Spring/Summer 2012
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Patricia A. Disney (1935–2012)
Born Patricia Ann Dailey in New Orleans in 1935, she was raised from the age of six in the Toluca Lake district of Los Angeles, where one of her neighbors was her future husband Roy Disney, the only child of Roy O. Disney—Walt Disney’s brother and partner in building the Walt Disney Company. After a year at the University of Colorado in Boulder and subsequently working in advertising in New York, she returned to Los Angeles
and married her childhood friend Roy in 1955. They remained married for more than 50 years and together they had four children—Roy Patrick Disney, Susan Disney Lord, Abigail Disney and Timothy Disney—and 17 grandchildren. A passionate advocate of higher education, Patty served as a trustee of Occidental College in Los Angeles and a regent of St. Mary’s College in Moraga, California. She also was a member of the board of the Peregrine Fund, a foundation dedicated to preserving endangered birds of prey. Her chief philanthropic endeavors were donating $5 million to establish the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (redcat) in the Walt Disney Concert Hall complex in downtown Los Angeles, and $10 million to Providence Saint Joseph Medical Center in Burbank to launch the Roy and Patricia Disney Family Cancer Center.
“I met Patty when my wife Janet and I first came to CalArts,” recalled President Steven Lavine, “and immediately we were joined by our shared love of books. I saw Patty often through the years and always she was ready to laugh, to engage, to enter into the spirit of the occasion, and, on the side, to talk about what she was reading at the time. When I visited her during her long illness, she was that same woman, rising to take me out to see the garden in bloom. Full of life as Patty was, it is hard to believe that she is gone. What she and Roy made possible for the CalArts community, including redcat—which they characteristically named not after themselves but after Roy’s parents—will be a lasting legacy. We will miss her deeply.”
calarts archive
Patricia A. Disney, a great and beloved friend, passed away on February 7. Patty, together with her late husband Roy E. Disney, were involved with CalArts from the beginning, fulfilling a sustaining role through thick and thin. Given the centrality of their support over the years, Patty and Roy never asked the Institute to pursue any one conventional direction in the arts and instead stood as fierce defenders of CalArts’ continuing artistic and educational independence.