HUZ: Drawn to Life

So, I'm at CalArts. I'm a freshman.

I remember one day my roommate says,

"Hey, let's go down to the Disney Studio. I know someone who actually works here."

We drive down, and there was a big fence.

So, me and my roommates park on the side. We climb the fence.

It's like, who are these four Black dudes

climbing the fence to get at Disney Studios at the time?

As we're walking, he says,

"Animation building this way," and all of this stuff, right?

So, we're following the signs. And then we get to, you know,

a couple of bungalows that actually sort of had open doors.

And we're like… "There's a Black dude.

That Black dude was Ron Husband.

I'm… I'm not real big on tables and chairs and inanimate objects.

I want something that's moving.

Everything and everybody that's moving is telling a story.

The city's still, or they're in action. There's a story taking place.

How best, as an artist, can you tell that story?

I get so much joy and pleasure out of people looking at my work

and being encouraged and bringing a smile to their face.

The name's Sweet, Joshua Sweet.

I never considered my time at Disney work.

For 38 years, I was there.

It was just, uh, you know, I got paid to push a pencil.

My high school art teacher, uh, Mrs. Dorothy Clemons,

encouraged the class to carry a sketchbook.

And on her encouragement,

um, I took her advice.

Art Center had classes for high school students on Saturdays,

and so she arranged for me to take advantage of that.

Obviously out of her own pocket, uh, for paying for those classes.

So, she had a real heart for her students.

And one day we had a class, and there was a couple of brushes

on the sink that students had just sort of walked off and left.

And… and she said, "Ron, will you clean those brushes for me?"

And I just sort of looked at her and just kept walking.

you know, I sat right up front. Bell rang…

- - …and she walks over to the desk,

and she looks me in the eye and she says,

"Get the hell out and don't come back."

And Ms. Clemons never spoke to me a word again.

Couple months later, I had won a national award

for a painting piece I had done.

And the principal and Ms. Clemons and I took a photograph,

but she didn't speak to me during that time.

We took the photograph, never spoke to me again.

And I'm sitting there looking with this dour look on my face.

But I took her advice to always carry a sketchbook.

And to this day, probably why I'm sitting here today,

because I took her advice.

- Oh, wow. -

- Just a couple of sketchbooks. - Just a couple of sketchbooks.

These books here go back to 1962. I was twelve years old.

You know, I love sports.

I get these sports magazines and copy the photographs,

which really, um, paved the way for what I'm doing now

in the sense of action, negative space,

silhouette value, things that are really, really important to drawing today.

Now, these books here, you know, they've got some history also.

Um.

I look at my sketchbooks as practice. Practice, practice.

Because practice won't make you perfect. Practice just makes you better.

And I wanna get better.

You're always on your journey.

And, uh, you know, my journey started long ago.

I was born and raised in Monrovia, California, a small town.

You know, there was, uh, unofficial barriers.

A certain street, uh, was the limit for Blacks to live in.

We had a public pool, and the Black kids could only swim,

or people of color, really, 'cause it wasn't just the Black kids,

anybody of color could only swim on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

My mom, a single mom, she had come out from Mississippi

by way of St. Louis and then coming to California,

you know, not having very much money.

We lived in 15 different houses. You know, rent's a little cheaper here.

You know, rent's going up here. We had to move over here.

And I remember this guy came into our apartment…

- - …and he had been stabbed.

And he staggered into the house.

He ended up going in the bathroom and… and dying in the tub.

It had to be about three years old, 'cause at four years old, we had moved.

She was a… a great mom, you know, raising four boys by herself.

Mom worked a lot. I mean, mom instilled a work ethic in all her kids, you know…

I was one of the original latchkey kids,

'cause he took a key and pinned it to my Levi's.

And off to school I went, come back home, don't let anybody in the house

until she got home.

You know, we were poor, but when you're poor,

you don't know you're poor.

You know, you got love, it's your mom's love.

You never… Went to bed hungry.

Well, my husband, yeah, I understand my husband's priorities.

- - One of them is his sketchbook.

- Yes. - Ask him about, uh,

me always fussing that every time we go somewhere,

I have to compete with the sketchbook.

He'll tell you all the time, I tell him,

"Just once in the 53 years that we've been married,

I would love you to not take that sketchbook anywhere."

And now he's gotten to the point, he don't care

what kind of sketchbook he has.

