Dick Winslow; Entertainer, Ex-Child Star

Dick Winslow, the onetime child film star who performed as a one-man band for several years at Disneyland and was plane pianist on the old Hacienda Hotel Champagne Flights from Burbank to Las Vegas, is dead.

Winslow, who also was featured as a boy reporter on Los Angeles radio station KHJ’s “Children’s Hour” during the 1930s, died of complications of diabetes Feb. 7 in a North Hollywood hospital. He was 75.

He was born Dick Winslow Johnson in Louisiana. His parents came to Los Angeles in the 1920s with their seven children. His mother, Wynonah, for many years was a reporter for The Times.

Over the years she managed to land small film roles for most of her children, particularly Dick, who made his film debut in Harry Carey Westerns.

“Get one of the Johnson children,” he remembered early film directors saying, “because there is one the right size for everything.”

Later he was seen as Tinkler in the 1935 “Mutiny on the Bounty” and in 1955 as Gil Rodin in “The Benny Goodman Story.”

He also appeared in “Airport” and “The Shootist,” in several Disney pictures and on TV in episodes of “I Love Lucy,” “Gunsmoke,” “Rawhide” and other series.

From 1957 to 1962 he made more than 1,000 trips to Las Vegas, playing piano and singing songs on the DC-4 that flew each evening from Burbank.

“My job was to calm them (passengers) down,” he said in a 1987 Times interview. “Many of them had never flown before.”

In 1964 he became a one-man band for Disney, playing accordion and singing while holding drums and cymbals with his knees. Earlier he had led a small band at the Anaheim park.

Survivors include his wife, Shirley, two daughters, two sons, two grandchildren, two brothers and two sisters.