The two younger Disney brothers remembered their father not as the forbidding man such anecdotes suggest, but with obvious fondness and unforced compassion. Elias was, they recognized, a decent man caged by harsh ideas. “A good dad,” Roy said. “So I don’t like him put in the light of being a brutal or mean dad. That he was not.”31
Elias had no gift for small talk, even with his sons. He was, after all, past forty when his two youngest children were born. “Yet he was the kindest fellow,” Walt said, “and he thought of nothing but his family.” Walt spoke of his father “constantly,” his daughter Diane said in 1956. “I think Dad had a very strong family feeling. He loved his dad. He thought he was tough. But he did love him. He loved that old man.”32 Strip away the crippling dogmas that Elias embraced, and a far more appealing figure emerges, a vigorous risk taker who was not afraid to take chances even when he was well into middle age—a figure with more than a passing resemblance to his youngest son.
Elias “loved to talk to people,” Walt Disney said. “He believed people. He thought everybody was as honest as he was. He got taken many times because of that.” Elias had a winning streak of eccentricity, as Walt recalled: “Dad was always meeting up with strange characters to talk socialism. . . . He’d bring them home! . . . And anybody who could play an instrument. . . . They were tramps, you know? They weren’t even clean. But he’d want to bring them into the dinner table, and my mother would have nothing of it. She’d feed them out on the steps.”
In a clear break with his astringent principles, Elias was “an old-time fiddler,” as Don Taylor, the Disneys’ Marceline neighbor as a teenager, remembered more than sixty-five years later; “and many Sundays he would harness the old buckskin mare to the family buggy, and while Ruth and Walt sat in the back with their feet hanging out, Mr. and Mrs. Disney put the violin in the buggy and drove to my parents’ home. Here he was joined by another fiddler [while] my sister . . . would play the piano. . . . I still can see Walt and Ruth sitting in straight-back chairs listening to the music which would generally last about an hour or so. To me, Walt was a very quiet, unassuming lad; and in addressing me, he would always say, ‘Hello, Dawn [sic].’ ”33
Flora Disney also softened the sternness of Elias’s rule. “We had a wonderful mother that could kid the life out of my dad when he was in his peevishness,” Roy said.34 When the family was scraping by, selling butter and eggs, she put extra butter on the children’s bread, turning the slices over so that Elias would not see that she was giving them butter he could have sold. “So,” Walt Disney said, “we’d say to Dad, ‘Look, there’s no butter on the bread.’ And it was just loaded underneath, you know?”
Walt escaped the worst of his father’s wrath. “He was a pet around the house,” Roy said. “Us older kids said that he got off easy with Dad because by the time Dad got around to him he’d worn himself out chasing us, so Walt had an easy time. Walt would get a chair between [himself] and Dad and just argue the dickens out of Dad. Dad couldn’t get ahold of him.”35 Walt Disney used a phrase like Roy’s to describe his role on the farm. “I just played,” he said. “I was sort of the pet in the family.”
Roy was a benevolent big brother to Walt and Ruth. “Roy was the one who would always see that Ruth and I had a toy,” Walt said in 1956. “Roy didn’t have much money, but by gosh he always saw we had a toy.”
Marceline’s new Park School opened in 1908, but Walt’s parents did not send him there until the fall of 1909, when he was almost eight years old; he and Ruth, two years younger, started school together. Until then, “I had leisure time,” he said. He spent much of it with his “pals” who lived on adjoining properties, the older men he identified as “Doc Sherwood” (Leighton I. Sherwood, who was in his seventies then) and “Grandpa Taylor” (probably E. H. Taylor, who was around seventy). For a time, he also enjoyed the company of his father’s widowed mother, Mary Richardson Disney, who was, unlike her straitlaced son, “always into mischief.” She aroused Elias’s ire, Walt Disney said, by sending her grandson onto a neighbor’s property to steal turnips.36
Disney remembered receiving encouragement to draw from some of his adult companions. Sherwood gave him “a nickel or something” to draw a picture of his horse, and his aunt Margaret—Robert Disney’s wife—brought him pads of paper and crayons and praised his drawings (“stick things,” Disney called them) extravagantly.37 In one oft-repeated family anecdote, the young Walt drew what Roy called “his ideas of animals” on the side of the Disney house with soft tar that Elias had used to seal a barrel that caught rainwater.
