by Bob Thomas
Elias Disney, eldest of Kepple’s eleven children, became restless on the farm and left for a job as machinist in a railroad shop, where a co-worker was Walter Chrysler, founder of the automotive empire. Elias moved on to join the work crew pushing the Union Pacific line through Colorado. When the railroad reached Denver, his job as apprentice carpenter was over. Jobs were scarce in Denver, and Elias tried to earn a living by playing his fiddle with two other amateur musicians outside saloons. The returns were skimpy, and Elias returned to the family farm in Ellis.
Part of the reason for Elias’s return to Kansas was Flora Call, the pretty daughter of the Disneys’ neighbors, the Charles Calls. The Call family was Scottish and English. The first to emigrate, Thomas Call, arrived in Boston in 1636. A descendant, Eber Call, moved to Ohio in 1825, and his son Charles left Oberlin College to join the 1849 Gold Rush to California. He found no gold and returned to Ohio, later settling his wife, eight daughters and two sons in Ellis, Kansas, where he taught school. The prairie blizzards convinced Charles Call to move his family to Florida in 1884.
Kepple Disney also grew weary of the Kansas winters, and he and his son Elias accompanied their neighbors to Florida. Kepple decided against making the move permanent and returned to his Kansas farm. Elias remained in Florida. He bought a forty-acre farm at Kismet and continued his courtship of Flora Call, who had become a grammar-school teacher. They were married on New Year’s Day, 1888, in her parents’ home at Akron, Florida. Elias was twenty-eight, his bride was nineteen.
Photographs of Elias and Flora Disney provide hints of their natures—he with starched collar and heavy woolen ready-made suit, big-eared with hawk nose, alert eyes in a stern face; she in high-necked dress, deep-set eyes, heavy-lidded, wide mouth pursed but with a hint of humor. They were a devoted couple, and she remained patient and understanding through his many misadventures in business.
First, Elias sold his farm and bought a hotel in Daytona Beach. But the tourist trade slumped and he was forced out of business. Now he had a son, Herbert, born December 8, 1888, and Elias went to work as a rural mailman and managed to buy a small orange grove. Then a war scare swept the country. Overwhelmed with patriotism, he enlisted in the militia. The crisis soon dissolved, and Elias saw no sense in remaining in the militia, not when he had a wife and baby son and an orange grove to care for. So he walked out of the army camp and went home. Military police arrived at his house to arrest him as a deserter. “I didn’t desert; there isn’t any war,” he reasoned. The army men could find no answer to his logic. “At least you must give back the uniform,” one insisted. “No, sir, I didn’t get paid, so I’m going to keep the uniform,” Elias replied.
A frost destroyed the orange crop and Elias was stricken with malaria. He decided, as he often did when his luck turned sour, that his life would improve if he moved on. He chose Chicago.
Seventy years before, Chicago had been a collection of huts on the shore of Lake Michigan. By 1889, when Elias and Flora Disney arrived with their infant son, it was a brawny city of 1,200,000 citizens, the railroad hub sending wheat and beef to the East, and cloth and threshers to the West. After a lifetime in small towns, Elias Disney was bewildered by the city’s clamor, but he was determined to succeed after his failure in Florida. First, he needed shelter for his young family. He decided to build his own house, applying the carpentry he had learned on the Union Pacific. Flora said she would design it for him. “There’s nothing mysterious about drawing up plans for a house,” she argued, “and a woman ought to know more about making it livable.” Following her plans, he built a square, trim, neat little house at 1249 Tripp Avenue, one of the two paved roads in the northwestern part of Chicago.
Elias painted the house white with blue trim, and visitors admired its clean lines and economy. He bought the adjoining lot and constructed another house, which he offered for sale. He began building homes in other parts of Chicago, and he developed relationships with bankers, who provided loans for prospective buyers. Flora drew up the plans, bought the building materials, did the bookkeeping, and even furnished the new house if the buyer so desired. In 1893, when building was in a slump, Elias took a job as a carpenter for the World’s Columbian Exposition, working seven days a week at a dollar a day.
