Believe it or not, back in 1947 Cecil Wells and his then-wife Ethel were charged with showing Walt Disney and his daughter Sharon (11) around Fairbanks. Disney was in Alaska for work and business, and there’s a picture of him and Cecil – it’s in the book of course – but I investigated this story in depth recently for Alaskan History Magazine, and it’s in the current issue. But you can read it for free below!

In the 1950s and 1960s, Walt Disney was a familiar presence on television screens across America, but unless you visited Disneyland or Disneyworld or attended a premiere of one of his movies, it was unlikely you’d ever see “Uncle Walt” in person.

For children – and adults – living in Alaska it surely seemed impossible, and there is only one documented case of Walt Disney visiting the territory, along with his 11-year-old daughter Sharon, in August 1947.

As reported in the Los Angeles Times of August 11, the trip was led by Russ Havenstrite, head of Arctic Circle Exploration Co., and the Iniskin Bay Association, an oil drilling development on the Kenai Peninsula. He was partners with Disney, producer Darryl F. Zanuck (The Grapes of Wrath, All About Eve), comedy producer Hal Roach (Laurel & Hardy’s The Music Box), and businessman Carlton Beal in the venture.

Also on the trip was Mrs. Havenstrite, and Hugo Anderson, the vice-president of the First National Bank of Chicago, and his wife (at the time, reports often omitted the first names of wives). They were joined en route by Mr. and Mrs. George Kennedy, who were friends of the Havenstrites, and the itinerary was to include a visit to Anchorage and Fairbanks, then to Candle, north-east of Nome.

Initially the party traveled to Anchorage in Havenstrite’s own DC-3, piloted by Elemer McLeod and Henry Price, and after arriving in Fairbanks they took a smaller plane to visit McKinley Park (now Denali Park), where they were met by Cecil and Ethel Wells.

Cecil, 45, was an advocate for Statehood and had interests in real estate, oil, and gold mining. He was also an early investor in Chena Hot Springs, which is still a famous tourist attraction today, though his most notable ventures were in automobiles dealership. He always drove the latest two door Cadillac Eldorado, and many from an older generation might recall the Wells Alaska Motor Company, which is now the location of the Rabinowitz Courthouse in Fairbanks.

Cecil also had three ex-wives and five children, and would certainly have been a force in Alaskan politics if it wasn’t for a 13 month stay at McNeil Island in Puget Sound back in 1928, when he was convicted of “Cohabitation in a state of adultery.” That however did not stop him from becoming well-known across the territory.

His fourth wife Ethel owned North Pole Nellie’s, a trading post at 16^th and Cushman, and had once wanted to establish an idyllic “Santa Land” in North Pole, a town some 14 miles outside the city (the Santa Claus house there now is not related).    

Disney, his daughter and the rest of the Havenstrite party spent the weekend at Camp Eielson, and arrived back in Fairbanks on August 18, where they stayed in the Lathrop Apartments. That night they visited the Wells home at 327 Illinois Street before going to dinner at the Country Club, where Disney talked about his other reason for the trip.

The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner reported that Disney, 46, told fellow diners he wished to tell the “Story of Alaska” using the five hours of color film that had been taken by filmmakers Al and Elma Milotte. He added that he felt Alaska’s “main job today was to settle the territory with people,” and he compared Anchorage and Fairbanks to frontier towns like those still found in Wyoming.

The party were reportedly going to visit other points of interest in Fairbanks before going north to a mine in Candle, where they spent several days and bought back a gold clean up estimated to be worth $175,000 (worth over $2.5m today). The Nome Nugget of August 25 wrote that Disney and his party had arrived there, and were going back to the Lower 48 via Vancouver, BC, but nothing further was reported after that.

In 1948 Seal Island, a 27-minute documentary about the migration of Alaskan seals, was indeed released as the first of Disney’s “True-Life Adventure” movies. Directed by James Algar, it won the first of six Oscars that the series was subsequently awarded. 

