by Neal Gabler
If Edmund’s visits were breezy reminders of the Disney wanderlust, Uncle Robert’s frequent visits to view his property were reminders of their pretensions. Wearing a linen duster and sporting a Vandyke, he would step off the train as if he were a sovereign, which is exactly how he acted toward his older brother. Robert kept a buggy at Elias’s farm, and Elias was expected to surrender it. Whether or not Elias was resentful, at least some of his neighbors were, and they referred to Robert disparagingly as “Gold Bug,” both for his airs and for the gold stock in which he traded. Still, Walt enjoyed these visits because Robert’s wife, Aunt Margaret—the only aunt, Walt said, whom he called “auntie”—would usually bring a gift, a Big Chief drawing tablet and pencils.
For most children these gifts might have seemed perfunctory. For Walt they came to represent something else of importance he took from Marceline: a nascent self-awareness and the first acknowledgment of his talent. Walt enjoyed art and claimed to have become interested in drawing “almost as soon as I could hold a pencil.” But it was not until Aunt Maggie’s visits that he received encouragement. “She used to make me think I was really a boy wonder!” he said, admitting that she had a “flattering tongue in her head.” And Aunt Maggie’s praise was reinforced by another mentor, an elderly neighbor named Doc Sherwood. By the time Walt met him, the doctor had retired from practicing medicine, so he had time on his hands, and he and his wife were childless, so he spent a good deal of that time with Walt, who became a kind of adopted son. Doc Sherwood was an imperious man; he wore a Prince Albert coat and drove a surrey in the summer and a cutter in the winter pulled by a prize stallion named Rupert. Walt often accompanied him, even into the drugstore, where the doctor conducted a “gabfest.” Usually on their trips Walt peppered him with questions, and years later he marveled at the doctor’s knowledge and patience. “Don’t be afraid to admit your ignorance,” Doc Sherwood told him, a philosophy that Walt, who was always inquisitive, said “lasted me a lifetime.” But what Walt remembered most about Doc Sherwood—what he would recount throughout the rest of his life—was the time the doctor asked him to fetch his crayons and tablet and sketch Rupert. The horse was skittish that day. Doc Sherwood had to hold the reins, and Walt had difficulty capturing him. “The result was pretty terrible,” he recalled, “but both the doctor and his wife praised the drawing highly, to my great delight.” In one version of the story Doc Sherwood gave Walt a nickel for the drawing, which one neighbor called highly uncharacteristic of the tight-fisted Sherwood, and in another version the drawing was framed and hung in the doctor’s house. Whatever was true, the drawing became, in his brother Roy’s hyperbolic words, “the highlight of Walt’s life.”
Years later the Disneys would also frequently recall another episode in Walt’s budding artistic career that they believed testified to his obsession. One summer’s day Flora and Elias had gone to town, leaving Walt and Ruth at the farm. As Ruth told it, they began investigating the rain barrels around the house and discovered the barrels’ tar lining. Walt announced that the soft tar could be used as paint, and when Ruth out of caution asked whether it would come off, he assured her that it could. So the two found big sticks, dipped them into the tar, and began drawing designs on the side of the Disneys’ whitewashed house. “And I can remember an awful feeling,” Ruth would say, “when I realized just a little bit later that it wouldn’t budge—the tar.” Their parents were not amused. (“He was old enough to know better,” Flora snipped thirty years later.) The tar still adorned the side of the house when the Disneys moved away—the first memorial to Walt Disney’s art.
The bliss of Marceline was undermined by only one thing: Elias Disney had absolutely no aptitude for farming. He told one neighbor that he did not believe in fertilizing his fields because doing so was like “giving whiskey to a man—he felt better for a little while, but then he was worse off than before.” The crops suffered until Elias finally relented. Another neighbor remembered Elias ordering his sons to water the horses in mid-morning and then questioning why no one else seemed to be watering their horses then, not realizing that what was required was to water them in the morning, at noon, and at night. Despite his shortcomings, he persevered and experimented. One year he planted an acre of popping corn. Another year, when the market was depressed, he had each member of the family go door to door with a basket selling their apples rather than take them to a wholesaler. And yet another time he collected apples from his neighbors and eliminated the middleman by taking them to the market in Kansas himself and splitting the proceeds. One fall after the harvest, when times were very hard, he resorted to carpentry again and remodeled a neighbor’s house. Still, money was always tight and Elias always frugal. The Disney children recalled that Flora had to butter the bottom of their bread so that their father would not see her depleting one of the family’s sources of income.
