Old inbetweeners refuse to fade away

By Virgil "Vip" Partch. Left to right: Sam Cobean, Tony Rivera, Bill McIntyre, Vip Partch, Reg Massie (foreground), Dick Shaw.

This probably dates from late 1941 or 1942, after the Disney strike in which they all participated. Along with Reg Massie and Walt Kelly (later of Pogo fame), Sam Cobean was in charge of publicity for the 1941 Disney strike. He was a frequent cartoon contributor to The New Yorker, and published several books. He was killed in a car crash in 1951. Tony Rivera was Grim Natwick's assistant on Snow White. He worked for UPA, John Sutherland and DePatie-Freleng. He was one of the original Flintstones layout artists, and continued working for Hanna-Barbera until shortly before his death in 1986. Bill McIntyre was in and out of the animation business for many years; at one time he also ran a bookstore in Laguna Beach. During WWII, Reg Massie was in charge of special effects at the Army Signal Corps Photographic Center in Astoria, L.I. In the late 1940s he worked for George Pal, designing several of the Puppettoons such as "John Henry and the Inky-Poo" and "Rome-Owww and Julie-Cat". He went on to be an art director for such magazines as Stage, The Reporter and Gourmet; he died in 1989. (His son, Jeff, has been the Guild's Recording Secretary and Assistant Business Rep for longer than he would care to admit.) A close friend of Vip Partch with whom he shared a love of boating, Dick Shaw is the only one of this group who returned to Disney, as a storyman on Make Mine Music and Donald Duck shorts. Later he went to UPA where he wrote dozens of Magoo shorts. None of them ever exactly faded away, but they never went back to inbetweening, either ...