Introduction: Pinto Colvig—The Early Years

by Todd James Pierce

He was born Vance DeBar Colvig, but because of his freckles he earned the nickname “Pinto”, meaning spotted. It was a name he would later use as a performer, a name that better expressed his carefree sense of humor, his unconventional lifestyle, his ambitions as a cartoonist. Once, in a letter to a friend, he described his early life as being filled with “wild and checkered” experiences. He was a hobo, a circus clown, a vaudeville performer, a boy who—like Walt Disney—never graduated from high school, yet left an enduring mark on the world of animation. He was the youngest of seven children and, even as a boy, yearned for attention. In this way, Pinto was indeed spotted inside and out.

As an adult, he operated his own animation studio; he was one of the original Keystone Cops; he was a gag writer and actor for early Mack Sennett films, such as those starring Harold Lloyd; he worked with Walter Lantz on early sound cartoons, but his most enduring legacy involves his work for Disney. Pinto joined the Disney studio in 1930, back when it was a small collection of buildings on Hyperion Avenue. There, he worked as a storyman, a gagman, a lyricist, and a voice artist. He provided the original voice of Goofy and invented the various woofs that would form Pluto’s canine language. He voiced two, maybe three Dwarfs in Snow White: he provided voices for Grumpy and Sleepy as well as hiccups for Dopey, the dwarf who didn’t speak. He gruffed out the voice for one of the three little pigs (Practical Pig) and corned up the grasshopper in The Grasshopper and the Ants. From 1935 until 1937, he worked under an exclusive contract for Disney and only separated from the studio because he believed he could earn more money elsewhere. Unlike animators and background painters, Pinto’s work wasn’t exclusively tied to animation. He could create voices and sound effects for radio; he could develop scripts; he could compose songs. He was a man of many talents.

After leaving his exclusive contract, he worked for the Fleischer animation studio, Paramount, and also created the character of Bozo the Clown for Capitol Records. But from 1941 until the end of his life, he returned to Disney on a project-by-project basis, primarily to voice Goofy and to help promote films. His last recording session for Disney was finished on June 2, 1967, for an episode of The Wonderful World of Disney called “How the West was Lost”.

Four months later he died.

This memoir, It’s a Crazy Business, was written in the early 1940s, while Pinto’s youthful experience at Disney’s and other studios was still fresh in his mind. The 1940s brought a type of early fame to Pinto. While he worked for the Fleischer animation studio, the Miami Herald featured a two-page, eight-photo spread of him mugging various comic emotions for the camera. He was profiled in Radio Life, Coronet, and American Magazine. He appeared in Talk of the Town. For weeks, in 1944, to promote a re-release of Snow White, he toured the country with Adriana Caselotti, the voice of Snow White. Together they played large theaters, school auditoriums, and army camps to support the troops, where thousands crowded in to see them. Through these articles and appearances, Pinto came to understand the public’s interest in the Disney studio, in animation, even in himself.

Pinto’s memoir is mostly concerned with his early career in Hollywood, from the Mack Sennett silent, black-and-white comedies to Disney’s first feature-length cartoon, as movies transformed themselves, adding length, color, and sound. But Pinto’s life didn’t simply encapsulate the early transformation of Hollywood. His life story illustrates the revolution of American entertainment in the twentieth century, from neighborhood bands and corner vaudeville theaters to international triumphs of cinema. In a way, the lens of Pinto’s memoir isn’t quite wide enough. It only captures part of this great American picture. To understand the rest of it—how one man could be cartoonist, animator, voice actor, gagman, lyricist, sound effects man, and radio personality, you first need to know a few things about Pinto’s early years, that strange soup of boyhood experiences that eventually formed the man who gave his voice to the cartoons, who watched Hollywood grow up and fill theaters around the world with films he helped create.

