by Neal Gabler
The Disneys arrived in Chicago late in the spring of 1890, a few months after Charles Call’s death, with their infant son, Herbert, and with Flora pregnant again. Elias rented a one-story frame cottage at 3515 South Vernon on the city’s south side, an old mid-nineteenth-century farmhouse now isolated amid much more expensive residences; its chief recommendation was that it was only twenty blocks from the site of the exposition. Construction on the fair began early the next year, after Flora had given birth that December to a second son, Ray. The family enjoyed few extravagances. Elias earned only a dollar a day as a carpenter. But he was industrious and frugal, and by the fall he had saved enough to purchase a plot of land for $700 through his brother’s real estate connections. By the next year he had applied for a building permit at 1249 Tripp Avenue* to construct a two-story wooden cottage for his family, which the following June would add another son, Roy O. Disney.
Though it was set within the city, the area to which they moved the spring of 1893, in the northwestern section, was primitive. It had only two paved roads and had just begun to be platted for construction, which made it a propitious place for a carpenter. Elias contracted to help build homes, and one of his sons recalled that Flora too would go out to the sites and “hammer and saw planks with the men.” Still, by his wife’s estimate Elias averaged only seven dollars a week. But he was a Disney, and he had not surrendered his dreams. Using Robert’s contacts and leveraging his own house through mortgages, he began buying plots in the subdivision, designing residences with Flora’s help and then building them—small cottages for workingmen like himself. By the end of the decade he and a contracting associate had built at least two additional homes on the same street on which he lived—one of which he sold for $2,500 and the other of which he and his partner rented out for income. In effect, under Robert’s tutelage, Elias had become a real estate maven, albeit an extremely modest one.
But by this time, already in his forties, he had begun to place his hope less in success, which seemed hard-won and capricious, than in faith. Both the Disneys and the Calls had been deeply religious, and Elias and Flora’s social life in Chicago now orbited the nearby Congregational church, of which they were among the most devoted members. When the congregation decided to reorganize and then voted to erect a new building just two blocks from the Disneys’ home, Elias was named a trustee as well as a member of the building committee. By the time the new church, St. Paul’s, was dedicated in October 1900, the family was attending services not only on Sundays but during the week. Occasionally, when the minister was absent, Elias would even take the pulpit. “[H]e was a pretty good preacher,” Flora would remember. “[H]e did a lot of that at home, you know.”
It would become embedded in Disney family lore that when Flora had a baby boy in the upper bedroom of their Tripp house on December 5, 1901, the child’s name was part of a pastoral bargain. As the story went, Flora and the wife of the new young minister, Walter Parr, were pregnant at the same time. Elias and Parr agreed that if their wives both had sons, Elias would name his after the minister and the minister would name his after Elias. This was supposedly how Elias and Flora’s new baby came to be named Walter Elias Disney. The story, however, was only partly true. The Disneys’ second son, Ray, may have originally been named Walter—that was the name on his birth registration—before the family reconsidered, which suggests that the Disneys had thought of the name previously. (The confusion would spur rumors later on about whether Walt was actually the Disneys’ natural-born child, especially since Walt had no birth certificate, only a baptismal certificate.*) In addition, though Mrs. Parr and Flora had indeed been pregnant at the same time, with Flora late in her pregnancy and Mrs. Parr early in hers, the Parrs’ baby boy, born the following July, was named not Elias but Charles Alexander. Not until the birth of another son two and a half years later, in May 1904, did the Parrs seem to keep their part of the bargain, if there was one, naming the child Walter Elias Parr.
