She was barely four feet, ten inches tall and weighed 98 pounds. Tiny Kline, in her dressing room, prepares to appear as Tinker Bell.
The entire trip took approximately thirty seconds.
Suspended 146 feet up in the air, she glided down a long 784 foot long cable from the Matterhorn to Sleeping Beauty's castle at roughly thirty miles per hour to signal the beginning of the fireworks. Kline, at age 70, became the very first Tinker Bell at Disneyland. That has always been the assumption since even the Disney Archives have been unable to locate any paperwork regarding her initial hiring. Roughly three short years later in the summer of 1961, he asked her to repeat the feat at Disneyland since she had demonstrated she could handle it. Walt attended the show (along with his wife Lillian and his brother Roy and his wife Edna) and was quite taken with Kline's performance as a flying Tinker Bell as she "flew" from the top of the amphitheater dome over the audience and finally landing on the stage floor. Strapped into a harness, Kline was part of the Disneyland Comes to the Hollywood Bowl event held on Augthat featured a medley of songs from Disney motion pictures conducted by Paul Smith. However, most people know her name today because of her work at Disneyland. She continued to perform in multiple venues including the Ringling Circus for the next twenty five years. In 1933, Tiny Kline spent the summer season working at the Steel Pier in Atlantic City, New Jersey dangling in a variety of ways from ropes beneath an offshore zeppelin balloon which was tethered to the end of the pier. In 1932, as a publicity stunt for her appearance at the RKO Palace Theater in New York City, Kline slid 1,134 feet across New York's Times Square at a height of 600 feet, hanging by her teeth. Starting at the bottom as a virtually nude, painted "statue girl," she worked her way up to "Roman rider" which meant she stood atop a charging steed in the chariot races at the end of the show and eventually became the queen of the aerial iron jaw act. Five weeks after the wedding, he fell off of his horse and died, leaving Kline to begin her own career in the circus. She caught the attention of a well-known Wild West trick rider Otto Kline whom she married shortly thereafter. Kline rejected the plan of becoming a seamstress to instead become a popular burlesque dancer. It was a place where young women could learn proper conduct in preparation for becoming domestic servants or needle workers. Upon arriving in America, she lived in the Clara de Hirsch Home, a boarding house and industrial school in New York City for Jewish immigrant working girls. Tiny Kline came to America as a Hungarian immigrant at the age of 14 as part of a dance troupe. Her name was actually Helen Deutsch before marriage. That first Tinker bell was Tiny Kline (1961-1963). Walt came up with an answer to that problem in the summer of 1961 by having a real life Tinker Bell fly over Sleeping Beauty Castle during the nightly fireworks display. She became so closely associated with the new theme park that one of the most frequently asked questions of Disneyland cast members was "Where is Tinker Bell?"
The popular Disney weekly television show opened each week with Tinker Bell soaring through air and introducing audiences to the four lands of Disneyland.
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