The Animated Man (5 page)

“We belonged there,” Roy said. “Dad used to sub for the preacher when he was away. All us kids went to Sunday school and church.”
²⁶
Elias was one of the church's trustees, Flora its treasurer. Walter Elias Disney was named for his father and for Walter Robinson Parr, the English-born minister of Saint Paul Congregational from 1900 to 1905. Walt Disney was baptized at the church on June 8, 1902. Parr gave the name Walter Elias to a son of his own in 1904.
²⁷

Elias Disney was a highly religious man, “a strict, hard guy with a great sense of honesty and decency,” in Roy Disney's words. “He never drank. I rarely ever saw him smoke.”
²⁸
Elias was not just a Christian of a flinty sort, but also a socialist, a follower of Eugene V. Debs. Walt Disney remembered copying the cartoons by Ryan Walker in the Kansas-based socialist newspaper, the
Appeal to Reason
, which came to the Disney household every week: “They always had a front-page cartoon, of capital and labor, and when I was . . . trying to draw . . . I had them all down pat.”

In 1894, when the Disneys were living in Chicago and the United States was suffering through a severe depression, capital and labor collided in the most traumatic fashion. The Pullman strike, which began in a company town south of Chicago, spread throughout the country when the American Railway Union, whose president was Debs, declared a boycott of trains that included Pullman sleeping cars. The strike ended only after President Grover Cleveland sent federal troops to Chicago and other cities in July; Debs was jailed for disobeying an injunction against the boycott. Elias Disney's socialist beliefs undoubtedly owed something to what he saw of the Pullman strike and its outcome.

Many people have found socialist and Christian beliefs compatible, and that was certainly true at the turn of the last century, but their juxtaposition was particularly unfortunate in Elias's case. His allegiances encouraged him to see his failures as evidence that he was in thrall to grim, implacable forces,
either his own weakness and sin or an increasingly impersonal and machinelike economy. Elias had an entrepreneurial temperament, as evidenced by his repeated attempts to go into business for himself, but all signs are that his beliefs pushed him toward stoic persistence and away from the nimbleness and opportunism that have always marked successful entrepreneurs.

Elias's sons responded in different ways to their father's demands. The two oldest boys, Herbert and Raymond, shared a bedroom on the first floor of the Marceline house. “They didn't like the farm,” Roy said, “and after about two years [probably in the fall of 1908] they went out the window one night and went back to Chicago.”
²⁹
Both soon wound up working in Kansas City as clerks.

The older sons apparently never talked on the record about their father, but Roy Disney did, at one point recalling an episode that would not seem to reflect well on Elias, whatever the transgression that provoked him:

“I remember in Chicago we had an apple tree in the back yard. He'd send me to my room where I could see down over the backyard. And he'd wait a half hour; then he'd casually walk out there and eye the tree and go over to it . . . making an impression on me . . . select a switch and cut it off, feel it, test it out like a little whip. All the time I'm in torture up there thinking about my licking. When he came up there he'd have a little switch and the biggest part of it would [be] no bigger than your finger. And you had to take your pants down and you got a switching. That was Dad.”
³⁰

Both Walt and Roy Disney remembered their father's quick temper, which found a mirror in their own impatience with him. “He knew what he wanted to do,” Walt Disney said, “and he expected you to know just what he wanted to do. . . . I'd say, ‘And how can I read your mind? . . . I'd come right back at him. He'd get mad . . . and he'd start after me. And my dad was the kind of guy who'd pick up anything near him”—even a hammer or a saw, although Elias retained enough self-possession that he attacked his sons only with the handle of the hammer or the side of the saw. Walt's defense was to run away until his mother had restored calm.

