you and Walt.

Bob Gurr: Oh! The Monorail…it didn’t kill us. We had delivered the train down to Disneyland—the first one, the red train—and had it all hooked up. The electricians were hooking up the electrical leads to the motors and if you’re familiar with old streetcar equipment at that time, the motors are very big and they’re very powerful. They’re called a series-wound motor. It’s a type of motor that the way the electrical current goes into the motor…the faster it goes, the faster it’ll go. It’s a very strange phenomenon that I didn’t understand at the time. That’s why these motors have very very big shafts on them because you never want the shaft to ever break. What happened was I didn’t realize the motor could develop that much torque going through the rest of the drive train out to the wheels. I didn’t realize—and of course the electricians didn’t realize that they hooked up the motors backwards, so that a couple of the motors were going forwards and a couple of the motors were going backwards. That meant that when I pushed on the power pedal when we had selected the reverse direction to back it out onto the main line, all the current—600 volt current—went half the motors this way and half the motors that way, which meant the torque rose in an instant so high that it broke one of the axles immediately. As it broke the axle, the motor immediately starts to accelerate—and this all happens in maybe one second—and the motor goes to like literally an infinity speed, maybe in another two seconds. It sounded like a giant siren and I immediately pulled the main breaker, which was in the cab. I looked out, and the electricians had all jumped over the berm, because they knew that the motor was going to explode. Walt had walked up at the last minute, sat in the back end of the train because he wanted to be the first to ride out backwards, and the train traveled about an eighth of an inch with a loud "bang" and a siren sound. I looked out there and all he did was get out, looked at me, and he walked away. He never said a word. That’s the way Walt was. He wouldn’t come in like a Michael Eisner and chew you out, if it didn’t work, well, walk off and he’ll probably get it figured out. Then the electricians came back over the berm and they said, "Boy, you could have been killed! Don’t you know that when these motors blow up, the armature will be about a quarter of a mile away?" "No, I didn’t know that." The motor was sitting right behind me.

WDI FC: Would you have liked to have seen your designs for the Monorail used as transportation in large urban areas?

Bob Gurr: That’s another interesting question. My truthful opinion of monorails is that they are really not very good. The reason I’m saying that is I’ve designed four different generations of monorails and the reason we have monorails in America today in the Disney Parks is because Walt wanted it in the worst way and he accidentally ran across it in Germany. The company that was developing it in Germany probably would not have gone much past the late 1950s or early ’60s trying to develop this type of design because it has so many inefficiencies and limitations. Stop and think a minute: on one hand, people look at the Monorail either at Disneyland or at Walt Disney World and say, "That’s the future." The reason for that is Walt wanted this train…I thought the German train that he showed me a picture of was so ugly and the challenge was to make a good-looking train. Only I accidentally made a train so advanced-looking that the idea of this thing sitting up on a beamway gave the impression that this is the great big beautiful tomorrow of transportation and it is coming. It’s stolen right out of Buck Rogers rocket ship on a tall, thin beamway in the air. When you actually get to looking at a vehicle for transportation and stop and think how stupid a German saddleback monorail is, that within the total volume structure of the vehicle, you have to have all the structure of the vehicle which is cut out of the bottom (because it has to straddle the beamway). So in other words it’s an inefficient structure because it’s open. Then it has a lot of window space which means you can’t really build it like an airplane where you have a monocock structure that can be very efficient…you have this structure that has to be in all these places where there’s nothing for doors and windows and the bottom of the train. Inside this vehicle shape you also have to have the entire road suspension—not only wheels to support it, but wheels on the side to stabilize it—so you carry a lot more suspension weight and volume than you normally would have than if you had a road vehicle. At the same time, in that same volume you have to contain the entire roadway that it runs on. Most people don’t think of a monorail in that way…that this is a hopelessly inefficient mechanism to design. And the smaller it gets, like in a small scale for Disneyland, where the people sit down and you don’t have full standing room, this becomes even harder to do in a smaller and tighter structure. Nothing has changed about designing monorails. The bigger ones, like in Japan, that are based upon the Alweg design are structurally a little easier to do. Monorails also have a deficiency in that they can’t carry near as much weight as far and as fast on rubber tires as you can on steel rail. Another limitation is monorails don’t have the ability to have high-speed switches because you literally have a track where you can run off the end of the beam if the switch doesn’t work all the way. So you have a time loss of allowing a switch to totally switch—changing from one track to another. These are all limitations of a transportation system that have always been argued about when cities would look at a monorail. You can’t get away from plain, simple facts. Walt spent a lot of time showing off the Disneyland train to governments…visitors from all over the country…to say, "Here’s an example of modern transit." People would think it’s modern because it looks modern, but I’m the designer and I can tell you how inefficient it is. We literally did it because Walt said, "I want it."

