by Bob Thomas
By 1917, Elias Disney had been in Kansas City seven years and was growing restless. The newspaper distributorship had not grown as he had hoped, and it was hard to find reliable delivery boys. A new business enterprise beckoned. For $16,000, Elias could acquire an interest in the O-Zell jelly factory in Chicago, as well as the position of head of plant construction. He invested his entire savings, as well as $20 belonging to his son Walter.
Walt, who had graduated from Benton School on June 8, 1917, remained in Kansas City for the summer to help the new distributor with the newspaper route. Herbert Disney, who now had a wife and daughter, moved into the family house, and Walt and Roy continued living there. Roy suggested that Walt get a job on the railroad; Roy himself had worked two summers as news butcher for the Santa Fe, selling newspapers, cold drinks, fruit and candy to the travelers. Walt applied for a summer job with the Van Noyes Interstate News Company, claiming to be sixteen although he was a year younger. The job required a $15 bond, which Roy supplied from his earnings at the bank.
Walt was outfitted with a blue serge uniform with a badge on the lapel and gold buttons marked “Van Noyes Interstate.” At the Van Noyes office in the Kansas City railroad station he picked up hampers packed with fruit, popcorn, peanuts, candy bars and soda pop. His first run was an eight-hour trip from Kansas City to Jefferson City, Missouri, and Walt placed the hampers in the news butcher’s position on the two front seats of the smoking car. As the train pulled out of the station, Walt stood on the steps behind the conductor, hoping the youngsters on the platform would admire his uniform.
It was a hot summer day, and Walt found many customers for soda pop in the commuter cars. Instead of walking back to the smoker, he placed the empty bottles in a box at the end of the train. After a couple of hours he returned to collect the bottles. He was dismayed to find the commuter cars had vanished. “Those cars are always detached at Lee’s Summit,” the conductor explained. Loss of the empty bottles wiped out Walt’s first-day profit.
Roy chided his brother for allowing the company to stock his hampers with overripe fruit. Walt sometimes left the hampers unguarded and returned to find candy and cigars missing. Once he sold soda pop to soldiers who filled a tourist car. They amused themselves by hurling the empty bottles from the train. Walt complained to the brakeman, “Those guys threw my bottles out the window!” The brakeman told the top sergeant, who made the soldiers pay for the lost bottles.
The romance of railroading was overwhelming for a fifteen-year-old whose only journeys had been from Chicago to Marceline, and Marceline to Kansas City. He rode the Missouri Pacific, the Kansas City, Southern & Missouri, and the Kansas & Texas lines to towns and cities in a half-dozen states. One of his favorite runs was from Kansas City to Downs, Kansas, a slow, six-hour trip during which the train stopped at every station, sometimes pushing boxcars onto sidings to clear the track. Walt went forward to supply baggagemen with cigars and chewing tobacco, then climbed over the tender to the cab, where the engineer and fireman allowed him to ride for part of the journey. During long stopovers, Walt explored the towns and cities. One day in Downs, where the train turned around and refueled, Walt was strolling past the stores when a policeman accosted him. The boy was accused of surveying the town for a robbery. The officer was unconvinced by Walt’s claim of innocence until the train crew verified that the boy was a news butcher.
After all-day runs, Walt stayed overnight in railroad hotels or boarding houses, returning to Kansas City the following day. During a visit to Pueblo, Colorado, he recalled that a friendly salesman had recommended a place to stay. Walt located the address and he was greeted warmly by a motherly woman in a green velvet robe. She asked where he was from and offered to get him a beer. While she was gone, Walt admired the elegant furnishings and gold piano and wondered if the place were priced beyond his means. He heard laughter at the top of the red-carpeted stairs, and a young cowboy and a pretty girl strolled down, arm in arm. Walt suddenly realized he was not in the normal kind of boarding house, and he made a swift exit.
