A skinny Horatio Alger with a flat-top, khakis and black horn-rimmed glasses – he floated around Detroit and Los Angeles banking on smarts, guts and luck to get him ahead. He patterned his look after Jack Webb, the tough cop in the TV show "Dragnet," wearing his white dress shirts with the sleeves rolled up.

He was always under the hood of a car – his was a yellow Cadillac convertible.

It helped that Gurr was no slouch as a mechanic. At 23 he had already written a couple books on industrial design, dreaming up auto bodies for Ford Motor Company and working for a design firm.

"I knew what I was doing," he says. "I was in charge."

He didn't figure it at the time, but Gurr would be the brains behind some of the most iconic structures and machines in the modern world.

•••

In 1954, another bootstraps capitalist was in the process of pouring obscene loads of cash into an idea that everyone around him thought was a boondoggle.

The capitalist was Walt Disney, and the idea was Disneyland.

And, while Disney was a rich guy, his resources weren't unlimited. To make his theme park, he needed dozens of unique components for rides and attractions that no one had ever thought of before. The materials and expertise for that weren't cheap.

That's why Disney took a trip to the Art Center College in L.A. – Gurr's alma mater —- to see if he couldn't finagle the headmaster into getting his industrial design students to create a car ride for his park, free of charge.

Disney struck out.

But, through sheer luck, the day after Disney's visit to Art Center, Gurr was back at the school, listening to a lecture by a prominent designer. And the school's job placement advisor, Johnny Thompson, approached Gurr after the lecture to tell him that Disney had been around, seeking someone to design an auto body for an amusement-park ride, something called "Autopia."

"Do you ever do outside work?" Thompson asked Gurr.

Gurr, at that point, had not.

"Yeah, sure I do," Gurr told the advisor.

"I met this fella' who had a sudden need for a designer…"

The next day, Disney Studios called Gurr and told him to show up in Burbank in 20 minutes.

•••

Walt Disney picked Gurr's brain a little and then assigned the young man his first job – designing a body for the prototype Autopia car. Gurr took a look at the little putt-putter Walt's mechanic had cobbled together out of spare parts. You could drive it around the parking lot out back.

He started designing a new body at night, in his one-room apartment in Studio City, with a big picture window overlooking the San Fernando Valley.

After two weeks, Gurr took another big gamble: He ditched his job at the design firm, bought a rubber stamp that said "R.H. Gurr Industrial Design," and declared himself CEO of his own business. His sole client? WED Enterprises, Disney's private company designing Disneyland.

After two months as a contractor, Disney offered to hire Gurr on as a staffer.

"Bobby," he said, "I've got a lot more things for you to design. How soon can you come over here and be an employee?"

It wasn't an easy call.

"Disneyland was such a radical new idea," Gurr said. "Why would anyone come over from a good career?"

Gurr made the leap, though. And, soon, he was the youngest guy working in the famous "Zorro Building," a rickety, white stucco structure Disney had hauled to Burbank all the way from his old Los Angeles studio. The tall, steel casement windows hung open in the summer, filling the sweaty building with smog as the ragtag crew inside fiddled with model trains and automobiles.