The Disneys would need that rainwater if drought dried up their wells, and there are echoes in Walt’s and Roy’s memories of how hard and practical their farm life really was. The Disneys stored apples after the harvest, Roy said, then sold them “in March and April, when you could get a respectable amount of money for a bucket of apples. We did that two years, and then Dad and I and Walt—he was big enough then to tag along but he wasn’t really much help—would go downtown and go door to door and peddle our apples. We really got good money out of it. In those days you could sell a bucket of apples for a quarter.”38
Elias induced at least some of his fellow farmers to join a sort of union called the American Society of Equity, founded a few years earlier to consolidate farmers’ buying power. In Don Taylor’s recollection, Elias hosted an oyster supper at the Knights of Pythias Hall, on the second floor above Zurcher’s jewelry store on Kansas Avenue. “Farmers came from all over with their families” to eat the soup made from five gallons of raw oysters. Writing in the 1970s, Taylor said that “never have I ever tasted oyster soup quite as good as that served at Elias Disney’s in 1907.”39
The Disneys lived on their farm for about four and a half years, until Elias sold it on November 28, 1910. “My dad had a sickness,” Walt Disney said—Roy identified it as diphtheria, but it was evidently typhoid fever, followed by pneumonia40—“and they decided to sell the farm. So my dad . . . he had to auction all the stock and things. And it was in the cold of the winter and I remember Roy and myself . . . going all around to the different little towns and places, tacking up these posters of the auction. And I remember my mother heating these bricks in the oven, we put the bricks in the floor of the buggy and a robe over us and we went around, all around tacking up these posters.”
As idyllic as life on the farm had been for the boys, Walt especially, leaving it was correspondingly painful. Roy Disney remembered “distinctly” that when the farm was sold, “we had a little six-month-old colt [that] was sold and tied up to a buggy and taken away, and Walt and I both cried. Later on that day . . . we were down in town and here was this farmer and his rig hitched up to the hitching rack and our little colt tied on behind . . . and the damn little colt saw us when we were across the street and he whinnied and whinnied and reared back on his tie-down, and we went over and hugged him and cried over him. . . . That was the last we saw of him.”41
The Disneys moved into Marceline for the remainder of the 1910–11 school year, most of that time renting a house, probably at 508 North Kansas Avenue.42 Then, on May 17, 1911, they left for Kansas City, Missouri, about 120 miles away.43 (Robert Disney lived in Kansas City then and may have encouraged his brother to move there.) They lived first in a rented house at 2706 East Thirty-first Street.44 Walt entered the Benton School at 3004 Benton Boulevard, barely two blocks from his new home, in September 1911. Although he had completed the second grade at Marceline, the Kansas City schools required him to take that grade over. In September 1914, the Disneys bought a modest frame house at 3028 Bellefontaine Street, a few steps north of Thirty-first and about four blocks east of their first Kansas City home.45
Kansas City was vast compared with Marceline. The Missouri side alone was a city of more than a quarter million people. Add Kansas City, Kansas, and other surrounding towns, and the total was well above a half million. Since the Civil War, Kansas City had grown steadily by serving as a vital hub for western set
tlement, for cattle drives, and for barge and rail traffic in agricultural products and manufactured goods from throughout the Midwest. By early in the twentieth century, its remaining frontier rawness was retreating rapidly in the face of such refinements as broad, landscaped boulevards. In 1911, Kansas City was not just bigger than Marceline, it was truly different, a real city.
Marceline and Kansas City were, however, similar in some fundamentals. Disney cheerfully associated outhouses only with Marceline when he spoke to the crowd there in July 1956, but he had remembered differently just a few weeks earlier, when he was interviewed by Pete Martin, a writer for the Saturday Evening Post. He said then, no doubt correctly, that the Disney family relied on an outhouse at its Bellefontaine address until he and his carpenter father enlarged the house one summer, adding a kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom.
