Goodbye Bill

Bill Melendez and I were not really friends. We knew each other. I talked to him a number of times. I guess you could call us good acquaintances. I know a lot about him because of the Evening With Bill Melendez DVD I produced.

Several years back I was talking to him at a Chuck Jones Gallery opening that he and Martha Sigall were headlining. Someone asked Bill about Martha`s career and he responded by saying that when he worked with her she was in Ink and Paint.

I then told him the story about how Martha was an animation camera-person during World War II but that the Cameraman`s Union pulled her ticket the day the war ended because she was not a man and therefore could not be a CameraMAN.

Bill was outraged. They can`t do that. That is not right. He was ready to pick up picket signs and go into battle to right a wrong he found intolerable 50 years after the wrong was done. He was fiery, a fighter.

The descendant of Mexican Generals, his father wanted him to return to Mexico and go to military school but his mother decided that he should develop his artistic skills. He was one of the Disney strikers. He never backed down on anything. He was an animation union president. He was both a great artist and a man who always fought for what he knew was right.

If they can say half as much about me when I am gone I will have lived a good life. Goodbye Bill you were a hell of a man.