Jacksonville, Oregon, a gold-rush town, surrounded by open hills wooded with sugar pine, laurel and oak. It was filled with pioneers and their children, such as the Colvigs, a town with a playhouse, a single row of shops, a blacksmith, a gristmill, and a few restaurants. It was also the town where, in 1892, Pinto was born. He grew up in a musical family and as such learned to play the clarinet at a young age. On holidays, he marched with the town’s Silver Cornet band. In the evenings, sometimes, he would sneak down to the local bar—a place his mother called Al’s “Den of Iniquity”—as Al owned the only phonograph in town. Out back, behind the joint, Pinto would listen to the scratch and hiss of those early records, “Won’t You Come Home, Bill Baily” and “Said the Saucy Little Bird on Nellie’s Hat”, then he’d rush home to write down the lyrics before he forgot them.

Music formed the culture of Pinto’s early life, a culture that he carried to school and also to the playhouse in town. But unlike the other young musicians, Pinto learned that he could make people laugh with music, squeaking out notes with comic precision and forcing his gaze cross-eyed. Often he punctuated his performance with a humorous expression of surprise. He was a vaudeville musician, already understanding comedy touched his soul more deeply than music. About this, Pinto would later comment: “I guess I was just meant to be a clown.”

About once a year a circus came to Medford, just down the road from Pinto’s hometown. “Us kids would collect ‘gunny sacks’ and beer bottles and whisky flasks for weeks to get enough money to go,” Pinto remembers. After each trip to the big top, he thought about the circus for weeks. In particular, he was fascinated with the clowns and other types of performers, much to the irritation of his father, a local attorney who’d earned the nickname “The Judge”. He often talked about becoming a clown, and at the age of twelve, he literally got the chance.

His big break came in 1905 when his father took him to Portland to visit the Lewis & Clark Centennial Expo. The Expo featured pavilions from twenty-one countries and sixteen states, as well as blimp rides, free motion picture exhibitions (a novelty in 1905), and amusement park fare. But Pinto was enchanted with one exhibit on the midway, the Temple of Mirth, which he knew by its nickname, the Crazy House. It was described in one newspaper as “the funniest thing you ever saw…[with curved mirrors that present a person’s reflection] in a thousand distorted views.” Outside the Crazy House was a carnival barker dressed as a clown, beating a drum and huckstering people over with his comic sales talk. “Portland used to have a well-known clown back in those days. His name was Habba Habba and he had a ring in his nose like a cannibal.” After taking a look at the entertainment, Pinto thought he might find a place for himself inside this beautiful ruckus. “I went up to him and said I had a clarinet and when I hit the high notes I couldn’t help looking cross-eyed.”

“OK,” Habba Habba told him. “Come back tomorrow.”

But Pinto, eager to join the midway, collected his clarinet from his father’s hotel room and returned that same day, where he squawked out a few funny notes. After considering Pinto’s performance, a smile appeared on Habba Habba’s face.

“The next day the guy put the clown white on me for the first time. Then he made me put on an old derby, and some big old clothes.” With this, Pinto was transformed into a twelve-year-old tramp-clown. The barker gave his approval and out on the midway he went.

For days, Pinto had the run of the place: rides, exhibits, and even the girlie shows. Because he was good with the pen, he became friends with the man who ran the Egypt pavilion, where he was asked to help with the man’s love letters to one of the dancers because he couldn’t read or write. “I still remember her name,” Pinto told a reporter years later, “Corina. I used to add a little to the letters I read him.”

For each letter he wrote, the man paid Pinto a handful of cigarettes and a few complimentary camel rides.

“Then she’d write letters back, and he’d call [to me], ‘Hey, keed, I got a letter from Corina. You read.’ Then I’d get more cigarettes and camel rides.”

But for Pinto, the carnival events didn’t remain in Portland. Back home in Jacksonville—most likely after his big adventure with the Expo—he started his own backyard all-kid circus. “At one time we had a willow whistle band with Pinto Colvig as conductor,” his childhood friend George Wendt recalled. “[Also] trained dogs, trapeze, snake man, magician…As I remember, the admission was two sticks of gum or 10 marbles.”

When Pinto was thirteen his family moved from rural Jacksonville to the nearby railway town of Medford, where brass bands and circuses continued to perform a few times each year. For the bands, Pinto volunteered to carry banners or hold music as they performed through town, and he never missed a circus performance, especially as they rekindled his memories of working alongside a clown barker in Portland. At school, he was drawn to art, particularly the type of cartooning that appeared in papers. He learned what he could in Medford, and he studied the funny pages, believing he might teach himself how to draw. “I thought it would be mighty nice to find myself on the twenty-fifth floor of The New York Times Building wearing an artist’s purple smock.”