Elias “had a peculiar way of talking,” Walt said. “I could never figure some of the expressions he used. He'd get mad at me and call me a little scud. He says, ‘You little scud, I'll take a gad to you,' and I found out later, when I was digging into Irish law and things, that a scud is equivalent to a little squirt . . . and a gad is something they used to sort of flail, you know, they used to beat the grain with it.”
*

The two younger Disney brothers remembered their father not as the forbidding man such anecdotes suggest, but with obvious fondness and unforced compassion. Elias was, they recognized, a decent man caged by harsh ideas. “A good dad,” Roy said. “So I don't like him put in the light of being a brutal or mean dad. That he was not.”
³¹

Elias had no gift for small talk, even with his sons. He was, after all, past forty when his two youngest children were born. “Yet he was the kindest fellow,” Walt said, “and he thought of nothing but his family.” Walt spoke of his father “constantly,” his daughter Diane said in 1956. “I think Dad had a very strong family feeling. He loved his dad. He thought he was tough. But he did love him. He loved that old man.”
³²
Strip away the crippling dogmas that Elias embraced, and a far more appealing figure emerges, a vigorous risk taker who was not afraid to take chances even when he was well into middle age—a figure with more than a passing resemblance to his youngest son.

Elias “loved to talk to people,” Walt Disney said. “He believed people. He thought everybody was as honest as he was. He got taken many times because of that.” Elias had a winning streak of eccentricity, as Walt recalled: “Dad was always meeting up with strange characters to talk socialism. . . . He'd bring them home! . . . And anybody who could play an instrument. . . . They were tramps, you know? They weren't even clean. But he'd want to bring them into the dinner table, and my mother would have nothing of it. She'd feed them out on the steps.”

In a clear break with his astringent principles, Elias was “an old-time fiddler,” as Don Taylor, the Disneys' Marceline neighbor as a teenager, remembered more than sixty-five years later; “and many Sundays he would harness the old buckskin mare to the family buggy, and while Ruth and Walt sat in the back with their feet hanging out, Mr. and Mrs. Disney put the violin in the buggy and drove to my parents' home. Here he was joined by another fiddler [while] my sister . . . would play the piano. . . . I still can see Walt and Ruth sitting in straight-back chairs listening to the music which would generally last about an hour or so. To me, Walt was a very quiet, unassuming lad; and in addressing me, he would always say, ‘Hello, Dawn
[sic]
.' ”
³³

Flora Disney also softened the sternness of Elias's rule. “We had a wonderful mother that could kid the life out of my dad when he was in his peevishness,” Roy said.
³⁴
When the family was scraping by, selling butter and eggs, she put extra butter on the children's bread, turning the slices over so that Elias would not see that she was giving them butter he could have sold. “So,” Walt Disney said, “we'd say to Dad, ‘Look, there's no butter on the bread.' And it was just loaded underneath, you know?”

Walt escaped the worst of his father's wrath. “He was a pet around the house,” Roy said. “Us older kids said that he got off easy with Dad because by the time Dad got around to him he'd worn himself out chasing us, so Walt had an easy time. Walt would get a chair between [himself] and Dad and just argue the dickens out of Dad. Dad couldn't get ahold of him.”
³⁵
Walt Disney used a phrase like Roy's to describe his role on the farm. “I just played,” he said. “I was sort of the pet in the family.”

Roy was a benevolent big brother to Walt and Ruth. “Roy was the one who would always see that Ruth and I had a toy,” Walt said in 1956. “Roy didn't have much money, but by gosh he always saw we had a toy.”

Marceline's new Park School opened in 1908, but Walt's parents did not send him there until the fall of 1909, when he was almost eight years old; he and Ruth, two years younger, started school together. Until then, “I had leisure time,” he said. He spent much of it with his “pals” who lived on adjoining properties, the older men he identified as “Doc Sherwood” (Leighton I. Sherwood, who was in his seventies then) and “Grandpa Taylor” (probably E. H. Taylor, who was around seventy). For a time, he also enjoyed the company of his father's widowed mother, Mary Richardson Disney, who was, unlike her straitlaced son, “always into mischief.” She aroused Elias's ire, Walt Disney said, by sending her grandson onto a neighbor's property to steal turnips.
³⁶

Disney remembered receiving encouragement to draw from some of his adult companions. Sherwood gave him “a nickel or something” to draw a picture of his horse, and his aunt Margaret—Robert Disney's wife—brought him pads of paper and crayons and praised his drawings (“stick things,” Disney called them) extravagantly.
³⁷
In one oft-repeated family anecdote, the young Walt drew what Roy called “his ideas of animals” on the side of the Disney house with soft tar that Elias had used to seal a barrel that caught rainwater.