The family was growing. Raymond Arnold Disney was born on December 30, 1890, and Roy Oliver Disney on June 24, 1893. Elias and his wife and sons worshipped at St. Paul Congregational Church, and he became a close friend of the preacher, Walter Parr. Elias volunteered to build a new church for the congregation, and he put up a plain, serviceable structure with a tall, sloping roof. Flora played the organ in the new church, and Elias preached the sermon when the preacher was on vacation. When both their wives became pregnant in 1901, Elias made a proposal to the preacher: “If I get a boy baby, I’ll name him after you; if your baby is a boy, you name him after me.” Walter Parr agreed.
A fourth son was born to Elias and Flora Disney in the upper bedroom of the Tripp Avenue house on Sunday, December 5, 1901. Keeping his bargain with the preacher, Elias named the boy Walter Elias Disney. The Parr baby was also a boy, and he was named Elias. It had been eight and a half years since her last son had been born, and Flora Disney lavished attention on young Walter. He was a sweet-natured baby, handsomer than the other boys, who had their father’s strong Roman nose. The mother liked to dress Walter in frilly clothes. Roy uncomplainingly pushed his little brother in a baby carriage up and down Tripp Avenue, and even bought Walter toys out of his own earnings—a gesture which might be considered prophetic.
Two years and a day after Walter’s arrival, the first daughter was born to the Disneys, and she was named Ruth Flora. By this time Elias had grown concerned about rearing his children in the big city. The neighborhood was filling up with Poles and Irish and Swedes, most of them hard-working, God-fearing people. But the old-world family ties were unraveling, and some of the children ran wild while their parents scraped for a living. Not far away from the Disney neighborhood was Cicero, later the headquarters of Al Capone and other notorious criminals.
Elias Disney’s concern grew each time he passed the streetcorner with its three saloons. His mind was made up when two neighborhood boys were arrested for killing a policeman in a carbarn robbery. One was sentenced to Joliet Prison for twenty years, the other to life imprisonment. “Flora, those two boys are no older than Herb and Ray!” Elias said to his wife. “We’ve got to get out of this cesspool of a city.”
Flora agreed with her husband’s proposal to move the family to the rural atmosphere they had known in their early lives. Elias visited communities in Colorado and Alabama where he had heard of opportunities, but none seemed suitable. Then he went to Marceline, Missouri, where his brother Robert owned property. The country was fertile, with green, rolling hills, a pleasant little town where supplies could be bought, and enough industry—there were coal mines and oil wells—for economic stability. Marceline, Elias Disney decided, would be the place where he could earn a good living and rear his five children in a wholesome Christian atmosphere.
WALT DISNEY remembered nothing of his early years in Chicago, but the memories of Marceline stayed with him throughout his lifetime. He recalled the place where he lived: “It was a beautiful farm, with a wide front lawn. Big weeping willow trees. It had two orchards, one called the old, one called the new. One variety was called Wolf River apples, and they were so big that people came from miles around to see them.”
Marceline was one of a multitude of towns that owed their existence to the railroad. The Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe was spreading through Missouri in 1888, and a new village grew up beside its tracks in Lynn County near the center of the state, 120 miles from Kansas City. The first settlers decided to call the place after the name of the railroad superintendent’s daughter, Marceline.
By April of 1906, when the Disney family arrived to take over the Crane farm, Marceline had become a community of five thousand people. They were hard workers. Some were employed in
the nearby Coal Mine No. 1, some in the oil and natural-gas fields. Merchants sold their wares in the red-brick and sandstone stores along Main Street. Most of the population lived on farms, growing fruit, vegetables, wheat, and barley and raising beef and pork for the big-city markets.
Flora Disney arrived first, bringing her three youngest children—Roy, Walt and Ruth. Elias Disney and the two older sons, Herb and Ray, came a few days later in a boxcar loaded with the family belongings, including a pair of horses Elias had bought in the Chicago stockyards. The family settled into the neat, square, one-storied whitewashed house built by a Civil War veteran, William Crane, recently deceased. Elias had purchased the house and forty-five acres at a price of $125 an acre, promising installment payments with money he was to receive for Chicago houses he had built.
