by Bob Thomas
For Herb and Ray it was the final tyranny. At noon the next day Herb rode a horse into town and withdrew his and Ray’s money from the bank. After dinner the two sons said they were tired from their day’s work, and they went to their room early. Later they slipped out the window and carried their bags to the Santa Fe station, boarding the nine-thirty train to Chicago.
The loss of his two sons was a blow to Elias Disney and his hopes of developing his forty-five acres into a prosperous farm. His efforts had been hampered by his own hidebound notions about farming. “Putting fertilizer on plants is like giving whiskey to a man,” he expounded. “He’ll feel better for a while, but afterward he’ll be worse off than he was before.” He was convinced otherwise when his neighbors persuaded him to fertilize a single patch of corn and observe the difference.
The well went dry in a Missouri drought. Elias dug others, but the yield was scant. His apples ripened when the market price was low. He buried the apples in layers of straw, as his father had done in Canada. When winter came, the apples remained fresh, and the family peddled them door to door. Flora sold her butter to local residents, and Elias declared it could not be wasted at home. In a rare act of disloyalty, Flora buttered her home-baked bread and passed it butter side down to her children.
The worst of Elias Disney’s bad luck came in the winter of 1909. He contracted typhoid fever, then pneumonia. Roy assumed the burden of running the farm, but it was too much for a sixteen-year-old boy. Flora argued that the farm had to be sold, and Elias finally agreed. After four years of bone-wearying labor, he would get back only what he had paid for the farm.
Roy hitched up the wagon, and he and his little brother rode through the bitter prairie chill to tack up notices on telegraph poles and fences advertising the coming auction at the Disney farm. The two boys watched sorrowfully as their favorite animals were auctioned to other farmers. They had special affection for a six-month-old colt that they had known from birth. The auctioneer sold the colt to a farmer, and both boys cried as they saw it tied to the back of a buggy and led off down the County Pike Road.
Later that day Roy and Walt took the wagon into town to buy some provisions. As they were walking into the hardware store, they heard a persistent whinny. They gazed across the street and saw their colt, tied to the back of the farmer’s buggy. The colt had recognized them, and the boys raced across the street to hug it and cry some more.
Elias had made plans to move on to Kansas City, but he and Flora agreed that the children shouldn’t be taken out of school in midyear. They rented a house in town at 508 North Kansas Avenue, and when school was out in the spring of 1910, the family left Marceline. Walt Disney had lived there barely four years, yet that period left more of an impression than any other time in his life. Forty years later, when he built a bam for a workshop on his estate in California, it was an exact replica of the one he had known in Marceline.
ALL his remembered years had been spent amid the calm fields and country lanes of a farming town. Now the boy saw broad boulevards filled with trolleys and automobiles. The buildings climbed eight and ten stories, and the theaters glittered with a thousand electric bulbs. Noise was everywhere—the call of street vendors, the rumble of beer drays, fire wagons clanging down cobbled streets. The city was unsettling in its strangeness, but the eight-year-old Walt Disney found it exciting as well. Among his vivid early memories of the city was Fairmont Park, a place of amusement two blocks from his first Kansas City home. To a boy of eight, it seemed like a pleasure palace with its gleaming white buildings and its sounds of music and excitement. But Walt never got past the whitewashed fence. There was no money to lavish on such frivolity.
The Disneys first lived at 2706 East 31st Street in a house with cramped rooms and a privy in the back yard. Elias Disney’s health precluded the hard labor he had known most of his life. He bought a distributorship for the morning Times and evening and Sunday Star newspapers, paying $3 apiece for seven hundred subscribers. Walt and his sister Ruth were enrolled at Benton Grammar School, and soon Walt joined Roy as delivery boy for his father. Walt arose at three-thirty and claimed the newspapers from the delivery truck at four-thirty. The Star and Times had been reluctant to give a franchise to Elias Disney because of his age—fifty-one—and he felt he had to prove himself. He wouldn’t allow his boys to deliver from bicycles, throwing the newspapers on porches. He insisted that they lay the papers on the doorstep, making sure that the wind would not carry them away. During the wintertime, the papers had to be placed behind the storm doors.