WDI FC: Did you have any influence on the track design for the Monorail?

Bob Gurr: No. On the Disneyland Monorail, that type of beamway was established by the Alweg Company of Cologne, Germany. They had several sizes that they had built for testing. They helped us engineer a slightly smaller version of their full-size track for Disneyland. Then in Walt Disney World, we went back up to a full-size beamway for the bigger, longer and heavier cars. I didn’t influence that track in any way…that was a given, that was a size that they had already established from a construction standpoint would work.

WDI FC: Have you ever heard the Monorail Song?

Bob Gurr: There’s a Monorail Song? [Bob has since heard this and expressed his enjoyment of it]

WDI FC: Were any parts of the Monorail track laid out in such a way as to make the Monorail look neat? For instance, when it’s coming out over the Submarine Lagoon.

Bob Gurr: Bill Martin laid out all that part of the Park in 1958. You’d have to ask him. He did a marvelous job of intertwining the submarine path, the redo of the Autopia, and the Monorail all in that one area.

WDI FC: Did you get to choose the colors for the Monorail?

Bob Gurr: Yes. Same way as when I chose them for all the vehicles we’d been doing up to that point. I’d done it for the Autopias, Main Street Vehicles, the Viewliner and the Monorails. Primary vehicle colors…the first one you always do is red and the second one is always blue. Then we went with the third color and for the Mark II and it was yellow, and then the fourth train I let Bill Cottrell, who was Walt’s brother-in-law, pick that color. It was a Pontiac color that he and I called "Verdora Green." But yeah, I always get to pick the colors.

WDI FC: Where did you get the inspiration for the bubbletop?

Bob Gurr: If you look at the cartoons of Buck Rogers, which has the big wraparound windshield on the rocket ship nose, and it had round windows on the side…obviously, I wanted to put the driver up on the top and let the people sit in the front, because in one of the early conversations I had with Walt, he said, "Bobby, I don’t want to have any Guest look down the greasy neck of a motorman." In the early days of streetcars, drivers sat in the front. It was very logical that the driver was going to sit behind the Guests and sit up on the top. In those days, a lot of jet aircraft had bubble canopies, like the Boeing B-47. It was a very obvious step to build a bubble canopy, to put a bubble canopy on the top of Buck Rogers rocket ship. Totally natural.

WDI FC: Did you ever get to see the Mouse-o-rail when it was touring the country?

Bob Gurr: No. I didn’t see the Mouse-o-rail until it was scrapped out in the backyard [at Disneyland]. Somebody showed it to me a few years ago and it was kind of sad. All the upholstery was falling out and they gave me a little piece of it. They said, "Here, take it home."

WDI FC: How did you feel about them converting it into a bus?

Bob Gurr: I had no idea they had done that job until I was looking at the Rose Parade one morning during the pre-show. I jumped out of my skin! I said, "How’d the Monorail get up in Pasadena?" I never knew a thing about it.

WDI FC: We saw that you have one of the current Monorail toys. Did you ever have one of the Schuco trains?

Bob Gurr: Yes. I have a brand new, perfect condition one. I found that about ten years ago in Belgium.