The summer travels had brought a new maturity to Walt, but no profit. The overripe fruit attracted flies, and the conductor made him throw it off the train. The empty bottles continued to disappear, and pilferage from the hampers added to the daily losses. Finally Roy advised, “You’d better give it up, kid. You’re not going to get ahead of the game, so you might as well just take your loss.” Walt reluctantly agreed. Summer would soon be over, and he would be joining his parents in Chicago to begin high school. Roy took the loss. Walt forfeited to Van Noyes the $15 deposit that his brother had lent him.
FROM the October 1917 issue of The Voice, magazine of McKinley High School, Chicago:
The freshmen are determined to make a great success this year, and from the early results, we may conclude that their boasts and determination have not been asserted in vain. They are already taking part in the vim and excitement of high school life.
Walter Disney, one of the newcomers, has displayed unusual artistic talent, and has become a Voice cartoonist….
Walt at last was getting his cartoons published. They were facile and humorous and reflected his own impatience to join the war effort. Roy had enlisted in the Navy, and Walt was envious when his older brother came home from the Great Lakes Naval Training Station in his sailor’s uniform. Walt had grown as tall as Roy, but he was still too young to enlist. He inscribed his cartoons for The Voice with such slogans as “Your Summer Vacation—Work or Fight,” and “Buy War Saving Stamps—Save and Serve.” One of his cartoons showed two slackers scoffing at a doughboy (“Wounded, hey? Well, that is too bad”) while a pair of policemen threatened, “We’ll nab those two loafers when the soldier leaves ‘em.” Walt also served as photographer for The Voice, and he studied anatomy, pen technique and cartooning three nights a week at the Chicago Institute of Art. Among his teachers were Carey Orr, cartoonist for the Chicago Tribune, and Leroy Gossitt, of the Herald, and Walt was permitted to visit them at the newspaper offices. He worked long hours over drawings in his room, never revealing a project until he completed it.
He began assembling a gag file. He sat for hours in vaudeville houses, scribbling down jokes for cartoons. He also copied gags from burlesque comedians at the Haymarket and the Star and Garter—this was a time when burlesque offered family entertainment, not the bawdiness of a later era. Walt compiled the jokes and tried out the best ones on his father. Elias listened to them without a smile. Two days later, he would remark straight-faced to his son, “You know, I’ve been thinking about that joke you told me, Walter. It’s funny, very funny.”
Elias Disney could not understand his son’s fascination with the entertainment world, nor did he sympathize with Walt’s ambition to be a cartoonist. But he agreed to pay for the boy’s correspondence courses in art—as long as Walt contributed to the family income. Walt worked as handyman in the jelly factory, washing jars and capping them, mashing apples for pectin, nailing up boxes. One night he served as night watchman, patrolling the factory with .38-caliber revolver and flashlight. He turned on all the lights and kept the gun in his hand so burglars would know he was armed.
The jelly factory paid him only $7 a week, and Walt quit to work as a guard and gateman on the Wilson Avenue elevated railway line at forty cents an hour. Each afternoon Walt donned his cap and badge and rode the elevated to the terminus in Chicago. If too many gatemen appeared for work, Walt returned home. Usually he was assigned to the rear gate, where he loaded a car with commuters, then rang the bell twice to signal the motorman to leave the station.
When Walt finished his freshman year at McKinley High School in the spring of 1918, he and a friend applied for summer jobs at the post office. The friend lied about his age and was hired, but Walt admitted that he was sixteen and was turned away. He went home and penciled a few lines on his face, borrowed his father’s suit and hat, and returned to the same employment window, declaring he was eighteen. He was hired.
Walt worked from t
welve to fourteen hours a day, sorting the mail and making special deliveries throughout the city, riding free on streetcars and elevateds. One day the supervisor asked if Walt could drive a truck. “Sure,” he replied; he had once driven a two-cylinder Buick in Kansas City. He was assigned to a White truck with four speeds forward and four reverse. Walt lurched through the Chicago streets on his deliveries, but by the time he returned to the garage he had mastered the truck. On Sundays he rode the streetcar to the end of the Grand Avenue pier and collected the mail, mostly postcards from vacationers to the folks back home. Then he took the streetcar to the post-office stables, harnessed a horse, hitched it to a mail wagon, and set out to pick up letters at boxes in front of the downtown hotels. The supervisor warned him: “Now, kid, leave that horse alone. He knows every box, and he knows his way back to the barn. Just keep your hands off the reins.”
