Animator-turned-theme park designer Rolly Crump, who was instrumental in the design of early Disneyland, died Sunday in his Carlsbad home, where he had been in hospice care, said his son Christopher. Crump was 93.
Crump received his big break at the Walt Disney Co. in 1952, when he was 22.
Those at the animation studio liked to remind him that he was an oddball. "A diamond in the rough," as Crump once proudly said he was labeled by a superior. Crump would later laugh, recalling — with swagger — that he was once told, "What you showed us was the worst portfolio of anyone ever hired in animation."
