by Neal Gabler
Even so, in July he left O-Zell for a job in the post office as a substitute mail carrier. (He loved to tell how he was initially denied the appointment because he looked too young for the responsibility, then went home, changed his clothes, drew a mustache on himself, exchanged his cap for a hat, and returned to the same man and got the job.) He would arrive at the downtown post office at seven in the morning, sort the mail and deliver it, and return by three or four o’clock in the afternoon. Though he could have gone home then, frequently he would make the special delivery run or take a horse and buggy or the white Ford truck and pick up the mail from the boxes. On Sundays he would grab a large mailbag and take the subway to the Grand Avenue Pier to collect postcards. He made forty cents an hour, which he described as a “gold rush to me.” On days when he finished his route and there was no additional work, he would take the elevated train to the Thirty-fifth Street terminus, pull on a uniform, and serve as gateman, loading the cars and closing the doors—typically working twelve to thirteen hours in all. “It was thrilling to ride on that thing,” he later said.
But, amid the thrills, one brush that summer almost cost him his life. On September 3 Walt had just finished his mail run and was walking through the post office in the Chicago Federal Building when he heard what he described as a “WHOOOM!!!!”—a deafening blast that shook the ground. In the lobby, dust billowed everywhere. Police immediately locked down the building. It turned out that someone had planted a bomb, injuring thirty and killing four, including a man who had worked two desks from Walt’s. Authorities debated whether the perpetrators were radicals hoping to free the head of the left-wing Industrial Workers of the World labor union, William Haywood, who was in custody in the eighth-floor jailhouse, or anarchists or German spies trying to cast suspicion on the IWW.*
The Germans were on every American’s mind that summer of 1918, with the country at war with Germany and American troops in Europe. Walt had been thinking about Germany too. As the summer drew to an end, he had no plans to return to school, later writing Principal Cottingham that he had been “disgusted” by his year at McKinley, though he had no plans to do anything else either. Walking along the beach with Bea Conover one day, Walt had asked her whether he should buy a movie camera or a canoe with his post office savings, and when she said a canoe, he was “disappointed” and made a down payment on the camera anyway. He began having himself filmed in the alley behind his parents’ house as Chaplin, with his friend Russell Maas presumably turning the crank, and then hatched a plan for making children’s films. But before he could realize the project, the camera was repossessed.
Yet even as he dabbled in entertainment, he had gotten the war bug. Two of his brothers were already in the service; Ray had been drafted into the army, and Roy, an enlistee, was at the Great Lakes Naval Station outside Chicago. Walt later said he had felt the full flush of patriotism when he was seeing Roy off at the train depot in Chicago during a visit early that summer, and the officer, mistaking Walt for one of the troops, ordered him to fall in. The feeling only intensified when he read Roy’s letters. “They were blowing bugles and it was more of what you call patriotism,” he would recall. “I just had to get in there.” Though he was underage, only sixteen, Walt admitted a sense of shame in his staying home as others marched off to war; he told Ruth that he never wanted his grandchildren to ask him why he did not go to fight. And one could not underestimate the unmistakable appeal of the uniform itself. Walt, who had been a cadet at McKinley as well as a postman, a gateman, and a train butcher in a suit with brass buttons, loved to dress in costumes. As he said of Roy, “He looked swell in that sailor’s uniform.”
Even before he went to work at the post office, Walt had attempted to join the navy with Maas, but they were rejected for being too young. Next they tried to join the Canadian forces, but Maas, who wore glasses, was rejected for his poor eyesight, and Walt did not want to go into the service without him. Dejected, they had both applied to the post office, where they found themselves dunned every noon by a fife-and-drum corps outside in the street urging men to enlist. It was Maas who got the idea to join the Red Cross Ambulance Corps, since the Red Cross was not as particular as the armed forces and the age of qualification was seventeen, not eighteen as in the regular services. (Walt said that the Red Cross attracted those who were too young, too old, or too incapacitated for the military.) Since they were still sixteen, they applied under false names as the St. John brothers, but the ruse did not work. They still needed their parents’ signatures to certify their ages, and in any case Maas’s mother had found his grip with a pair of socks in it, suspected something was happening, and alerted Flora. After Walt confessed, Elias refused to sign the papers. “If I did,” he said, “I might be signing your death warrant.” Flora was no more eager to send her youngest son to war than was her husband, but Walt begged her and she finally relented, signing for both herself and Elias and saying that if she did not, Walt would probably run off anyway. Flora evidently did not know that Walt, at sixteen, was still too young for the Ambulance Corps, so after his mother had the certificate notarized, he converted the last digit in 1901, his birth year, to a zero, and on September 16 he enlisted.