If it was money that battered Elias, it was money too that sundered the Disney family. In 1907 Herbert and Ray had arranged with Uncle Robert to grow some wheat on his land, which they then had neighbors harvest that fall. When Elias asked his sons what they intended to do with their money, and one of them said he was going to buy himself a pocket watch, Elias erupted at the indulgence. He insisted that he would take the money and help pay off the farm. “That was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” one neighbor said. That same day Herbert and Ray withdrew their money from the bank, and that night they crawled out a window of the house and hopped a train for Chicago. The wound of their departure was so deep that nearly one hundred years later, family members were still reluctant to discuss the incident. By the spring they had moved to Kansas City, where Uncle Robert got them jobs as bank clerks, and in the summer of 1909 Herbert became a mail carrier for the postal service. They would occasionally visit their parents in Marceline, but the rift never healed entirely. When Herbert and Ray would send back their old clothes for Flora to alter for Roy and Walt, they sometimes stuck a plug of tobacco in a pocket, knowing it would provoke their moralistic father.
Without Herbert and Ray’s assistance, the farm became even more burdensome. Elias, who was nothing if not hardworking, blamed his travails on the system that forced farmers to market their crops through middlemen and trusts, taking the profits he believed the farmers themselves deserved. Within a month after his sons’ departure, Elias and M. A. Coffman, the neighbor who had picked up the family upon their arrival in Marceline, formed a chapter of the American Society of Equity, which they described as a farmer’s union. The society, headquartered in Dayton, Ohio, hoped eventually to provide granaries, elevators, warehouses, and cold storage throughout the country so that farmers could control their own crops, regulate their own supply, and set their own prices. Farmers were receptive—there were twenty-nine members at the chapter’s inception—but even in pro-labor and progressive Marceline, Elias’s involvement soon branded him as a “radical,” according to a neighbor. He would not have disapproved of the label. “He had high ideals about living,” his daughter said. “That was when he became interested in the philosophy of Socialism—which seemed to him then to be a fair way for people to live.” He even called himself a Socialist, claimed to have voted for the Socialist candidate for president, Eugene V. Debs, and subscribed to the Appeal to Reason, an ardently Socialist journal for which Debs was an associate editor.
But Elias’s radicalism was an excuse, not a remedy. Like his orange grove in Florida, the farm ultimately defeated him. Falling crop prices across the country squeezed him, exacerbated locally by a five-month-long coal strike in the summer of 1910. Moreover, earlier that year he had fallen ill with either typhoid or diphtheria, which left him weak and unable to work. Flora was convinced that his illness was the result of worry and insisted he sell the farm. By the fall he had done so. That November—a cold morning, as Roy remembered it—Elias conducted an auction to sell their stock and implements. Roy and Walt tacked the signs up throughout the area. Later that afternoon, in town, Roy and Walt saw a six-month-ol
d colt that they had tamed and broken, now hitched to the rig of the farmer who had bought her. She whinnied in recognition at the sight of them, and they went to hug her and cried over their loss. Thus the idyll ended.
The Disneys moved into town to a small four-room house at 508 Kansas Avenue so that the children could finish the school term while Elias recovered. But the Marceline in which they now lived was a much different place from the one where they had arrived five years earlier, confirming what one Disney scholar wrote of Walt’s attachment to the town: “Disney’s small-town America, the source of his golden memories, was in fact beginning to vanish even as he experienced it.” The population had swelled—nearly 50 percent since 1900, according to the census—and that did not account for striking miners who were gone at the time the census was taken. No longer a town whose roads were unpaved, Marceline now boasted more than twenty automobiles. It had a new school, a new power plant, and a new waterworks as well as the six-hundred-seat New Cater Theater, which showed films and featured vaudeville. The month before the Disneys left for Kansas City in the summer of 1911, “one of the largest crowds ever assembled in the City Park,” according to the Marceline Mirror, cheered the lighting of Marceline’s first streetlamps with power generated from her very own electrical station.