Young Walter Elias Disney, fine-featured and golden-haired and favoring the soft Calls more than the flinty Disneys, would not remember much about Chicago. He was scarcely four years old in 1906 when Elias decided yet again to move, though the motive this time was less financial or even temperamental than moral. Two neighbor boys the same ages as Herbert and Ray and from an equally devout St. Paul’s family had attempted to rob a car barn and had killed a policeman during a shootout. Terrified that his own boys might be led astray, especially since the neighborhood was growing rougher, Elias began searching for a more salubrious environment, even making a few brief scouting expeditions, before settling on a remote Missouri town where his brother Robert had recently purchased some farmland as an investment. In February Elias sold their house for $1,800 and another property a month later. He, Herbert, Ray, and two draft horses they had bought in Chicago then went on to Missouri in a boxcar to ready the farm while Flora, Roy, Walt, and their new baby sister, Ruth, followed on the Santa Fe train. “That was a big moment when we were going to go away,” Walt recalled years later. “[I]t sounded wonderful to all of us,” Roy would confirm, “going on a farm.”
II
Walt Disney would remember Marceline, Missouri. He would remember it more vividly than anything else in his childhood, perhaps more vividly than any place in his entire lifetime. “Marceline was the most important part of Walt’s life,” his wife would say. “He didn’t live there very long. He lived in Chicago and Kansas City much longer. But there was something about the farm that was very important to him.” He would remember the family’s arrival—“clearly remember every detail of it,” he later said. He remembered getting off the train and crossing to a grain elevator, where a neighbor named Coffman waited for them, and he remembered clambering onto Coffman’s wagon and driving out to the farm about a mile from the town’s center, north of Julep Road and of the railroad track that sliced diagonally through the heart of Marceline. And he remembered his first impression of the site—its dazzling wide front yard carpeted green and crowded with weeping willows.
It was a small farm. Uncle Robert’s property, a mile west, was nearly five hundred acres, while Elias had purchased only forty acres on March 5, 1906, from the children of a Civil War veteran named Crane who had died recently, and then bought just over five acres more the next month from Crane’s widow. Elias’s property cost $3,000, money he did not have just then, but he had made an arrangement to pay in installments as he received the proceeds from the sale of his properties in Chicago. Despite its modest size, Walt would always recall the farm through the prism of a child’s wonder and always think of it as a paradise. Game abounded; there were foxes, rabbits, squirrels, opossums, and raccoons. And there were birds. During migration teal and sprig would settle on the pasture pond. Of the forty-five acres, five were planted with orchards, apple, peach, and plum trees with grapevines and berry plants. “We had every kind of apple you ever heard of,” Walt recalled, “including one called a Wolf River apple. Wolf River apples were tremendous in size. People came from miles to see ours.” And there were a hog pen, chickens, a few milk cows, and four to six horses. “[I]t was just heaven for city kids,” said Roy, which is exactly what Elias intended it to be.
And because it was in the country everything seemed heavenly, even when it wasn’t. The wooden one-story farmhouse in which the Disneys lived was crudely constructed with whitewashed siding and green trim and so cramped that the back parlor had to be converted into a bedroom for Herbert and Ray. But surrounded by the willows, mock orange trees, silver maples, cedars, lilacs, and dogwoods, it was, in the words of Elias’s aunt, “a very hansome [sic] place” with a front yard “like a park.” She was so smitten that she debated whether she could ever return to Ellis.
Walt Disney had the same dreamy vision of the farm as his great-aunt. “Everything connected with Marceline was a thrill to us,” he once reminisced. Coming from what he described as “crowded, smoky” Chicago, he was especially fascinated by the livestock and claimed that hi
s time on the farm imbued him with a special feeling toward animals that he would never lose. He often told about herding the pigs by climbing on their backs, riding them into the pond to root, and sometimes getting shrugged off into the mud—a sight so comical that Elias invited guests to watch. Other times he and a few other children would get up on an old horse named Charley who, Walt said, had “his own sense of humor.” Charley headed toward the orchard, forcing the children to jump off his back to avoid being hit by the limbs. Everywhere Walt went he was trailed by a little Maltese terrier he had been given, his first pet, that would snap at his heels and tear his socks. He counted it a “big tragedy” when the dog followed Roy into town one day and never returned.