For six years, Walt delivered the newspapers morning and night, missing only four weeks because of illness. In the beginning he carried the papers in a sling over his shoulder; later his father supplied a pushcart. The pushcart wasn’t big enough to accommodate all of the Sunday papers, and after his first delivery Walt returned to the distribution point for another load. The newspapers had to be distributed in rainstorms and blizzards; many times young Walt fell up to his neck in snowdrifts. During storms he welcomed the end of his route, when he visited apartment houses. Then he would make his deliveries from floor to floor in the steam-heated hallways. The warmth was so alluring that he sometimes sat down in a vestibule to take a brief nap. He always awoke in panic, puzzling over whether he had finished his deliveries in the building, fearing that he would be late for school. Until late in his life, Walt Disney had a recurring dream in which he suffered torment because he had failed to deliver some newspapers along his route.
The other newsboys were paid for their deliveries, but not Roy and Walt. Their father gave them small allowances but nothing for carrying the newspaper. “Your pay is the board and room that I provide for you,” he declared. Both boys considered that unfair; they believed that a day’s work deserved a day’s pay, even if the boss was their father. Roy, who was nineteen and had graduated from high school, could no longer tolerate his father’s domination and his frequent outbreaks of temper. “He still treats me like a little boy,” Roy complained to Walt. Roy decided to follow the course of his two older brothers and run away from home. One summer night in 1912, he told Walt he was leaving to help with the harvest at their Uncle Will’s farm in Kansas. “Don’t worry, kid; everything will be all right here,” Roy said assuringly. In the morning he was gone.
Roy’s departure placed more responsibility on Walt. When other boys proved unreliable, it was Walt who had to substitute for them or make a special delivery for a lost paper. When Elias added a new kitchen, a bedroom and a bath to the Disney home, he insisted that Walt help him. Elias had his own ways of working, and he grew impatient with Walt. “No, you don’t saw the board that way, you saw it like this!” the father would say angrily, and slap the back of the boy’s pants with the side of the saw. On such occasions Elias struck out with whatever was in his hand—a length of board, the handle of a hammer. Walt learned to run when he saw such outbursts coming. His mother intervened, telling Elias: “How do you expect Walt to know those things? He’s only a boy.”
Walt discovered his own amusements. When the circus came to the city, he followed the parade from beginning to end, his sister Ruth striving hard to keep up with him. He devised his own circus parade, enlisting Ruth and the neighborhood children to help decorate floats atop play wagons. When Ruth became ill with the measles, he amused her with drawings, including a series of figures that seemed to move when papers were flipped; at nine he had made his first attempts at animation.
Walt took a boyish delight in playing tricks on his parents. He was fascinated with magic tricks and one day brought home a small rubber bladder that could be inflated through a long tube to make a plate rise. He tried it first on his mother’s pots in the kitchen. She was startled, then delighted, and she tried the stunt on her husband at dinner that night. Elias was too occupied to notice, but Flora was so convulsed that she had to leave the room. One day Flora answered the front door to find a nicely dressed woman. Flora began to converse with her until she recognized some of her own
clothes. The visitor was Walt in his mother’s clothes, a wig and makeup.
Flora Disney brought a note of gaiety to what was often a gloomy household. Elias had been perplexed by the defections of his three older sons and disheartened by the repeated failures of his enterprises. His thrift was extraordinary—he would walk miles rather than pay a nickel for the trolley—yet he continued with his unpromising investments. He could convince himself that a mining stock or a new invention could lead to riches.
He was always thinking up new ways to make money. Remembering the sweet butter on the farm, he arranged for a Marceline dairy to send him a regular supply. Flora Disney loaded the butter into a cart and sold it door to door; Walt accompanied her, but she insisted on pushing the cart herself. Their route took them into the well-to-do district, where some of Walt’s classmates lived. The embarrassment was something the boy did not soon forget.