He thought of it not as war but as an adventure. He was assigned to Camp Scott, the Red Cross’s new training facility on Chicago’s South Side near the University of Chicago, on the grounds of what was once an amusement park and roller rink. The training called for a week of driving ambulances and trucks, another week in repair shops learning how to dismantle and assemble a car, and two more weeks of military drills before shipping out to France. Walt had no sooner arrived at the camp than he was writing Beatrice’s friend Virginia Baker that he was having “a good time out here” and had met “lots of old friend [sic] and made new ones all ready.” But within days he contracted influenza in an epidemic that would soon be sweeping the globe and would eventually result in at least twenty million deaths. Since hospitals were considered unsafe, Walt was taken by ambulance to his home to recuperate. By the time he recovered three weeks later, his company had already sailed to France. Walt returned to Camp Scott on November 4, only to be sent by train to Camp King in South Beach, Connecticut, to await transport to France as part of Company A of the Automotive and Mechanical Section. While he was at Camp King, bivouacked in an empty summer resort, Ye Olde Greenwich Inn, he received what for him was terribly disappointing news: an armistice had been signed ending the war. “I’ve never seen a sicker looking bunch than we were,” he later recalled. “Everybody else was celebrating the end of the war, but all we knew was that we’d missed out on something big.” Walt just assumed that he would now be sent home, but the company was roused at three one morning and told that fifty of them would be going to France after all to aid in the occupation. Walt always claimed that his was the last of the fifty names called and that he had gone back to sleep in despair at not being able to leave for Europe, when his compatriots awakened him with the announcement.
The next morning the fifty were heading for France on a converted cattle boat, the Vaubin, loaded with ammunition. The enlistees were so exhilarated that they joked about the possibility of being blown up. They arrived in Cherbourg on November 30, found the harbor clogged by a sunken boat, and steamed to Le Havre, where they disembarked and were herded onto a train for Paris, transferring to trucks there for the trip to a Red Cross outpost in St. Cyr, near Versailles. It was not an auspicious introduction to France. The food was execrable. The nights were cold, and the châteaux in which they billeted were unheated. Walt had to wrap himself in newspapers before pulling the blanket around him. St. Cyr was also dangerous: a group of discharged Algerian soldiers had been organized into a labor gang nearby, and there were occasional knifings. But amid it all Walt, small, baby-faced, and looking younger, celebrated his seventeenth birthday shortly after his arrival, toasting it with a round of grenadine for the younger enlistees and cognac for the older ones, for which he was forced to pawn a pair of shoes, and
the next week the outfit was trucked to Paris to cheer President Woodrow Wilson’s appearance at the peace conference. Walt shimmied up a tree to get a glimpse of him.
Though France was recovering from devastation and death, Walt, who before his enlistment had never been farther west than Colorado or farther east than Mississippi, seemed to regard his Red Cross duty as another escape. After indoctrination in St. Cyr, he was transferred to the Hotel Regina near the Louvre in Paris and then to Evacuation Hospital No. 5 on the Longchamps racecourse at Auteuil, where the infield was laid out with huts holding wounded men undergoing triage that would send them back to America, to England, or to base hospitals on the French coast. He was there only a short time when he was sent back to the motor pool in Paris, where he played poker and chauffeured Red Cross and army officials. This duty allowed him to see the city. Then he was transferred to Neuilly, just outside Paris, and by early February he had been transferred yet again, this time to Hospital No. 102 in Neufchâteau, situated in rolling country roughly 150 miles east of Paris, a classically Gallic village with narrow stone streets, quaint shuttered shops, clustered buildings, and a church whose spire dominated the skyline.
