20 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY august 1-7, 2024 www.montereycountynow.com ing drawing; he was Harvey’s first art teacher. Harvey’s life as a very young child felt stable and secure, but across the channel, trouble was brewing. On Sept. 1, 1939, Adolf Hitler’s Germany invaded Poland. Two days later, France and Britain declared war on Germany. World War II had officially begun. Air-raid sirens could be heard blaring through London that day according to historical reports, although German bombs did not begin to fall on England until June 1940, continuing until the end of the war in 1945. During a sustained 57-day attack in 1940-1941 called The Blitz, German bombers killed an estimated 43,000 residents and destroyed over 1.1 million homes. Westcliff-On-Sea was in the range of German planes, so her father dug out and built a small air-raid shelter in the garden. Harvey remembers the shelter was constructed of wood struts surrounded by soil. Harvey only remembers heading into the shelter once for a drill. The sirens sounded and the family hurried down a ladder into the shelter, along with the nextdoor neighbors who had three dogs. A little dog named Jill was carried down into the shelter, but the two larger dogs were left up top in a nearby garden shed. “It seemed wrong, to say the least,” Harvey says. She believes that may be where her desire to help animals was formed. Rescuing animals is “something in you that you can’t fight. It’s just in you. You’ve got to do it,” she says. At that point, “all the children were shipped off to Northern England,” she says. Harvey found herself on a train headed north. She has a clear memory of holding an orange in her hands while sitting on the train. Then someone stole the orange. “That was like my mother, gone again. It was horrifying,” she remembers. Her father would ride the train every couple of weeks to visit his children, who were staying with different families in Furness Vail in Derbyshire. Harvey’s father later purchased a home in a nearby town of Spondon and the family was reunited for the rest of the war. And although they were in the north, German planes did reach them. When the sirens blared, the entire family of six would crowd into a small space under the stairs. She remembers hearing a “whistling like crazy and then an explosion.” After the war ended, Harvey attended and graduated from the Southend College of Art. She remembers taking classes in a quonset hut leftover from the war. It was a very happy time, she remembers. “It was the best time going to that art school,” she says. ••• With an art degree in hand, it was time to find a job, but Harvey couldn’t bring up the courage to pursue one. “My mother had to find my first job—I was too shy to ask for one,” Harvey recalls with a laugh. The job was in a factory painting images on plastic panels used to make lampshades. “It was lovely really. I learned hand control, as well,” she says. From there Harvey got a job making fine silver jewelry, which she did for several years until she decided to immigrate to Toronto, Canada for the prospect of better job opportunities. Immigration officials sent her to another jewelry company to work, but she was unhappy there. She thought the jewelry ugly and the employees cold—Harvey found out the owners had fired a German girl to hire her, which upset the other employees. She left. All the while Harvey was painting lampshades and making jewelry, what she really wanted to do was become an animator. At the time she saw Bambi as a child, “I didn’t know what [animation] was. At the time I didn’t think there was any way I could be with such a job,” she says. The more animated movies she saw, the more she loved it. “It grew on me.” While Harvey didn’t know right away she wanted to draw animation when she watched Bambi, she did get the problem of the hunters sorted with the innocent logic of a child. “In the front row of the theater there were 25 seats, not more than 30,” she remembers noticing. Her idea was to invite imaginary hunters to sit in the seats around her: “I would sit [the hunters] in the front row. And of course if they saw the movie, they would never hunt again!” ••• It was another factory job and a friendship formed there that paved the way to Harvey’s animation career. The job was painting faces on dolls and mannequins, and Harvey was seated across from a woman who came from what was then Yugoslavia. The woman spoke little English at the time. Despite their language barrier, the two shared a laugh over the sing-song way their supervisor assigned work and they became friends. It became a critical connection for Harvey’s career and a lifelong friendship. The friend was Marija Miletic Dail, the first woman to earn the position of animator at the world-famous Zagreb Film, in what is now Croatia. She and her brother had to escape the communist country, landing in Canada, where Dail took whatever small job she could find—including painting mannequin faces—according to her 2022 obituary. Dail left the doll and mannequin factory for an animation company, but she did not forget her friend Harvey. She recommended Harvey to the owner of the company, and Harvey began freelancing at night drawing frames of animation, sometimes until 2am, while still working at the factory during the day. She had finally achieved her dream. Thanks to that work, Harvey went on to work full time in a Toronto animation studio, where she was an assistant animator. She would take whatever projects she could to advance to animator, but the environment was not always welcoming. She remembers one of the male animators, originally from New York, came up to her workspace, sat down and put his feet up on her desk, and huffed: “In New York we don’t have women animators.” Her boss tried to fire her after becoming angry that a lowly female assistant animator had dared to check some completed animation work. As soon as the other animators found out, they protested—she was the only person willing to take on jobs no one else wanted to do and had become an invaluable member of the team. The boss relented. Eventually her good friend Dail went on to work for Bill Hanna at Hanna-Barbera Studios in Los Angeles. When Harvey’s studio shuttered, Dail suggested to Hanna that he hire Harvey and her colleagues. Within a week they were in Los Angeles. Harvey remembers sitting in Hanna’s boardHarvey flips through some of her work for a proposed children’s book. Rescuing animals is “something in you that you can’t fight. It’s just in you. You’ve got to do it.” “Scooby-Doo still lives. I see him on packages in the supermarket. It’s amazing to me.” Daniel Dreifuss
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