Walt Disney would always speak of these as his halcyon days. He did not start school until he was nearly seven because, he said, there was no one to take him and because his parents decided he could wait another year and accompany his sister, Ruth, when she started school. “It was the most embarrassing thing [that] could happen to a fellow,” he would later complain, “that I had to practically start in school with my little sister who was two years younger.” But school did not seem to have much appeal anyway except as a stage on which he could perform, and his one memory from his Marceline education was a Tom Sawyerish escapade in which his teacher asked the children to bring in switches to use on misbehaving students and Walt surreptitiously laid a thick barrel stave on her desk. When she queried who had brought it, Walt, knowing he would get a laugh from his classmates, confessed, only to find himself being struck with the stave by the teacher.
When he was not in school or on the farm, he often spent languid afternoons fishing with the neighbor boys for catfish and bowheads in Yellow Creek and skinny-dipping afterward. In the winter they would go sledding or skating on the frozen creek, building a bonfire on the shore to keep warm. Sometimes Walt would tag after Erastus Taylor, a Civil War veteran, who would relive his battle exploits. (“I don’t think he ever was in a battle in the Civil War,” Walt later said, “but he was in all of them.”) Even Sundays were no longer committed exclusively to church and Sunday school since there was no Congregational church in Marceline. Instead, the Disneys often spent the day going to the Taylor house just down the road, where Elias would take out his fiddle and play with his neighbors.
The town was no less enchanting than the farm. In seeking to escape the encroachments and dangers of the city, Elias Disney could hardly have found a better place than Marceline. Though it qualified as frontier, Marceline was sedate, even refined. Located east of the Locust River off State Highway 5, Marceline, like Ellis, Kansas, was a product of the railroad boom, specifically of the desire of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad to establish a “Chicago Extension,” connecting that city to the west via Kansas City, which lay about 125 miles southwest of the town. The plan necessitated what were called “terminal” or “division” points roughly every one hundred miles along the route, where trains could be serviced and workers housed. Marceline, which became one of these division points, was incorporated on March 6, 1888, and named, depending on who told the story, after the wife or the daughter of one of the railroad’s directors, or the daughter of the town’s first resident civil engineer, or a French immigrant who was an early resident. Within six months 2,500 people had settled there, primarily to service the railroad. Within a year a prospector named U. C. Wheelock discovered coal there, eventually leading to the digging of five mines, which would employ five hundred more men. When the Santa Fe was reorganized in 1903 and was divided into an eastern and a western division, Marceline became the seat of the latter.
Young Walt Disney was impressed by the town’s appearance—that it looked exactly the way a small town should look. From what the local newspaper described as a “motley array of tents and shacks” at its founding, Marceline had, by the time the Disneys moved there, become a “dignified and sturdy” town of roughly 4,500 residents, with two hundred houses built in the preceding two years alone. “A stranger coming here is amazed at the number of lovely lawns and elegant homes,” a civic booster beamed a few years after the Disneys settled there. “In this feature she is excelled by no city of equal population on the continent.” Down the main thoroughfare, Kansas Avenue, still unpaved at the time of the Disneys’ arrival, were the Simpson & Miller Dry Goods Store; Hayden & Anderson’s meat market; the Meriden Creamery; the three-story New York Racket Store, where, an advertisement boasted, a bride could order her complete trousseau and then select the furnishings for her new home; Hott’s Tavern, run by Judge Hott, where “you are sure of getting a good bed—provided the house is not full”; R. J. Dall & Sons ice company; the Brown Hardware Company; Sutton’s Tonsorial Parlor; the Allen Implement Company for farm machinery; Zircher’s Jewelry Store with its free-standing clock on the corner; J. E. Eillis Big Department Store; and the two-story gray granite Allen Hotel. Just off Kansas Avenue at the center of town was another quintessential image of quaint small-town life—Ripley Square, a wooded park with a band gazebo, a long pond, and a cannon sitting atop a four-sided plaster base with a mound of cannonballs nearby.