For the senior Disneys, who had lived in Chicago a few years before, the move to Kansas City may have been disheartening, one more setback to absorb, but the city cannot have been as startling a change for them as it must have been for their nine-year-old son. Yet unlike other children in such situations, Walt Disney seems not to have been thrilled or cowed by the city’s crowds and bustle. He rarely if ever spoke of Kansas City with the nostalgic fondness he felt for Marceline. That was surely because—in contrast to his life on the farm—he had so little free time. From the time the Disneys moved to Kansas City, Walt was put to work.
As of July 1, 1911, Elias bought (for twenty-one hundred dollars) a Kansas City Star delivery route that extended from Twenty-seventh Street to Thirty-first Street, and from Prospect Avenue to Indiana Avenue, on the city’s southeast side. Curiously, the route was in Roy’s name, rather than Elias’s, evidently because Elias, at fifty-one, was so much older than the typical Star route owner. Elias, Roy, and Walt delivered the morning Times to almost seven hundred customers and the afternoon and Sunday Star to more than six hundred, figures that increased over time.46
“It was a big load,” Roy said. “And Sunday was a big work day. . . . We got out of the church habit because of that. That’ll break your church, you know.”47 The “church habit” had probably begun to fade even in Marceline, where there was no Congregational church. Like his brother, Walt Disney noticed a falling away in the family’s religious observances. The Disneys asked grace over dinner, he said, “but later on that kind of disappeared.”
Disney spoke of the newspaper route’s demands in 1955: “When I was nine, my brother Roy and I were already businessmen. We had a newspaper route . . . delivering papers in a residence area every morning and evening of the year, rain, shine, or snow. We got up at 4:30 A.M., worked until the school bell rang and did the same thing again from four o’clock in the afternoon until supper time. Often I dozed at my desk, and my report card told the story.”48
Forty years afterward, he still dreamed that he had missed customers on his route. “I remember those icy cold days of crawling up these icy steps” to put the newspaper inside a storm door, he said in 1956. Elias insisted that the papers not be thrown on porches or in yards, but carried to the front door. “I was so darn cold I’d slip, and I could cry, so I cried.” The Disneys’ route encompassed grander homes than their own, and Walt said the “wealthy kids” on his route often left “wonderful toys” outside. He sometimes paused in his deliveries to play “with these electric trains or wind-up trains.”
Roy Disney delivered newspapers for his father only until he graduated from Manual Training High School in 1912.49 He then worked on an uncle’s farm for a summer before taking a job as a clerk at the First National Bank of Kansas City. Walt Disney continued to deliver papers, for a total of more than six years. In the winter when snow was on the ground, said the Disneys’ next-door neighbor Meyer Minda, Elias and Walt loaded their newspapers onto bobsleds. On summer mornings, the Mindas were awakened by the clanking iron wheels of the Disneys’ delivery cart.50
When Elias hired other boys to help with the route he paid them three or four dollars a week, Walt Disney said, but he would not pay his son. “He said that it was part of my job. I was part of the family. He said, ‘I clothe and feed you.’ . . . So he wouldn’t pay me.” Walt began to find ways to make—and keep—money behind Elias’s back, first by delivering medicine for a drugstore while he was delivering papers, and then by ordering and selling extra papers that Elias did not know about.
Meyer Minda, two years Walt’s senior, remembered that the two boys “opened a pop stand together at the corner of Thirty-first Street and Mont-gall,” near the Disneys’ first Kansas City home, when Walt was ten, in the summer of 1912. “It ran about three weeks and we drank up all the profits.”51 Walt later drew cartoons for a barber named Bert Hudson, proprietor of the Benton Barber Shop on Thirty-first Street near the Benton School. He caricatured “all the critters that hung out there,” Disney said, and got haircuts in return.52
“The upshot of it was,” he said in 1956, “I was working all the time.”
So was his father. In addition to the Star route, Elias imported butter and eggs from a dairy in Marceline—“I think every week or two weeks,” Walt said—and sold them to his newspaper customers. Sometimes Elias was ill when it came time to deliver the butter and eggs, and on those days his parents took Walt out of school so that he could help his mother make deliveries. Disney remembered his embarrassment at having to push the delivery cart through the neighborhood where his schoolmates lived.