Elias and the three older sons went to work immediately, plowing the spring fields and planting large areas of corn and sorghum, lesser amounts of wheat and barley. Elias bought cows for milking, and pigs, chickens and pigeons to feed the family. Flora Disney worked constantly, preparing huge meals, washing and mending the men’s shirts and coveralls, hoeing the vegetable garden, churning butter to trade for provisions at the grocery store. Her butter was so sweet and pure that the groceryman gave it special position on his counter.
Walt, a wiry, towheaded boy with searching eyes, tagged after his mother to help with her chores, and he was followed by little Ruth. The farm and its surroundings were an endless source of wonderment to the boy. He played in the mud under a bridge near the house, waving shyly to farmer neighbors as they passed by in their buggies. He herded the pigs to new grubbing places, and they permitted him to ride on their backs, a feat that Elias Disney showed off to visitors. Walt gave special attention to a runty piglet he named Skinny. He nourished Skinny with a baby bottle, and the pig followed him around the farm like a pet dog.
As one season blended into the next, Walt learned to anticipate and enjoy the cycles of farm life. During the sorghum harvest, his father and brothers cut the cane and fed it into a horse-powered squeezer. Walt led the horse around in a circle until the cane was mashed. The molasses was stored in big vats and poured on breakfast pancakes or baked in cakes and gingerbread. If the crop had been bountiful, the excess was siphoned into brown earthen jugs and bartered at the grocery store in Marceline.
Harvesting time brought the big, puffing steam thresher to the farm, the neighbors’ wagons hitched behind it. While the men worked in the fields, the women filled the kitchen with gossip and the aromas of fried chicken, corn bread and chocolate cake. At noontime the men came to the house and ate huge meals, exchanging views about the size and worth of the harvest. Then they stretched out on the lawn under the willow tree and slept for an hour before returning to the fields.
Hog-killing time brought neighbors back to the farm, and they helped Elias slaughter the animals and dip the carcasses into huge boiling kettles. The bristles were scraped off, and well-honed knives sliced the remains for ham, bacon, sausage, and headcheese.
As Walt grew older, he wandered farther from the Disney farm, sometimes with his brother Roy. Nearby were woods overgrown with walnut, hickory nut, hazelnut, persimmon, wild grape, and chokeberry, all in their seasons offering food for passersby. Walt learned to watch for animals that lived in the woods—rabbits, foxes, squirrels, ‘possums and raccoons. And he scanned the trees for birds—bobwhite, crow, hawk, woodpecker, meadowlark, cardinal, wren, swallow and wild dove. On hot summer days, Walt and Roy walked the few miles to Yellow Creek and cooled themselves in the slow-moving water.
The Santa Fe railroad tracks ran through the countryside a short distance from the Disney farm, and Walt would put his ear to the rail to hear the train coming. He always hoped that the engineer would be his uncle Mike Martin, who worked the route between Fort Madison and Marceline and often stayed with the Disneys overnight, bringing a striped bag of candy for the children. Another diversion for Walt was watching the horseless carriages chug by on the County Pike Road in front of the farm. They had just begun to appear in Marceline.
Things happened to young Walt that he could remember with absolute clarity in his mature years. He wandered through an orchard on a summer Sunday and saw an owl on the branch of an apple tree. He reached up to pet the bird, but it flew away. Walt pursued, found the owl perched within reach, and put his hands over it. The owl screeched and clawed. Instinctively Walt threw the owl to the ground and stomped on it. The boy was overcome by remorse to find the owl dead, and he buried it in a small grave. For months afterward, the owl returned in Walt’s dreams.