You know, he used to carry nice sketchbooks,

leather-bound, the whole bit.

Now, he'll carry one with tape on it, and just, you know,

I don't have to worry about him getting an actual woman,

- 'cause the sketchbook is his other woman. -

- Which is kind of beautiful. - No.

LaVonne, yeah, love of my life. We've been married, um, 52 years.

We didn't start dating until my junior year in high school.

She was a pep cat, and I was on the football team.

He was just quiet. I don't know what attracted me to him

other than, well, he had a great body, for one thing.

I'll put that out there. I'm gonna leave that alone.

But anyway, he… he was just a classy guy. And I decided, "Okay, he's mine."

Her name is actually LaVonne Jackson…

- Mm-hmm. - …but she, because she was part of ASB,

snuck in somewhere and added her name

as… as LaVonne Husband in the high school yearbook.

So, she's there as LaVonne Jackson as a junior

and as a senior as LaVonne Husband.

So, she was staking her claim.

- - Yeah.

And then at Citrus College, we were there together.

- And he went to Vegas. - And then he went to Vegas.

No, I told him he better come back.

I played football in college,

went to university on a football scholarship,

so I get 15 dollars a month.

I was also working at the university

as a model for photography and art classes.

In eighth grade, I was, uh, playing flag football.

This little chart here, and I said what I was going to do in order

to build my body up… …to play football, right?

So, uh, 20 push-ups, 30 sit-ups, 100 jumping jacks.

Really, really crude stuff that I was gonna do. Uh, lift weights.

Didn't have any weights, but, uh, I ended up

signing up, uh, October 22nd, 1963.

I never knew where I was gonna end up. This is a start.

After graduation from the University of Las Vegas,

I wanted to be a commercial artist.

Uh, I wanted to do book and magazine illustration.

But coming back to Southern California, where there are no publishing houses,

I had to have a job to bring in some income.

I got a call from, uh, Honeywell.

They offered me a position as a technical illustrator.

And that sounded sort of like illustrator.

So, I took that job.

It was one guy who gotta do all of the exploded views

and all the really, really creative stuff. And the rest of us in the department,

we did block diagrams and flow charts.

But it paid the bills, and it was a lot of overtime.

Uh, after about a year and a half,

I said, "I wanna do something more creative."

…and be creative?" I said, "Well, maybe an art school."

So, I took a class at Art Center,

a class called "Sketching for Illustration."

It was taught by Sam McKim, and he's-- was a imagineer.

You know, they design and build the rides for the theme parks.

I just wanted to get in an environment to where I could be more creative.

Art Center, to me, was like the pinnacle of where I could get my education.

Going to Art Center was just, um, the best thing

that could have happened to me because it gave me a foundation in art.

Before that, I was just a kid drawing pictures,

but drawing and painting suddenly became serious

when I was an Art Center student.

I love sculpting, I love drawing, I love painting,

but this is what I wanna do.

I wanna paint backgrounds for Walt Disney Studios.

So, that was the propellant that pushed me forward.

One night after class, Mr. McKim said there's a trainee program

at Disney bringing in, uh, artists to train

to perhaps become animators.

Back in the '70s, it was very, very bare bones.

You know, you had Disney.

- Yeah. - You had, uh, Hanna-Barbera.

- Well, don't wait. Illustrate. - Ralph Bakshi doing, uh,

you know, his thing.

Strong man and diaper man.

So, it was very, uh, minimal.

And I remember the discussion on the way out of the classroom

that night was that, "I'm not going to Disney."

They don't pay anything.

For me, it was like, "Okay, yeah, I'm gonna-- I'm gonna follow up on this

'cause, you know, I just need something more creative to do."

I went home, grabbed a couple of sketchbooks,

and dropped them off at the guard gate on Buena Vista

and went back to work.

These are the sketchbooks that I turned in to the-- To the studio

that they looked at and were able to see my ability,

being able to capture movement in my drawings.

And nothing real, you know, real fancy.

And so I was basically, uh, hired on, uh, on potential.

The world I walk into in animation is total creativity.

Disney was looking for young people to come in and to replace the nine old men

who had really created this art of animation.

It was the '70s when, uh, a lot of the new kids, uh, came to Disney.

They were gonna be the one to carry this business forward,

to make the, uh, Disney classics yet to be made.

So, it was a very exciting time.

- Hello, my name is John Musker. - I'm Ron Clements and I'm a story man.