Though the Red Cross operated the hospital there, seventy to eighty beds used primarily to sequester contagious patients who might infect American troops, Walt had little contact with the ill. Mostly he ran errands for the canteen that served troop replacements passing through Neufchâteau by train on the way to Germany, or drove the canteen car, transporting the girls who worked there between the canteen and their quarters or to the commissary for provisions or to surrounding farms for eggs or even occasionally to picnics, especially when dignitaries visited. (He became such an accomplished tour guide that he was soon in demand.) The proprietress of the canteen and Walt’s nominal superior was a portly, bespectacled middle-aged nurse from Nebraska named Alice Howell, whose primary responsibility was making six hundred doughnuts each day for the troops moving through there and then dispensing them on two long sticks, one in each hand. Walt loved Howell. She became his surrogate mother in France and the source of his fondest memory there. Howell happened to be a close friend of General John J. Pershing, the head of the American Expeditionary Force. Pershing, who had grown up near Marceline, was Walt’s hero. Because of his family’s relationship to Howell, the general, headquartered in nearby Chaumont, sent his ten-year-old son to her canteen one afternoon for a picnic. Though the boy had arrived in a limousine, he insisted on riding in Walt’s old Ford to Domrémy, the birthplace of Joan of Arc, where they ate fried chicken on the lawn in front of her shrine. Walt always cherished that day with Pershing’s son and cherished Howell for making it possible. As he did with his teachers at the Benton School, he would continue to correspond with Alice Howell until her death, and she in turn would send him the flag that had flown over the canteen.
Writing to Howell years later, Walt would recall these months in Neufchâteau as “mingled with joy and sorrow,” but the sorrows seemed rare. He found the French cordial until the peace conference began turning against them and they grew increasingly hostile toward the Americans; once a French girl grabbed his hat and threw it off, and another time he got himself in a scuffle. As for the Germans, his only contact with them came when he was heading up a garbage detail of prisoners of war; they found themselves under attack from French children throwing stones. Otherwise, he joked in a postcard home, he was “doing something I very seldom do—‘work.’”
His most eventful assignment was driving a truckload of sugar and beans to Soissons. During the trip it snowed, and the truck burned out a bearing. He sent an associate to get help, then spent the next two days at a railroad watchman’s shack awaiting assistance. When the associate failed to return, Walt hiked into town for a meal, fell asleep, and hiked back, only to find the truck missing. The associate had gone to Paris, where he had passed out, drunk, before reporting the incident. By the time a rescue crew finally arrived, Walt had gone for his meal, and the crew had taken the truck. Walt faced a board of inquiry but, thanks to an understanding sergeant, was let off with a reprimand for leaving his post.
When he was not driving or running errands, he did what he had always done. He drew—sketches for the canteen menu featuring a doughboy character he had devised, posters advertising hot chocolate and baths to the troops, designs on the canvas flaps over the sides of the ambulances, caricatures for his fellow enlistees to send to their girls and families for which Walt charged a fee, editorial cartoons to The McKinley Voice and to friends back home with crude sentiments like an AEF soldier kicking the German kaiser off a cliff and saying, “Get off and stay off,” and even comic strips. He drew on an easel that he set up in his barracks under the window, and he drew in his truck. “I found out that the inside and outside of an ambulance is as good a place to draw as any,” he would remember. Soliciting ideas from his fellow troops, he began sending cartoons to Life and Judge, the most popular humor magazines then, but he received only yellow rejection slips. He had better luck when a discharged French soldier was assigned to maintain their barracks and Walt copied the soldier’s Croix de Guerre on his own leather windbreaker as a joke. Impressed by the gag, many of his barracks mates wanted a Croix de Guerre painted on their jackets, and Walt earned ten or fifteen francs apiece for his work. He earned more when one of the mates, a boy from Georgia who was nicknamed the Cracker, realized that the troop replacements coming through Neufchâteau were willing to pay for souvenirs; he arranged with Walt to paint camouflage on German helmets the Cracker had rescued from the dumps outside town. Then the Cracker scuffed them in the dirt, shot a hole in them and sold them as authentic war booty, giving Walt a share of the money.