It was hard to avoid the reins, especially when automobiles sped past the wagon. But the horse seemed to know what to do. At the Rush Street bridge, which rose to allow boats to pass on the river, the horse came to a stop with its chest touching the chain; it waited stolidly for the bridge to lower, then proceeded across. Walt didn’t need a route list. The horse halted beside every mailbox, and Walt jumped down to gather up the letters. As soon as he slammed the tailgate of the wagon, the horse began walking forward, and Walt had to run to catch up, stepping on the wheel hub to climb aboard. He realized that the slam was the horse’s signal to start, so he learned to ease the tailgate shut, then climb on the wagon and say, “Go on.”
The system worked perfectly until Walt reached a big hotel in the downtown Loop. He went inside the lobby to collect the letters, and when he returned to the street, the horse was gone. Walt was in a panic. A horse with a wagonful of mail had disappeared in the busy downtown streets, and he was responsible. He ran to the corners and peered down each block, but there was no sign of the horse. He returned disconsolately to the hotel entrance, then looked through the passageway to the next street. The horse was waiting patiently on the other side. Its routine was to proceed around the block and wait for the mailman to pass through to the other side of the hotel.
One day Walt was sorting letters with his fellow mailmen and joking about how the postal inspectors spied through holes in the wall. He noticed that the other men fell silent, and he turned around to find two uniformed inspectors standing behind him. “Disney, come with us,” one of them said. He followed the two inspectors down a long corridor as hundreds of mail sorters watched. The two men took Walt to an office and began their interrogation.
“Two Sundays ago, you picked up a bag of mail at the Grand Avenue pier. What did you do with it?”
“I took it to the post office and put it down the chute.”
“No, you didn’t. The mail never reached the post office. Tell us what you did with it.”
Walt was certain that he had deposited the mail as usual. Finally one of the inspectors said, “We’ll tell you what you did with the mail. You hung it on a peg at the stable, and it’s been there for two weeks. Now be more careful. And get back to work.”
The summer of 1918 was the best that Walt had known. His hours for the post office were long, but there was no drudgery to the work, and he was outdoors most of the time. At night he took girls from McKinley High School to movies and vaudeville shows.
For the first time in his life, Walt had enough money to indulge himself, and he contemplated buying a movie camera or a canoe. A girl friend urged him to buy a canoe, but he decided on the camera. He mounted it on a tripod in an alley and photographed himself in imitations of Charlie Chaplin. To please his friend, he joined another boy in buying an inexpensive canoe; it was so small and unwieldy that he and the girl were swept out into the lake on a windy Sunday.
By late summer, the Allies had stopped the Germans in the second battle of the Marne, and Marshal Foch had ordered a counterattack. Walt grew more impatient to get in uniform, telling his parents, “I don’t want my grandchildren asking me, ‘Why weren’t you in the war? Were you a slacker?’” The Navy had transferred Roy to Charleston, South Carolina, then assigned him to voyages between New York and France. Ray Disney had joined the Army. Walt wanted to take part in the same adventure; he couldn’t conceive of returning to high school for another year. A friend at the post office, Russell Maas, shared his feelings. They decided to cross the border and enlist in the Canadian Army, which accepted younger recruits. Their plot was thwarted when Russell’s mother discovered his packed suitcase; her son admitted the plan and she warned Flora Disney. One day Russell arrived at the post office and told Walt excitedly, “There’s something forming here that you and I can get into. It’s a volunteer group called the American Ambulance Corps, part of the Red Cross. They need drivers, and they’re not fussy about how old you are.”
At noon, the two young men hurried to the headquarters of the American Red Cross. They learned the age limit for ambulance-unit volunteers was seventeen. Both were sixteen, but they falsified their ages and signed up as the St. John brothers, Russell and Walter. The ruse succeeded until the applications for passports, which required their parents’ signatures. Walt was forced to disclose his plan to his parents. “I will not sign any permission,” Elias Disney declared. “It’s signing a death warrant for my son.”