As Walt grew up and Elias grew older, the weight in their relationship began to shift. Walt Disney recalled an incident when his father, angry because Walt had talked back, ordered him to the basement for a whipping. As Walt started down, Roy told him, “Don’t take it.” In the basement, when Walt again responded sharply to something his father said, Elias raised a hammer, “and he started to hit me, and I took the hammer out of his hand. He raised his other arm and I held both of his hands. And I just held them there. I was stronger than he was. I just held them. And he cried. He never touched me after that.”
Walt and Ruth graduated from the seventh grade at Benton School on June 8, 1917.53 Elias had sold the paper route on March 17, 1917, and it was apparently soon after graduation that he and Flora, and Ruth with them, moved back to Chicago. Elias had been investing in a Chicago jelly concern called the O-Zell Company at least since 1912, and the limited available evidence suggests that he moved in order to take a more active role in the company’s management.54 Walt stayed behind, continuing to work on the paper route for its new owner while living in the family home with Roy, their older married brother, Herbert, and Herbert’s wife and baby daughter.
Roy had worked two summers for the Fred Harvey Company as what was called a news butcher, a vendor of candy, fruit, and soft drinks, on some of the many Santa Fe trains passing through Kansas City.55 After graduation, Walt followed Roy into such a job for the Kansas City—based Van Noy Interstate Company, which owned the concessions on much of the country’s railroad network (but not the Santa Fe). Walt lied about his age, not for the last time, since he would not turn sixteen until December.
Although Walt had been working almost all the time since his family had moved to Kansas City, he had always been under Elias’s thumb; but now his father was in Chicago. As a news butcher Walt Disney was for the first time completely on his own, a fledgling businessman. By his own account, he fared badly at the hands of his customers. He was the repeated victim of cruel jokes that robbed him of empty soda bottles and thus of his profits. His co-workers treated him no better, pretending to help him while stuffing his hamper with rotten fruit—and Disney himself, attracted by the candy bars he was selling, “couldn’t resist eating my own stock,” in a repetition of what had happened with the pop stand. (He suffered in another way as well: almost forty years later, he vividly remembered being snubbed by a pretty classmate—“I had always had an eye on her at school”—who was a passenger.)
At the end of the summer, when he left to join his parents in Chicago, Disney was in debt to
his employer. Roy said many years later that his brother “just wasn’t attending to business. So he’d come in and he couldn’t account for all that merchandise he took out so he’d run into a loss and who do you think paid his losses? . . . He was always that way. He never had any knack for business”—that is, business conceived in terms of the careful, precise accounting that Roy found congenial. “It just annoyed him.”56
For all the disappointments associated with it, Disney remembered “this news butchering chore” as a “very exciting thing.” Since he was very small, his life had been confined to Marceline and Kansas City; as a news butcher, he rode different lines’ trains to surrounding states. For him, as for so many of his contemporaries, railroads opened up the world as nothing else could. “I loved them,” he said of the trains he rode.
In Chicago, the Disneys rented a flat in a two-flat building at 1523 Ogden Avenue on the Near West Side, about five miles closer to the downtown Loop than their old Tripp Avenue address.57 Walt enrolled in the eighth grade at McKinley High School at 2040 West Adams Street—and, as always, he worked, this time in the jelly factory of which Elias was part owner, in the 1300 block of West Fifteenth Street.58 He washed bottles, crushed apples, and once carried a pistol as a very nervous sixteen-year-old night watchman. He also took classes three nights a week at an art school, the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts.59 That was his only formal art training of any kind, apart from some children’s classes that he attended “two winters, three nights a week” in Kansas City, sponsored by the school then called the Fine Arts Institute.60
At McKinley he was a typical high school cartoonist, displaying in his stiff, awkward drawings such limited artistic ability that most others would have shed any ambitions of that kind in favor of more mundane employment. The characters in Disney’s cartoons for the monthly high school magazine, The Voice—pug-nosed and vaguely Irish—owe a great deal to the cast of George McManus’s comic strip Bringing Up Father.61
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