Most of Walt’s school years were spent at Benton Grammar School, and they provided lifelong memories. He reminisced in a 1940 letter to a onetime teacher, Daisy A. Beck: “I often think of you and the days I spent at Benton. I can plainly see you and [school principal J. M.] Cottingham coaching the athletic teams for the annual track meet. I don’t know whether you remember or not but I participated in several events and even won a medal one year on the championship 80-pound relay team. I was kept rather busy with my paper route and didn’t have much time to train, but I did manage to get in on a few events….Do you remember the time I brought the live mouse into the classroom and you smacked me on the cheek? Boy! What a wallop you had! But I loved you all the more for it. And I can still plainly see the kids marching, single file, into the classrooms to the rhythm of the piano in the hall with you and Miss [Catherine] Shrewsbury standing over the radiators while the heat billowed out your skirts. It looked very comfortable to me on those cold mornings—and sometimes I wished that I might have worn skirts myself. I remember how Cottingham would break in on any classes if he had a new story and all work would cease until he had his fun. He had his faults, but I still think of him as a swell fellow.”
Walt’s record at Benton Grammar School was undistinguished, despite his mother’s coaching with his homework. Teachers complained that the boy’s attention wandered, that he failed to follow the normal curriculum. Part of this may have been due to exhaustion from the early-morning regimen of newspaper deliveries. But Walt seemed unwilling to conform to the ordinary methods of learning. His reading of the classroom assignments was perfunctory, although he made good use of the public library. He read everything of Mark Twain, whose Missouri childhood had been similar to his own. He was engrossed by the success stories of Horatio Alger and the adventures of Tom Swift. The storytelling of Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott and Charles Dickens also intrigued him.
Walt’s abiding interest was drawing, but even in that field he could not please his teachers. When his fourth-grade teacher, Artena Olson, instructed the class to sketch a bowl of flowers on her desk, she strolled around the room and stopped at Walt’s desk. He had drawn human faces on the flowers with arms where the leaves were supposed to be. The teacher chastised him for not following the assignment.
He continued to draw things the way he saw them. His earliest efforts duplicated the political cartoons he found in Appeal to Reason, the socialist tract his father subscribed to. Walt became accomplished at portraying the top-hatted capitalist with gold watch across his bloated belly, the oppressed laboring man in work clothes and square paper hat. He developed an ease for caricature, and one day he drew impressions of the patrons at Bert Hudson’s barbershop. The barber liked them so much he asked Walt to draw a new caricature every week. His work was framed on the barbershop wall, and Hudson cut Walt’s hair for nothing.
His drawing skill helped cement a friendship with a schoolmate at Benton, Walter Pfeiffer. The two boys had become acquainted at school. One day when Walt went to call on his new friend, he was told that he had the mumps. Since Walt had already had them—on both sides—he was allowed to visit his friend. He brought along paper and charcoal, and he showed Walter how to draw.
Walt became a steady visitor at the Pfeiffer house. Mr. Pfeiffer, a jolly German whose laughter filled the house, was an official of the United Leatherworkers Union. His daughter Kitty played the piano, and he liked to have the whole family join in song. Mr. Pfeiffer adored the theater, especially the Dutch-dialect comedy of Weber and Fields, and he rattled off the jokes with gusto. After the austerity of his own home, Walt was overwhelmed by the warmth and gaiety of the Pfeiffers. He began spending more time at their house than he did at his own.
Through the Pfeiffer family, Walt Disney was introduced to an enticing new world of vaudeville shows and motion pictures. Elias Disney had always considered such entertainments to be frivolous and time-wasting, so when Walt and Walter Pfeiffer started going to the theaters, Walt was careful not to let his father know.
Around the piano at the Pfeiffer house, Walt and Walter re-created the jokes and songs they had heard in the vaudeville houses and imitated the pantomime of the movie comics. With Mr. Pfeiffer’s coaching, the two boys devised routines to perform at Benton School. Walt induced other students to wear funny costumes and repeat the jokes he had copied from the vaudeville comics. His most popular performance was “Fun in the Photograph Gallery.” Walt portrayed an antic photographer, posing his fellow students, then dousing them with a jet of water from the camera. The audience was delighted when Walt produced the “photograph”—his own caricature of the student who had been squirted.
On Lincoln’s Birthday when he was in the fifth grade, Walt converted his father’s derby into a stovepipe hat with cardboard and shoe polish, borrowed his father’s church-deacon coat with swallowtail, added crepe hair to his chin and a wart to his cheek. Principal Cottingham was so pleased with the impersonation that he took Walt into each class for a recitation of the Gettysburg Address, a ritual that continued until Walt graduated.
