Dave Master, one of America's foremost animation educators, as drawn by his mentor Chuck Jones. Courtesy of Dave Master.

For over 30 years, Dave Master has been in the business of educating people, bringing the collective wisdom of animation professionals to a broad cross-section of young artists. Whether at a low-income high school on the outskirts of Los Angeles, as manager of a Warner Bros. training program, or as an Internet pioneer, Dave has made it his mission to give everyone a shot at becoming an animator.

How did a bearded hippie radical hospital workers union organizer become one of the foremost animation educators in the USA?

One night, in the early 1990s, I was driving out of Los Angeles on the 60 freeway. The glitz of Hollywood and the glass towers of downtown L.A. gave way to low-level suburban malls, brown hills dotted with sagebrush and dipping oil pumps. It looked like a scene out of There Will Be Blood.

Where the heck was I?

I was headed for an animation class at a place called Rowland High School. I had met the instructor Dave Master, who had invited me. But the real impetus came from Chuck Jones, who even called me at home to make sure I was definitely going. He said June Foray, Bill Scott, Steve Bosustow and Disney's Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston had already visited there.

If there was anything I learned from my years as an animator, it was when Chuck Jones told you to go some place, you went!

So I arrived at Rowland High School. I was ushered past the usual municipal high school playground fields and classrooms to a converted metal-working shop way in the back. Once there I discovered an oasis of animation. A workshop with light tables and discs and computers and 3D setups and dozens of eager, talented students. I had a wonderful time that night talking and critiquing their work. And many of them told me later it was very inspiring to their own development.

What was it that made this out-of-the-way high school so different from all others?

It had Dave Master.

Dave Master was born in the New York City borough of Queens, and spent his teen years in the shadow of Shea Stadium, where the #7 train to Flushing rumbles overhead. He was not the usual type you would expect to dedicate his life to teaching cartoon animation. "When my father was in the military, he was turned off by the rampant racial inequality he saw black soldiers experience. He taught me, 'There should be a level playing field. Everyone should have an equal opportunity to achieve.'"

Dave's dad worked for the Dept. of Real Estate for the City of New York, and he would take Dave to tenements in some of the most underserved areas to show him how people in less fortunate circumstances lived. This affected Dave in the deepest way. He was proud that his dad did everything he could to make sure the buildings he supervised had heat in the winter and plumbing that worked. One of his dad's proudest moments was participating in the March on Washington in 1963 and hearing Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech. His dad instilled in him a strong sense of fairness and activism.

Master worked as a union organizer before landing a job teaching arts at a Southern California high school. His enthusiasm about using animation in the curriculum helped get him in.

Dave could draw and was an arts major in college, but the call of social justice was louder then. He grew up in the 1960s as a student radical in the antiwar movement and, while working his way through college, became a grass roots labor union organizer under his mentor Elliot Godoff. His greatest achievement was helping to organize the forgotten service workers in a big Staten Island hospital. "Everyone told us it was impossible and you can't win. But in the end we got 85% voting for the union."

In the mid-1970s, a friend who was a television producer convinced Dave to move to California and get into set design. He did some commercial art, but his interest in teaching was stronger, and he soon went back to school to get his teaching credential.

As a child, Dave had been enthralled by cartoons like Crusader Rabbit and later, as a bored student, he used every textbook page and margin as a flip-book. This long-dormant interest was reawakened when he became a student teacher and was fortunate enough to have a master teacher who showed him the basics of animation. He thought it would be fun to give kids a chance to explore animation, an opportunity he wished he had had while in school. So it was with this new inspiration that he donned his '70s leisure suit and went to a job interview for a new teaching position in Rowland Heights. "Out of 35 applicants, I was the only one excited about using animation as part of my arts program, and it was on that basis I got the job."

Dave filled his classroom with desks and overhead video shooters and Preston Blair books. In 1978 he went to the FILMEX film festival in Century City and attended a lecture by Stephen Leiva called "The Animator as an Actor." At the time, Steve Leiva was Chuck Jones' publicist and he introduced the two men. Chuck looked at Dave's students' primitive early work and, in his endearing and straightforward way said, "I love your enthusiasm, but you don't know what the hell you are doing!"

Jones took Dave under his wing. He taught him in detail about the intricacies of animation and introduced him to other Jedi masters like Bosustow, Foray, Scott and Bill Littlejohn. Later that same year, at a student film festival, Frank and Ollie viewed some of Dave's students' films and they invited Dave to come on the Disney lot periodically with Super-8 reels of his kids' work so they could add their notes. These greats of animation spread the word about Rowland Animation among their friends in the biz.