The Disneys would need that rainwater if drought dried up their wells, and there are echoes in Walt's and Roy's memories of how hard and practical their farm life really was. The Disneys stored apples after the harvest, Roy said, then sold them “in March and April, when you could get a respectable amount of money for a bucket of apples. We did that two years, and then Dad and I and Walt—he was big enough then to tag along but he wasn't really much help—would go downtown and go door to door and peddle our apples. We really got good money out of it. In those days you could sell a bucket of apples for a quarter.”
³⁸

Elias induced at least some of his fellow farmers to join a sort of union called the American Society of Equity, founded a few years earlier to consolidate
farmers' buying power. In Don Taylor's recollection, Elias hosted an oyster supper at the Knights of Pythias Hall, on the second floor above Zurcher's jewelry store on Kansas Avenue. “Farmers came from all over with their families” to eat the soup made from five gallons of raw oysters. Writing in the 1970s, Taylor said that “never have I ever tasted oyster soup quite as good as that served at Elias Disney's in 1907.”
³⁹

The Disneys lived on their farm for about four and a half years, until Elias sold it on November 28, 1910. “My dad had a sickness,” Walt Disney said—Roy identified it as diphtheria, but it was evidently typhoid fever, followed by pneumonia
⁴⁰
—“and they decided to sell the farm. So my dad . . . he had to auction all the stock and things. And it was in the cold of the winter and I remember Roy and myself . . . going all around to the different little towns and places, tacking up these posters of the auction. And I remember my mother heating these bricks in the oven, we put the bricks in the floor of the buggy and a robe over us and we went around, all around tacking up these posters.”

As idyllic as life on the farm had been for the boys, Walt especially, leaving it was correspondingly painful. Roy Disney remembered “distinctly” that when the farm was sold, “we had a little six-month-old colt [that] was sold and tied up to a buggy and taken away, and Walt and I both cried. Later on that day . . . we were down in town and here was this farmer and his rig hitched up to the hitching rack and our little colt tied on behind . . . and the damn little colt saw us when we were across the street and he whinnied and whinnied and reared back on his tie-down, and we went over and hugged him and cried over him. . . . That was the last we saw of him.”
⁴¹

The Disneys moved into Marceline for the remainder of the 1910–11 school year, most of that time renting a house, probably at 508 North Kansas Avenue.
⁴²
Then, on May 17, 1911, they left for Kansas City, Missouri, about 120 miles away.
⁴³
(Robert Disney lived in Kansas City then and may have encouraged his brother to move there.) They lived first in a rented house at 2706 East Thirty-first Street.
⁴⁴
Walt entered the Benton School at 3004 Benton Boulevard, barely two blocks from his new home, in September 1911. Although he had completed the second grade at Marceline, the Kansas City schools required him to take that grade over. In September 1914, the Disneys bought a modest frame house at 3028 Bellefontaine Street, a few steps north of Thirty-first and about four blocks east of their first Kansas City home.
⁴⁵

Kansas City was vast compared with Marceline. The Missouri side alone was a city of more than a quarter million people. Add Kansas City, Kansas, and other surrounding towns, and the total was well above a half million. Since the Civil War, Kansas City had grown steadily by serving as a vital hub
for western settlement, for cattle drives, and for barge and rail traffic in agricultural products and manufactured goods from throughout the Midwest. By early in the twentieth century, its remaining frontier rawness was retreating rapidly in the face of such refinements as broad, landscaped boulevards. In 1911, Kansas City was not just bigger than Marceline, it was truly different, a real city.

Marceline and Kansas City were, however, similar in some fundamentals. Disney cheerfully associated outhouses only with Marceline when he spoke to the crowd there in July 1956, but he had remembered differently just a few weeks earlier, when he was interviewed by Pete Martin, a writer for the
Saturday Evening Post
. He said then, no doubt correctly, that the Disney family relied on an outhouse at its Bellefontaine address until he and his carpenter father enlarged the house one summer, adding a kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom.