Biography | Michael Eisner — The Grand Hall Where 43 Percent Withheld the Chair

People treat a Disney annual meeting as a Florida cast-member show.

On 3 March 2004 it filled the Grand Hall of the Pennsylvania Convention Center at 1101 Arch Street.

The hall occupies the old Reading Railroad train shed. Shareholders queued from before dawn. Costumed characters worked the floor. About 3,000 investors sat through five and a half hours.

Roy E. Disney and Stanley Gold, who had left the board the previous autumn, were given time to speak against the chief executive.

When the vote was counted, holders of about 43 percent of the shares represented withheld support from Michael Eisner's re-election to the board. He ran unopposed and stayed on the board. The withhold share the year before had been about 7 percent.

That night the directors met at the Four Seasons Hotel in Philadelphia and separated the chairmanship from the chief executive title. Former senator George Mitchell took the chair. Eisner remained CEO until 30 September 2005.

The company had picked Philadelphia because ABC's strongest owned station sat there, not because the train shed was a Disney set.

The pin is the Grand Hall, the room that held the vote, not the hotel where the board finished the titles.

Photo: Carol M. Highsmith, Pennsylvania Convention Center, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: Michael Eisner, October 2010, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.