Walt and Walter Pfeiffer entered amateur night at a local theater with “Charlie Chaplin and the Count,” Walt playing Chaplin in his father’s derby, pants and work shoes and a lampblack mustache. They won fourth prize of twenty-five cents. Rehearsing as Walt delivered newspapers, the two boys developed other acts—“The Two Walts,” “The Boys from Benton School,” “Hans and Mike.” Walt sneaked out his bedroom window for the performances, realizing that his father would not approve. One night Elias and Flora took their daughter for a rare visit to the neighborhood vaudeville house. A performer announced he would stack three chairs over his head and balance a boy on top. The Disney parents were startled to discover that the boy atop the stack was their son Walter.
In addition to his newspaper routes, Walt delivered prescriptions for a drugstore and sold newspapers on streetcorners. During the noon recess he swept out the candy store across from school in return for a hot meal. Work became a constant, numbing routine. Sometimes as he dressed before dawn, he fell asleep while tying his shoelaces. Small diversions gave him pleasure, like playing with a miniature train left on a customer’s porch during the summer or taking a few minutes from his deliveries for football or hockey with friends.
Walt looked forward to the times when his brother Roy returned home. Roy had twice gone to work on his Uncle William’s farm in Ellis, Kansas, walking part of the way and hitching rides on freight trains. Later he was hired as teller at the First National Bank in Kansas City. Despite the difference in their ages, the two brothers maintained the same closeness they had known on the Marceline farm, and Roy provided counsel from his worldly experience.
One day Elias upbraided Walt for not handing him a tool fast enough. Walt’s temper was as hot as his father’s, and he replied sharply. Elias accused him of impertinence and ordered him to the basement for a thrashing. Roy overheard the exchange and confided to his brother, “Look, kid, he’s got no reason for hitting you. You’re fourteen years old. Don’t take it any more.” When Walt reached the basement, his father
was still in a rage, and he swung a hammer handle. Walt grabbed it away. Elias raised his hand to strike the boy. Walt held him by both wrists, and his father could not escape. Tears began to appear in Elias’s eyes. Walt loosened his grip and climbed the stairs. His father never tried to thrash him again.
Accustomed to his father’s frugality, Walt rarely asked anything for himself. But he longed for a pair of high leather boots with metal toes and decorated leather strips over the laces, arguing that the boots would be practical for delivering newspapers through the slush and rain. Flora Disney persuaded her husband to buy the boots, and at Christmas in 1916 Walt found them under the tree. He wore the boots every day as he trudged through his morning and afternoon deliveries. One early spring evening, Walt was finishing the Star route at 31st Street and Indiana, where he usually joined his friends for a soda at the drugstore. As he crossed the street, he kicked a piece of ice, then yelped in pain. A horseshoe nail had pierced the boot and jammed into his big toe. His foot was frozen fast to the ice.
“Help! I’m stuck!” he yelled, but a trolley muffled his shouts. For twenty minutes he endured excruciating pain, and no one offered assistance. Finally a wagon driver chipped the ice loose and took Walt to a doctor’s office. “Kid, I’ve got nothing to give you for the pain,” the doctor said. “You’ll just have to hang on.” He assigned two men to hold Walt’s legs, then he pulled out the nail with pliers. Walt sweated in pain as the doctor removed the boot, opened the wound, and administered a tetanus inoculation.
Two weeks free from the ordeal of delivering the Times every morning gave Walt time to think about his future life. He discarded notions of being a doctor or lawyer; he realized he had been an indifferent student, and besides, none of the Disney sons had been afforded the luxury of a college education. The show world intrigued him—he had known no greater pleasure than performing before audiences—but he lacked the confidence to compete in big-time vaudeville. Cartooning interested him most. His drawings had evoked chuckles from the patrons of Bert Hudson’s barbershop and his fellow students at Benton School. He enjoyed the children’s art classes at the Kansas City Art Institute more than his regular schoolwork. By the time Walt’s foot healed and he returned to his newspaper routes, he had decided to become a cartoonist.