This Marceline was not, however, the Marceline that Walt Disney would remember. His was a more rustic place that would become more rustic still in his memory. He idealized Marceline. He later claimed that he felt sorry “for people who live in cities all their lives and…they don’t have a little hometown. I do.” His wife said that when he would take a train across the country and pass through Marceline, he would even dragoon passengers in the middle of the night to point out where he grew up. Associates said that his recall of events and animals in the town was almost total.
Disney scholars would cite the effect of Marceline on Disneyland’s Main Street, U.S.A., or on its Tom Sawyer Island, or on the live-action films like So Dear to My Heart and Pollyanna that were steeped in small-town life and extolled small-town virtues, or even on the early cartoons’ preoccupation with farm life and animals, which Disney himself acknowledged. It was as if Marceline were a template for how life was supposed to be, and he were trying to re-create the town, no doubt attempting in the process to recapture its sense of well-being, freedom, and community, essentially recapturing what he would call the most blessed passage of his childhood. Marceline would always be a touchstone of the things and values he held dear; everything from his fascination with trains and animals to his love of drawing to his insistence on community harked back to the years he spent there. And Marceline was an oasis as well as a touchstone—Walt Disney’s own escape, of the sort the Disneys had so long sought with so little success. Years later, rhapsodizing about country life during a meeting on the mood he wanted to achieve in the “Pastorale” section of Fantasia, Walt said, “That’s what it is—a feeling of freedom with the animals and characters that live out there. That is what you experience when you go into the country. You escape the everyday world—the strife and struggle. You get out where everything is free and beautiful.”
He would spend the rest of his life trying to recover that feeling.
III
For Elias Disney, moving to Kansas City was another admission of defeat. He had left Chicago to escape the baneful influences of urban life, the noise and bustle and crime, but Kansas City, galvanized by the civic boosterism of Kansas City Star editor William Rockhill Nelson, was burgeoning at the time they arrived. Largely as a result of Nelson’s campaigning, the city had launched a $40 million boulevard system that created wide, tree-lined streets, had begun construction on a new downtown train depot, and had nearly doubled capital investment and the value of manufactured products in less than a decade. In the first two decades of the century the city’s population doubled as well—from 163,000 to 324,000. Yet for all its expansiveness and the sense that it was in the process of remaking and renewing itself, it was a city nonetheless. “The city was not pretty,” one observer noted, “but it was lively in the lusty Western tradition.”
If Kansas City was a comedown from Marceline, the house there was a comedown too. Located at 2706 East Thirty-first Street in a working-class section, it was so small that when relatives visited, Roy and Walt had to move to what they called the “barn,” a shed out back, and it was so close to the road that the family had to draw the curtains so no one could look inside. Compared to the Marceline farmhouse with its sprawling pastures, the Thirty-first Street house had only a tiny vegetable patch, and it had no indoor plumbing. For the children its sole grace, Ruth remembered, was its proximity to the Fairmount amusement park, which was “a fairyland that you couldn’t get into.” Debarred, she and Walt would stand outside its gates, staring raptly at the all-white structures.
And if the city and the house were comedowns, Elias’s job was even more demeaning. He listed himself in the Kansas City directory as a “clerk.” In truth, he had sold the Marceline farm for $5,175 to a local family and purchased a paper route in Kansas City at three dollars per customer, roughly 650 of them, but whether he was ashamed of delivering papers or there was some business advantage in doing so, he listed eighteen-year-old Roy as the owner of record. The route, in a twenty-square-block area bordering the Disneys’ own neighborhood, was reasonably lucrative by the standards of paper delivery. The section, called Santa Fe, was affluent and the Kansas City Star itself so popular that, as Walt later said, “the route book would list the people who DIDN’T take the paper”—those being rabid Democrats who resented the paper’s pro-Republican editorial position. Customers paid forty-five cents a week for thirteen editions of the morning Times and evening Star, of which Elias kept twenty-one cents—about thirty-one dollars a week. Roy received three dollars of this; Walt, in Roy’s recollection, got “some little amount,” but in Walt’s recollection nothing.