In 1956, Sharon and Diane – Walt’s eldest daughter – spoke to the Saturday Evening Post about the trip in more detail, and that article is on the Walt Disney Family Museum website. It notes that Sharon remembered a very bumpy plane ride, and Diane recounted how their father said he saw the famous Northern Lights.

Only one small photograph accompanies that article, and it shows Walt and Sharon standing next to an upturned boat – but it turns out that a few more photographs of Disney and his daughter, apparently taken in Candle, were in the collection of Cecil Wells’s late grandson, Darrell Rafferty.

Several are rather blurred, but one clearly shows Walt Disney, with his trademark mustache, a camera around his neck, and what seems to be a light meter in his hand, talking face-to-face with Cecil Wells.

It’s a strong match to the photo of Walt on the Family Museum website, and Rafferty’s pictures of a young girl feeding a ground squirrel and panning for gold also compare conclusively to Sharon, who sports pigtails and red boots in both. Alas those squirrels weren’t, as Rafferty thought, the inspiration for Chip n’ Dale: they had already appeared in cartoons since 1943.  

And then there was the story of the lost Disney mural.

According to legend, Walt Disney drew a Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck mural on the playroom basement wall of the Wells’ home on Illinois Street, and members of the Messer family, who were close to the Wells at the time, remember their father, Jim, talking about it.

Jim Messer worked at Wells Alaska Motors on 1^st Avenue, “and would have done anything for Cecil,” recalled his daughter, Patty Wagner Messer, who added that he was offered – and took – first refusal on the dealership following Cecil’s murder in October 1953.

The mural didn’t last long, however. Some say that it was whitewashed over by Ethel following her divorce from Cecil, though Jim Messer told his daughter Ann that Diane, Cecil’s fifth wife, had it painted over simply because she didn’t like it.

That second explanation might be related to the fact that Diane, 31, and her alleged lover, Black musician Johnny Warren, 32, had been charged with Cecil’s death.     

“My father was firm in the belief that Diane did it. My parents thought she was a “gold digger,” said Patty, “and in the 1970s/1980s he hired a private detective to look into it.”

Phyllis Rafferty – Cecil’s eldest child and Darrell’s mother – had also been unhappy with law enforcement efforts, and went as far as asking author Erle Stanley Gardner, the creator of “Perry Mason,” for a recommendation for a private eye. Gardner suggested Glen “Bud” Bodell, who had been vital to one of Gardner’s cases in his famous Court of Last Resort.

The pulp magazines, American and even international press reveled in this film noir-type sex scandal from the little-known “frozen north,” and the killing even knocked the opening of Anchorage Airport off the headline in that day’s Anchorage Daily News. The police investigation was however poorly organized, the evidence circumstantial, and the case, one of the earliest for a young lawyer named Theodore “Ted” Stevens, was never solved.

Tragically, Diane committed suicide a month before the trial, which was then regularly postponed, though her co-defendant Johnny Warren wasn’t exonerated until October 1960.

The investigation into the murder of Cecil Wells is reexamined in my book The Alaskan Blonde, which also contains the picture of Cecil and Walt Disney. The other Rafferty pictures are on the website www.thealaskanblonde.com

ENDS

Bibliography

“Disney and Daughter Leave on Alaska Trip” – Los Angeles Times, August 11, 1947 – page A1

“Walt Disney and Daughter Here to Absorb Atmosphere” – Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, August 19, 1947 – page 3

“Walt Disney and Party arrive in Nome” – Nome Nugget, August 25, 1947 – page 6

“Walt and Sharon Take a Trip to Alaska” – https://www.waltdisney.org/blog/walt-and-sharon-take-trip-alaska – Walt Disney Family Museum, posted August 6, 2016

Bartlett, James T. The Alaskan Blonde: Sex, Secrets, and the Hollywood Story that Shocked America. Los Angeles, California: Territory Books, 2023