The most persistent family legend about Walt’s boyhood on the farm was always described as his first attempt at art. The incident was recalled by his sister Ruth in an interview almost seventy years afterward: “My folks had gone to town, and Walt and I were left there alone. We spied a big barrel of tar and opened it up. As we were looking at it, Walt said, ‘Oh, this would be real good to paint with.’ He added, ‘Let’s paint on the house.’ I wondered if it would come off, and he said, ‘Oh, sure.’ So we went to work on the long side of the white house, the side that faced the main road. He drew houses, I remember, with smoke coming out of them, and I drew zigzags. Two rows of them. We dipped big sticks into the tar, and I can remember the awful feeling when we realized a little bit later that the tar wouldn’t budge. My father was so angry that he just left it there. It was still there on the side of the house when we moved.”
His mother taught Walt how to read. Elias Disney decreed that it was more convenient for the boy to wait until Ruth was old enough for school, and Walt was almost seven before he was enrolled at the Park School, a two-story red-brick building with two hundred students in grade and high school. Walt read the standard text, the McGuffey Eclectic Reader, and studied arithmetic, writing, geography and spelling. His grades were only fair, because he was always finding things that interested him more than schoolwork. One of his new discoveries was the movie house that had just opened in Marceline. One day after school he persuaded Ruth to accompany him to the theater, and on the bedsheet screen they saw an enactment of the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. It was dark when they emerged, and they hurried home fearful of what would happen to them for staying out so late. Nothing did, because their parents were so relieved that the two children were safe.
The years in Marceline provided Walt Disney with a gallery of memorable characters. Warm-hearted Aunt Margaret, who came from Kansas City with crayons and pads to encourage Walt’s drawing. Grandma Disney, full of mischief in her seventies, urging her grandson to fetch her turnips from a neighbor’s farm. Uncle Robert Disney, an elegant figure who kept a cigar in his mouth even when his Vandyke beard was being trimmed in the barbershop. Uncle Ed, considered dim-witted by outsiders, but by his family simply a boy who never grew up. Walt found him a perfect companion, a grown-up who liked to do boyish things. They wandered the countryside together, and when Uncle Ed wanted to go to town, he simply flagged down the train and climbed aboard. Walt visited the nearby farm of Erastus Taylor and listened to the Civil War veteran recount the battles of Shiloh and Bull Run. The boy rode into town with Doc Sherwood, in black Prince Albert frock coat and beardless, having pulled out his whiskers one by one. The eccentric retired physician commissioned a portrait of himself and his prize stallion Rupert, and paid Walt a shiny new quarter for his drawing.
At first, Elias Disney was viewed with suspicion by his farming neighbors. He came, after all, from the big city, full of socialistic ideas. Some of the farmers, angered by having food processors and the railroad dictate terms, listened with sympathy to Elias’s proposals to join the American Society of Equity. One night in 1907, he hired the Knights of Pythias meeting hall and invited farmers and their wives to a dinner. He had bought five gallons of oysters from Ed Hayden’s grocery, and the diners admitted that they had never tasted such good oyster soup. But they were less receptive to Elias’s arguments, and his hope for a union of farmers in Marceline pro
ved a failure.
Despite his radical ideas, Elias Disney came to be well liked in Marceline. He was industrious and serious-minded, yet there was one note of frivolity in his nature. On Sundays he hitched his buckskin mare to the buggy and rode to the house of Grandpa Taylor. For an hour or two, Elias and Will Rensimer played on their fiddles to the piano accompaniment of the Taylors’ daughter. Walt sat on a straight-backed chair throughout the concert, enthralled by the music and astonished by this unexpected aspect of his father.
At most other times, Elias Disney was sober, even dour. The task of supporting a wife and five children on a prairie farm had proved more of a burden than he had anticipated, and he brooded over the possibility of failure. He demanded more of his older sons, and only Flora’s quick humor forestalled open rebellion.
By planting acreage Elias had rented from Robert Disney, Herb and Ray earned $175, and they bought themselves gold watches and chains for $20 apiece. Their father accused them of profligacy and asked what they planned to do with the rest of the money.
“We thought we might buy a heifer and a colt,” Herb replied.
“No,” Elias said firmly. “I’ve got a lot of debts on this farm, and that money should help pay them off.”