But for all the fun he seemed to be having in France, Walt was nevertheless feeling increasingly homesick. “France is an interesting place,” he wrote The McKinley Voice, “but just the same I want to—” and he inserted in the letter a cartoon of a man shouting, “OH! I want to go home to my Mama.” He signed it “your old artist.” By this time, Ray and Roy had already left the service and returned to Kansas City. Walt, though, despite his homesickness, was considering re-upping with the Red Cross and transferring to Albania, where the salary was $150 a month—nearly three times what he was earning in France. In July he was reassigned to Paris, and years later he would say that while watching Pershing moving out his troops early that September, he was suddenly seized by loneliness and promptly put in a request to be discharged. But that was another bit of Disney drama. Even before Pershing left, Walt had already applied for a discharge, on August 7, “to be sent home as soon as possible.”
While he waited in Paris, he was reunited with Russell Maas, who had also been assigned there. The two teenagers decided that when they returned home, they would pool their money to buy a scow and float down the Mississippi River like Huckleberry Finn. Meanwhile they each bought a German shepherd puppy. Walt kept his in his musette bag and carried him everywhere. The very afternoon that Pershing was pulling out, September 3, 1919, Walt was leaving Paris for Marseilles and the voyage back to the States. (Maas had already left with the puppies.) It was not an easy passage. A dock strike prevented him from sailing as scheduled. He spent the next twenty-three days waiting out the strike by going to Nice, where the accommodations were cheaper and the workers friendlier, and killed time by taking the streetcar each morning to Monte Carlo. He finally sailed on the SS Canada with a group of nurses, doctors, and correspondents returning from the peace conference. Progress was slow. Due to the strike the Canada had no cargo and little fuel, and not until the ship reached the Azores was it able to take on coal. The ship was not long back out at sea when it was hit by a savage storm. The Canada finally limped into New York Harbor on October 9. Walt was discharged the next day and was back in Chicago the day after that.
After nearly a year away he returned in high spirits, but they were quickly crushed. He hunted down Maas to retrieve his dog, only to find that the puppy had died of worms or distempe
r during the crossing. As for their trip down the Mississippi, Maas had met a girl, gotten a job, and abandoned his plans for adventure. Walt was even more disappointed by Beatrice. She had written him faithfully while he was in France; he had kept the letters. As he prepared to leave Paris, he had bought perfume and blouses for her. But when he arrived in Chicago, he later said, he was shocked to hear that she had gotten married. (In fact, though Walt would always insist that his girl had betrayed him, Beatrice was not married yet. She would not marry until April.) Devastated by the news, he never even bothered to see her but instead saved the presents for his sister-in-law in Kansas City and declared himself “through with women.”
Added to all these disappointments was another. Walt had saved nearly six hundred dollars from his earnings in France, including three hundred in winnings from a crap game in Neufchâteau, and he had sent most of it home to be put in the bank until his return. Now he considered taking the money and staking himself while he tried to land a job as an artist. Elias was aghast at his son’s impracticality. “He never understood me,” Walt later said. “He thought I was a black sheep. This nonsense of drawing pictures! He said, ‘Walter, you’re going to make a career of that, are you?’” Elias had other plans for his son. He had secured a job for Walt at O-Zell for twenty-five dollars a week, and he could not possibly see why Walt would sacrifice the certainty of the jelly factory for the uncertainty of art.
But Walt Disney had returned from France a man transformed. He had been transformed physically. He had left Chicago five feet eight inches tall and spindly. He had returned weighing 165 pounds, strengthened by extensive manual labor, with broad shoulders and big hands. He had even begun smoking while in France, a habit that was anathema to his father. More, he had changed emotionally, having had in France, he said, “a lifetime of experience in one package.” Though he still pulled childish pranks—upon his return he would carry a box with a hole in the bottom through which he stuck his own “bloody” thumb—he had matured, become more self-reliant and independent. “I was settled” was how he later put it. “I…was able to kind of line right up on an objective. And I went for it.”
