Arrow Development
Arrow Development was an amusement park ride and roller coaster design and manufacturing company, incorporated in California on November 16, 1945,[1] and based in Mountain View.
[2]: 158 [3] Originally located at 243 Moffett Boulevard,[4] it moved to a larger facility at 1555 Plymouth Street[4] after Walt Disney Productions purchased one third of the business in 1960.
Schulze and his wife had provided accounting services for several small companies in the Bay Area, including Duro-Bond Bearing, which is where he likely heard of Arrow.
[2]: 154, 158 Neither Bacon nor Morgan saw active duty in the military, although Ed and his younger brother Eugene enlisted in the Army Air Corps.
[2]: 153 Eugene was killed in action in the South Pacific on December 16, 1944, while serving with the 868th Bombardment Squadron, flying special radar equipped B-24 Liberators designed for secret night bombing and escort missions.
[13] During the early years, Arrow Development sold used machine tools and made replacement parts for trucks, which were scarce after the war.
[15] Ed Morgan read a newspaper article about Disneyland and wrote to Disney about a small stern wheel paddle boat named “Lil’ Belle”, which Arrow had built in 1952.
Imagineer Bruce Bushman gave Ed Morgan a sketch of the "Mr. Toad" vehicle, and a prototype body was quickly fabricated.
Walt and Roy Disney had consulted with Harrison Price of SRI’s Los Angeles office on a proposal to build Disneyland in Burbank, California.
They also designed and built the ride systems for It's a Small World (1964/66), Pirates of the Caribbean, Adventure Through Inner Space (1967), and the Haunted Mansion (1969).
Arrow has also been credited for improving the guidance system for the Submarine Voyage (1959) and prototyping a four-track version of Space Mountain for Walt Disney World in Orlando.
[22] Dana Morgan, the son of co-founder Ed Morgan, recalled that Arrow was involved in fourteen of the Walt Disney World attractions, including Dumbo the Flying Elephant and Peter Pan, Pirates of the Caribbean, the parking lot trams, Sky Buckets and the Prince Charming Carousel.
[23] The last ride system Arrow may have worked on for Walt Disney World would have been Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, which opened November 15, 1980, two months before the merger with HUSS Maschinenfabrik which formed Arrow-Huss.
[24] Karl and Ed also set up a separate company called Easbey[2]: 293 which won a contract with the city of Oakland, California, to install rides at the Children's Fairyland at Lake Merritt, which was built in 1950.
On August 21, 1960, a tragic accident occurred at Playtown involving the son of Frank Freidel, a visiting professor at Stanford, known for his extensive biography of Franklin Roosevelt.
When Disney opened Central Shops in 1971, Dick Nunis, then Executive VP, told Arrow, “I have to admit that we could not have done this without you.
Ron Toomer stated that "building roller coasters really didn't fit into Rio Grande's scheme of things".
Arrow-Huss registered with the State of California as a Foreign Stock business on January 12, 1981, but its status as a valid company was eventually forfeited.
On January 10, 1986, Arrow Dynamics was incorporated in Delaware, with offices in Clearfield, Utah, and Norm Scott as President.
Around this time (mid-80's) Arrow partnered with Vekoma, a Dutch manufacturer of farming and mining equipment, in an effort to have a dealer in the European market.
Initially, Arrow built ride vehicles and the more complex track sections in Utah and shipped them to Holland.
Over a period of several months Arrow taught Vekoma to build all types of track sections for their European customers.
On March 10, 1987, Ron Toomer, Otis S. Hughes and Brent H. Meikle would file an application for certification of authority for Arrow Dynamics, Inc., also in Delaware.
[40] Arrow Dynamics' authority to operate in Utah would be revoked in October 1999 for failure to file their annual report, but be reinstated in November.
The building at 243 Moffett in Mountain View, which was built in 1946 by the founders, was still standing in December 2013 and the site of an automotive body shop.
South Bay Construction and Development Company (SBCDC) purchased the site in November 1982 and subdivided it into three parcels: 1555, 1615, and 1625 Plymouth Street.
[38] On June 25, 2013, Broadreach Capital Partners announced that it had acquired the 5.2-acre (2.1 ha) site comprising 1615 and 1625 Plymouth, where it planned to develop, own and manage a state-of-the-art office project.