Flora Disney argued that three of their sons had left the family home by stealth and she didn’t want Walter to go the same way. “The boy is determined,” she said. “I would rather sign this and know where he is than have him run off.”
“Well, you can sign it for me—I won’t!” Elias replied, and he stalked from the room. Flora forged his name on the passport application, and Walt altered his birthdate to read “1900.” He and Russell Maas returned to the Red Cross, and their applications were accepted. The two boys received uniforms and reported to a tent encampment at a burned-down amusement park near the University of Chicago. Mechanics from the Yellow Cab Company taught them how to repair motors and drive cars over rough terrain.
An influenza epidemic struck Chicago, and Walt became so sick that he was ordered to a hospital. The ambulance driver asked him, “You live in Chicago, kid?” When Walt said that he did, the driver suggested, “We better take you home. With this flu going on, you’d never come out of a hospital alive.” Walt took the advice. Two of his close friends had been taken to the hospital, and they had died the next day.
Flora Disney nursed her son through days of high fever and delirium, giving him poultices and heavy doses of quinine. Because his bedroom had no heat, Walt occupied his parents’ room; when little Ruth became ill, her bed was placed beside the kitchen stove. Flora herself caught the influenza, which was killing Chicagoans by the hundreds, but she continued caring for her two children. Finally the fevers broke. Walt regained strength and returned to the Ambulance Corps. He was dismayed to learn that his outfit, including Russell Maas, had shipped out. Walt was assigned to a new unit and sent to Sound Beach, Connecticut, to await passage to France.
November 11, 1918, brought jubilation to the country, but the Red Cross volunteers at Sound Beach greeted the Armistice with ambivalent feelings. The reason for their volunteering had gone and they faced the future as peacetime chauffeurs. They called themselves Coxey’s Army, after the ragtag band of unemployed who marched on Washington in 1894, and they grumbled about camp discipline, complaining that they were treated like draftees. Homesickness became endemic. Walt missed his mother’s cooking, and he longed to see the girl who had promised to wait for his return.
Early one morning, lights flashed on in the barracks and the awakening volunteers heard a voice shout: “Up everybody! Up everybody! Fifty guys going to France!” A bunkmate shook Walt and said, “Hey, Diz, wake up; they’re shipping out fifty guys.” Walt replied groggily, “They won’t pick me,” and he returned to sleep. The fiftieth name called was Walter E. Disney. His companions rolled him out of bed and within an hour he was on the train to Hoboken. That night, November 18, he embark
ed for France aboard a rusting cattle ship, the Vaubin.
The disappointment over the end of the war was now forgotten in the new adventure of crossing the Atlantic on a ship laden with ammunition. Although there was no reason to fear German U-boats, the ship had to pass through waters that had been heavily mined. Disregarding the danger, Walt slept directly over the magazine hatch. As the ship approached France, minesweepers came alongside to provide an escort through the hazardous English Channel. The Red Cross volunteers lined the railing to watch the minesweepers, long booms on each side, patrol the waters, their gun crews scanning the surface for mines. At Cherbourg, huge anti-submarine nets parted to allow the Vaubin to enter the port. The ship didn’t land, but continued on to Le Havre, arriving December 4. Walt disembarked with his shipmates, and the young Midwesterners toured the waterfront streets wonderingly. Few had been away from their own cities, and they were overwhelmed by the sights of the French seaport. They were astonished by the streetcorner urinals, and none could summon the nerve to use them. But after a day of sightseeing, one of the Americans could wait no longer. He stepped cautiously up to the pissoir, and his companions followed.
Members of the American Ambulance Corps trooped to the railroad station for the trip to Paris. Walt was fascinated to see how small the French engines seemed in comparison to those he had known in his summer as a news butcher. He stared out the window on the journey through the French countryside, noticing the high hedges and the groves of poplars that separated the small farms.