The Hollywood Reporter has reported that Edle Bakke, a female “pioneer” at the Walt Disney Company has passed away at age 91 at her home in Oxnard, California.

Ms. Bakke was born in Brooklyn in 1927 and then moved with her family to Los Angeles in 1941.

Shortly after graduation from high school she was hired by the Walt Disney Co. as a secretary in the Ink & Pain department– an all-female department.

Later she worked for Ward Kimball on his The Magical World of Disney series called Man in Space in 1955.

The Hollywood Reporter had an excerpt from a piece she wrote in 2006:

“I was assigned to take notes in shorthand of all the conferences on subjects like weightlessness, centrifugal force, rocket stages and orbital trajectories, all of which were Greek to me. Since Walt never liked seeing someone taking notes, I was discretely placed behind a tall screen where I jotted down everything being said, minus four-letter words that often crept into Walt’s vocabulary. We didn’t use tape recorders in those days, so I was very busy indeed.”

A couple of years later she was the first person trained by the Walt Disney studios to be trained as a live-action script supervisor.  She kept track of movies and shows like Old Yeller, Toby Tyler, Ten Weeks With a Circus, Davy Crockett, Spin & Marty, The Hardy Boys, Zorro and The Mickey Mouse Club.

She also worked on Gunsmoke from 1961-1970, Escape to Witch Mountain, Being There, Tron, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and a season on MacGyver before retiring in 1987.

Then in 2017, her and her sister Lucile, who is also a Disney animation alumni, were in the group honored at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences that recognized women who were at the forefront of film and animation.  They were also both featured in a book called Ink & Paint: The Women of Walt Disney’s Animation by Mindy Johnson.

Source: The Hollywood Reporter