School, however, was never Pinto’s strong suit. He attended elementary school and, up through the age of 15, attended junior high as well. According to local records, he appears to have finished the eighth grade, though did not pass his exit exams. He took them once, on May 14, 1908, receiving high scores in Writing and Reading but low scores in Civil Government and Grammar. He signed up to re-take the exams on June 11, but apparently never did.

Two years later, at the age of seventeen, he joined his brother in Portland, where he focused on cartooning. He entered contests and even won a weekly prize given out by Judge magazine. He hoped to formally pursue drawing in the fall with a class taught by political cartoonist Homer Davenport. But his father, the Judge, looked down on many of Pinto’s antics. “My future,” Pinto once explained, “was a serious matter with Dad. He wanted me to become a great lawyer or a great baseball player.” But after long discussions, Pinto agreed to come home from Portland, put off his interest in cartooning, and take an evening job at the Medford train depot. He would soon turn eighteen years old, and he bristled at the prospect of dull, adult responsibility.

One of his jobs was to check every car on the sidetracks and enter it into a log. But this type of tedious work simply couldn’t hold Pinto’s interest. “One evening, with time to waste,” he once told a reporter, “I made the entry by drawing a picture of the [train] car, putting a hobo on top of it with a brakeman kicking him off.” A week later, his boss complained, telling Pinto that he “was working for a railroad, not a comic supplement in a newspaper” then pointing out that he should know the difference.

Pinto objected to the way the man talked about his drawing. Likely using this moment to leave a dull job, Pinto ended the disagreement by simply quitting.

After the depot, Pinto briefly took a job with York’s concert band—a traveling outfit that soon folded, leaving him broke once again, riding with an impoverished freedom as “the tramp cartoonist” on top of boxcars. From there he traveled to Corvallis, Oregon, where his brother and some of his childhood friends were attending Oregon Agricultural College (now Oregon State University). Pinto’s plans didn’t necessarily include college, though this, of course, was what his father wanted. As he would later explain: “[I] landed in Corvallis October 10, 1910 (10-10-10), where I met a lot of my hometown Medford guys. I was on my way to San Francisco to join a band en route to Australia; but when Cap’ Beard learned that I played E-flat clarinet, he encouraged me to sign up for a course in [the] art department so I could play in the band… OAC had a good band in those days. About 60 pieces. No girls! No slick chick drum majorettes! Dammit! But we had fun—especially on tours to Roseburg Strawberry Festival each spring. On weekends (weather permitting) I’d get the urge and take off on hobo trips; returning Monday a.m. in time for first period.”

As he did not have a high school education, he was admitted to OAC as a “special student”. To friends, later in life, he would make many jokes about college. To some, he claimed that in college he primarily learned to roll his own cigarettes and row a canoe. For his college alumni magazine, he joked that he “majored in campustry and canoe-ology!” But clearly Pinto loved some of his studies at college. He enjoyed ancient history taught by “dear old ‘Jackie’ Horner”, a man Pinto would later describe as “an interesting and likable character”, even though Pinto knew so little that for one exam he simply drew “cartoons of famous old Greeks and Romans”. He loved band. He also loved art, especially as the college allowed him to pursue his interest in cartooning.

In college, Pinto studied drawing and illustration and worked toward becoming a commercial cartoonist. Outside of his classes, he developed skills as a caricaturist and even put together his own “chalk-talk routine”. In the early part of the twentieth century, a chalk-talk routine was a vaudeville act where an artist created drawings for his audience while delivering jokes or laying down a funny story. For this act—likely first delivered on the OAC campus sometime in the autumn of 1912—he billed himself as “Pinto, the Nightmare of Caricature”.