But however much it may have looked the archetype of hidebound agrarian America, Marceline was not especially conservative—with its large workforce, it was a hotbed of support for the Democratic populist William Jennings Bryan—and it prided itself on its progressivism, which allowed young Walt to receive his cultural education there and led him to comment once that “more things of importance happened to me in Marceline than have happened since—or are likely to in the future.” In Marceline Walt saw his first circus and attended his first Chautauqua, a traveling tent show that prominently featured the leading orators of the day. In Marceline he broke his piggy bank to get money to watch Maude Adams play Peter Pan in a touring company, inspiring him to reprise the role in a school production. “No actor ever identified himself with the part he was playing more than I,” he said, recalling how the hoist and tackle that brother Roy used to enable Walt to fly gave way and sent Walt “right into the faces of the surprised audience.” In Marceline he was awaiting the parade for Buffalo Bill’s visiting Wild West Show when Buffalo Bill himself stopped his buggy and invited Walt to join him. “I was mighty impressed,” Walt later wrote. And in Marceline, after school one day, Walt coaxed his sister Ruth to see their first motion picture—a life of Christ, as Ruth remembered it. She also remembered her parents’ scolding when the children returned home after dark, “in spite of Walt’s telling me it was all right to go.”
But it was not just the homely appearance of Marceline or the cultural rites of passage he experienced there that Walt Disney loved and remembered and would burnish for the rest of his life; it was also the spirit of the community. In Marceline people cared for one another and were tolerant of one another; even a black man who had gotten into a scuffle with some white roughs was exonerated by a local judge. “[E]verything was done in a community help,” Walt recalled. “One farmer would help the other, they’d go and help repair fences. They would do different things.” He especially enjoyed the camaraderie of threshing season, when the wagons would be hitched behind a big steam engine and rumble through the fields, and the neighbors would gather to help, sleeping in the Disneys’ front yard, and their wives would arrive too, all joining forces to cook for their men in a scene that Walt would always think back on fondly.
Nor was it only the community of neighbors he recalled. Living in Marceline would be the first and last time in Walt’s life that the extended Disney family would be a presence, and he clearly basked in the attention. His uncle Mike Martin, who was an engineer on the train running between Marceline and Ft. Madison, Iowa, and who was, Walt said, “one of the prides of my life,” would arrive, walking or hitchhiking the mile from the station in town, and come up to the farm carrying a striped bag of candy for the children. Grandma Disney, a mischievous woman who in her old age seemed to relish bedeviling her dour, straitlaced son, would also come from Ellis and stay. During
one of their frequent walks she had Walt crawl under a neighbor’s fence to pick some turnips for her. (Elias was mortified by the transgression, but Walt admitted that he enjoyed these subversive adventures, no doubt because they did rile his father.)
The boy was even more enthused over visits from his uncle Edmund Disney, Elias’s younger brother. Edmund was retarded; he was incapable even of signing his name. But he was an amiable man and free spirit who frequently left his sisters, Lizzie and Ethel, with whom he lived in Kansas, and went roaming. Marceline was one of his regular stops, and he would show up unexpectedly at the Disney door announcing, “It’s me!” Walt said Edmund made a wonderful playmate for an eight-year-old boy since that was about Ed’s mental age. Ed had no inhibitions. “Uncle Ed did everything he wanted to do,” Walt observed. “He wanted to go to town, he would walk over to the railroad track and the train would be comin’ up. And he’d flag it. The train would stop. He’d say, ‘I want a ride.’ He’d get up and go on to town.” The two would also venture into the woods, where Ed knew the names of the plants and birds and could identify the latter’s calls. And then, after what was typically a short visit, he would declare that he was going to see another relative and would leave. Walt admired this sense of juvenile freedom—Ed was a real-life Peter Pan—but he also loved his uncle’s joy, and he considered Ed a role model. “To me he represented fun in its simplest and purest form.”