The route was not just a means of earning a living—it became a way of life for the Disneys. Everything was subordinated to the delivery of newspapers. Even when the family moved, sometime in the summer or fall of 1914, to a modest two-story bungalow at 3028 Bellefontaine on a quiet, tree-lined street of similarly modest bungalows, they had only crossed Thirty-first Street, compelled, as they were, to stay close to the route. And as their location was defined by the route, so was their time. Unlike other dealers, Elias would not buy a horse and wagon. Instead he had pushcarts, shaped like Roman chariots, one customer said, with down-sloping sides, and each morning, sometimes as early as three-thirty, Elias, Walt, and Roy would take the carts to the distribution point, load them with papers, and head back to Santa Fe to deliver. On Sundays, because the papers were too thick for the carts to accommodate them all, the Disneys would have to deliver one load and then return for another. This effectively prevented any churchgoing in Kansas City for Walt and Roy, though Ruth insisted that she was marched off to Sunday school each week.
Only nine years old, Walt was nevertheless tethered to the route. On weekdays he would rise early, in the darkness, to get his allotment of fifty papers and deliver them—the first year by foot, the second by bicycle. He returned home at five-thirty or six, took a short nap, and then woke and ate his breakfast. Since he received virtually no compensation, for pocket money he delivered medicine for a pharmacy along his route and eventually talked his father into letting him take fifty additional papers to sell for himself at a trolley stop and, when other newsboys evicted him from his curb, on the trolley itself. After he finished on the trolley, he headed for school, though he never completed the school day. He had to leave a half-hour early to pick up the papers for the afternoon run. At three-thirty the next morning the routine would begin again. On Saturdays, in addition to delivering the papers, he collected the fees. And on Sundays he had the double load.
At first Walt was excited by the route. He said he enjoyed seeing the lamplighters turn the gas off every morning while he was delivering his papers and turn it on again during his
afternoon circuit. But his enthusiasm quickly waned. The Star had given Elias the route reluctantly, fearing he might be too old, so he was anxious not to disappoint them. Because he insisted that the papers be placed under a brick, so that they would not blow away, or behind the storm doors in winter, rather than just be tossed on the porch, Walt had to go up each walkway. Sometimes a customer would not see the paper between the doors, and Elias would have to send Walt to redeliver it. It got worse after Roy graduated from high school and left the route to clerk in a bank and Walt assumed his brother’s route as well. Elias hired several other boys, but they were often unreliable, and once again Walt was dispatched to deliver the papers to homes the boys had overlooked, which is how he talked his father into getting him the bicycle. Before that, Elias made him run to houses for missed deliveries.
It was worst, of course, in winter, when Walt had to trudge through the cold and snow, slipping on the icy steps, often crying at the knives of frost he said he endured. Some of the drifts into which he waded were so deep he sank to his neck. At times the cold and his tiredness would conspire, and Walt would fall asleep, curled inside his sack of papers or in the warm foyer of an apartment house to which he had delivered, and he would awaken to discover it was daylight and he had to race to finish the route. What added to this picture of Dickensian drudgery was that Elias took the money Walt had earned by selling his own papers on the trolley and invested it, so that in addition to delivering for the pharmacy the boy began working at a candy store during school recess to earn money to buy more papers he could sell without Elias knowing. “So the upshot of it was I was working all the time,” he told an interviewer. “I mean, I never had any real play time.” What playtime he had was stolen from the route; he said he played with toys he would see on the porches, then left them exactly as he found them. In six years on the route he missed only five weeks—two with a severe cold, a third on a visit to his aunt Josie in Hiawatha, Kansas, in 1913 (“It stands out in memory,” he wrote his aunt, “because it was one of the few vacations that my Mother and Father ever had”), and two more in 1916, when he kicked a piece of ice with a new boot he had just gotten for Christmas and was stabbed by a nail hidden in the chunk. (He screamed for help but had to wait twenty minutes before a deliveryman stopped, chopped the ice loose, and took him to a doctor, who pulled out the nail with pliers and gave him a tetanus shot.) Even then he spent his recuperation helping Elias put an addition on the Bellefontaine house—a new kitchen, a bedroom, and a bathroom finally to replace the outhouse.