WDI FC: Right after the Monorail was built, were you excited to learn that it was going to be extended to the Hotel?

Bob Gurr: There was no discussion that it was going to go over to the Hotel in the first two years at least. Sometime in 1960 the idea came up that there was going to be different business relations with Jack Wrather, the owner of the Hotel. Walt really wanted to do more about showcasing the Monorail, showing that it’s real transportation, and he could kill two birds with one stone and help his old buddy Jack Wrather out by running the train right out to his Hotel. It ran through the Parking Lot and down Harbor Boulevard so people could see that this is real transportation, and that was the big incentive to do that. It was a very expensive job because we had to build a lot of beamway. At the same time, we had enough trouble getting the train to work well, and we were always on a constant development program of working on propulsion systems, working on suspension particularly, to try to get all that to work. Then we wanted to increase the capacity by not only adding the better train, but by adding more cars. That meant that we had to change a lot of electrical equipment and rewire everything. So while the new beamway was being built, we took all the trains back to the Studio where we had built them originally, on one of the soundstages, and we did all the redesign and built fresh new cars to stretch out the existing trains and redid all the electrical. Then Walt, at that time, said, "Gee, the view up in the bubble is terrific, why don’t we make a bigger bubble so more people can sit in the top? That’s how the idea came about that we would go to a bigger bubble and put the driver sort of in the left rear position, which we then continued to do for the Mark III’s later on in ’68.

WDI FC: Did you ever think of naming the Monorail cars like the Viewliner ones had been?

Bob Gurr: No. The cars just got named on the Viewliner. It was a surprise one day that they had names. I just don’t have much recollection of whether there was any idea towards doing that on the trains because we always called them "Monorail Red," "Monorail Blue," "Monorail Gold." Never had names. Part of it was because you had to keep track of where trains were, and if they were numbered, you couldn’t tell which was which. You could only identify them by color. That became a problem when we got down to Walt Disney World because we had to have very distinct colors. We were going to have like six trains and we eventually wound up with 10 trains. Even during the dark at night or rainstorms or whatever, these colors had to be very distinct so you could tell which train was which and be able to identify it from a distance. So colors really ruled more than the idea of a name.

WDI FC: Would you care to explain this wonderful artifact for us?

Bob Gurr: In the rendering on the wall behind you, you’ll notice that at the end of the window panels you’ll see the curved shape of the window. This is an end panel from the right rear of car #1 on train #1, which was the red train. When the original trains were scrapped out, they gave me one of these panels. At that time, the train was sponsored by Santa Fe.

WDI FC: Do you have any other pieces from the original Mark I Monorail?

Bob Gurr: No, that’s the only…the guys in the shop were kind enough to save me a little piece. I do have a piece of the Mark III—the control knob that was used for the control lever. It had a little dead-man control on the top of it. I got a box of junk in the back and it’s got the control thing. It looks like a headless duck and the guys call it the "headless duck handle." In fact, I still have the clay model of it. I made this little switch for the dead-man, and then I put clay on it and just carried it around all afternoon until it fit my hand. Then I finished sculpting and said, "Well, there’s the control handle." That’s how that came about.

WDI FC: Are you a member of the Monorail Society?

Bob Gurr: Maybe I am and maybe I’m not. Kim Pederson always sends me stuff anytime there’s something new on his site. Do you have any credentials if you’re a member?

WDI FC: Uh, we’re not members so we don’t know.

Bob Gurr: I don’t know. Maybe you’re a member if you’re not credentialed. I’ve never gone to a meeting.

WDI FC: Are you planning to go to prison anytime soon?

Bob Gurr: I’ve done a lot of stuff that I should have been arrested for, but I’ve never been caught, and if I’m 68 and I got away with these things this far, I see no reason that I am ever going to go to prison at any time.

WDI FC: If you did go to prison, who would you use as your one phone call?

Bob Gurr: Probably Gloria Allred, because she’s the most arrogant lawyer on the face of the planet.

We would again like to thank Bob for inviting us to be guests at his home in Tujunga.