According to the campus paper, Pinto created quick and amazing drawings using nothing more than “mustache blacking and graphite—so he said”. For fifteen or twenty minutes, he captivated the audience by producing humorous drawings of professors and students. The high point of his act was the magical, changing drawing. He would draw one object—such as a wine glass—and then with “a half-dozen strokes made this [wine glass into] a long-nosed greenhorn, new to Oregon, who was sucking cider through a straw. Colvig is a hummer,” the college paper concluded, “with real ability, and his stunt will prove tremendously popular anywhere.”

That December, over Christmas recess, Pinto toured Oregon with the college band, and the musical director allowed him to perform his “nightmare” caricature routine as part of the show. In Medford, the paper explained that his routine kept the audience in “an uproar for 15 minutes”. A little farther south, in Ashland, the paper confirmed that “he is certainly gifted, both as a cartoonist and as a comedian”. The personal lesson for Pinto, however, was larger: he was learning that his humorous, artistic abilities might have value out in the real world.

He was in college for three years, more or less, before wanderlust struck him again in a big way. College was, by far, the longest of his youthful endeavors, with the shadow of his father most likely looming large over his studies. When he first arrived at OAC, he audited a drawing class to learn basic skills as he had little formal training in art. The following term, he took a drawing class for a grade and received a “C”. For a while his college career went reasonably well. But in the academic year 1912‒1913, he signed up for 12 credits and didn’t finish any of them.

Though he would return to college at least once (as his departure date according to an alumni publication was 1915), he again found his freedom in travel and performance: he went north and delivered his “nightmare” chalk-talk routine to vaudeville audiences on the Pantages circuit. For his act, he billed himself as “the human leopard, wandering minstrel and society tramp”. In ways, this was the perfect act for the young Pinto, an act that would confirm his ability as a humorous artist, one who could also lay down a funny story. His path from college to cartooning might’ve been more direct, except while in Seattle the fanciful notes of a calliope brought him back to the circus once more. After arranging a job in a traveling circus band, Pinto traded in his vaudeville rags for the white gloves and baggy overalls of a clown. He was officially a member of the Al G. Barnes Big 4-Ring Wild Animal Circus.

Later in life, Colvig would present this escapade as “running away with the circus” which wasn’t entirely true. He may have been running away from responsibility or running away from the work-a-day life of an average Joe, maybe even running from the endless exams in college. But he was too old to truly run away with the circus. He simply changed jobs, from one type of performer to another.

The circus tour lasted for three months, covering the upper Midwest and also Canada. When the tour finished, he returned to vaudeville, where he now billed himself as “The Eccentric Cartoonist”.

During his final year (or years) of college, Pinto enjoyed a double life, spending part of the year in Corvallis to complete his education in art (probably to satisfy his parents) and part of it on the road. “Come early springtime,” he later wrote, “elephants and Call-of-the-Calliope would lure me back to the circus, where I clowned, played Big Top and often pinch-hit as ‘barker’ when our big show announcer showed up too stewed to spiel!”

The following summer, after touring the country, Pinto returned home, where he found his father reluctantly proud of him “in spite of the original way which the latter chose to obtain an education”. For a local paper, his father would explain that Pinto “learned more from a circus than he did from college”. That same summer, Pinto received his first full-time job offer as a cartoonist, working for a newspaper in Nevada, the Rockroller. The job only lasted a few months as the paper folded when the publisher took ill. From there, two more summer tours with the circus. And from there, after marriage (to Margaret Slavin of Portland), he made his way to California, where he found work with the Animated Cartoon Film Corporation of San Francisco. Though the Animated Cartoon Film Corp mostly produced ads, this was Pinto’s entry into the movies, the moment, more or less, that begins his memoir.

Pinto’s story is a large one, how a tramp-illustrator-lyricist-clown would help create cartoon characters that would endure far beyond his life. The memoir features Pinto, dozens of animators and directors, and celebrities that would shape popular culture in the early decades of the twentieth century, celebrities such as Jack Benny, Charlie Chaplin, Leopold Stokowski, and of course Walt Disney. Without further delay, then, in Pinto’s own rustic tones, are the years that changed his life and lifted Hollywood from silent one- and two-reel curiosities to classic films that are still screened around the world.

Note: The introduction is annotated with copious footnotes which don't appear here, but do appear in the book.