The Animated Man (6 page)

For the senior Disneys, who had lived in Chicago a few years before, the move to Kansas City may have been disheartening, one more setback to absorb, but the city cannot have been as startling a change for them as it must have been for their nine-year-old son. Yet unlike other children in such situations, Walt Disney seems not to have been thrilled or cowed by the city's crowds and bustle. He rarely if ever spoke of Kansas City with the nostalgic fondness he felt for Marceline. That was surely because—in contrast to his life on the farm—he had so little free time. From the time the Disneys moved to Kansas City, Walt was put to work.

As of July 1, 1911, Elias bought (for twenty-one hundred dollars) a
Kansas City Star
delivery route that extended from Twenty-seventh Street to Thirty-first Street, and from Prospect Avenue to Indiana Avenue, on the city's southeast side. Curiously, the route was in Roy's name, rather than Elias's, evidently because Elias, at fifty-one, was so much older than the typical
Star
route owner. Elias, Roy, and Walt delivered the morning
Times
to almost seven hundred customers and the afternoon and Sunday
Star
to more than six hundred, figures that increased over time.
⁴⁶

“It was a big load,” Roy said. “And Sunday was a big work day. . . . We got out of the church habit because of that. That'll break your church, you know.”
⁴⁷
The “church habit” had probably begun to fade even in Marceline, where there was no Congregational church. Like his brother, Walt Disney noticed a falling away in the family's religious observances. The Disneys asked grace over dinner, he said, “but later on that kind of disappeared.”

Disney spoke of the newspaper route's demands in 1955: “When I was nine, my brother Roy and I were already businessmen. We had a newspaper route . . . delivering papers in a residence area every morning and evening of
the year, rain, shine, or snow. We got up at 4:30
A.M
., worked until the school bell rang and did the same thing again from four o'clock in the afternoon until supper time. Often I dozed at my desk, and my report card told the story.”
⁴⁸

Forty years afterward, he still dreamed that he had missed customers on his route. “I remember those icy cold days of crawling up these icy steps” to put the newspaper inside a storm door, he said in 1956. Elias insisted that the papers not be thrown on porches or in yards, but carried to the front door. “I was so darn cold I'd slip, and I could cry, so I cried.” The Disneys' route encompassed grander homes than their own, and Walt said the “wealthy kids” on his route often left “wonderful toys” outside. He sometimes paused in his deliveries to play “with these electric trains or wind-up trains.”

Roy Disney delivered newspapers for his father only until he graduated from Manual Training High School in 1912.
⁴⁹
He then worked on an uncle's farm for a summer before taking a job as a clerk at the First National Bank of Kansas City. Walt Disney continued to deliver papers, for a total of more than six years. In the winter when snow was on the ground, said the Disneys' next-door neighbor Meyer Minda, Elias and Walt loaded their newspapers onto bobsleds. On summer mornings, the Mindas were awakened by the clanking iron wheels of the Disneys' delivery cart.
⁵⁰

When Elias hired other boys to help with the route he paid them three or four dollars a week, Walt Disney said, but he would not pay his son. “He said that it was part of my job. I was part of the family. He said, ‘I clothe and feed you.' . . . So he wouldn't pay me.” Walt began to find ways to make—and keep—money behind Elias's back, first by delivering medicine for a drugstore while he was delivering papers, and then by ordering and selling extra papers that Elias did not know about.

Meyer Minda, two years Walt's senior, remembered that the two boys “opened a pop stand together at the corner of Thirty-first Street and Mont-gall,” near the Disneys' first Kansas City home, when Walt was ten, in the summer of 1912. “It ran about three weeks and we drank up all the profits.”
⁵¹
Walt later drew cartoons for a barber named Bert Hudson, proprietor of the Benton Barber Shop on Thirty-first Street near the Benton School. He caricatured “all the critters that hung out there,” Disney said, and got haircuts in return.
⁵²

“The upshot of it was,” he said in 1956, “I was working all the time.”

So was his father. In addition to the
Star
route, Elias imported butter and eggs from a dairy in Marceline—“I think every week or two weeks,” Walt said—and sold them to his newspaper customers. Sometimes Elias was ill when it came time to deliver the butter and eggs, and on those days his parents
took Walt out of school so that he could help his mother make deliveries. Disney remembered his embarrassment at having to push the delivery cart through the neighborhood where his schoolmates lived.

As Walt grew up and Elias grew older, the weight in their relationship began to shift. Walt Disney recalled an incident when his father, angry because Walt had talked back, ordered him to the basement for a whipping. As Walt started down, Roy told him, “Don't take it.” In the basement, when Walt again responded sharply to something his father said, Elias raised a hammer, “and he started to hit me, and I took the hammer out of his hand. He raised his other arm and I held both of his hands. And I just held them there. I was stronger than he was. I just held them. And he cried. He never touched me after that.”

Walt and Ruth graduated from the seventh grade at Benton School on June 8, 1917.
⁵³
Elias had sold the paper route on March 17, 1917, and it was apparently soon after graduation that he and Flora, and Ruth with them, moved back to Chicago. Elias had been investing in a Chicago jelly concern called the O-Zell Company at least since 1912, and the limited available evidence suggests that he moved in order to take a more active role in the company's management.
⁵⁴
Walt stayed behind, continuing to work on the paper route for its new owner while living in the family home with Roy, their older married brother, Herbert, and Herbert's wife and baby daughter.

Roy had worked two summers for the Fred Harvey Company as what was called a news butcher, a vendor of candy, fruit, and soft drinks, on some of the many Santa Fe trains passing through Kansas City.
⁵⁵
After graduation, Walt followed Roy into such a job for the Kansas City—based Van Noy Interstate Company, which owned the concessions on much of the country's railroad network (but not the Santa Fe). Walt lied about his age, not for the last time, since he would not turn sixteen until December.

Although Walt had been working almost all the time since his family had moved to Kansas City, he had always been under Elias's thumb; but now his father was in Chicago. As a news butcher Walt Disney was for the first time completely on his own, a fledgling businessman. By his own account, he fared badly at the hands of his customers. He was the repeated victim of cruel jokes that robbed him of empty soda bottles and thus of his profits. His co-workers treated him no better, pretending to help him while stuffing his hamper with rotten fruit—and Disney himself, attracted by the candy bars he was selling, “couldn't resist eating my own stock,” in a repetition of what had happened with the pop stand. (He suffered in another way as well: almost forty years later, he vividly remembered being snubbed by a pretty classmate—“I had always had an eye on her at school”—who was a passenger.)

At the end of the summer, when he left to join his parents in Chicago, Disney was in debt to his employer. Roy said many years later that his brother “just wasn't attending to business. So he'd come in and he couldn't account for all that merchandise he took out so he'd run into a loss and who do you think paid his losses? . . . He was always that way. He never had any knack for business”—that is, business conceived in terms of the careful, precise accounting that Roy found congenial. “It just annoyed him.”
⁵⁶

For all the disappointments associated with it, Disney remembered “this news butchering chore” as a “very exciting thing.” Since he was very small, his life had been confined to Marceline and Kansas City; as a news butcher, he rode different lines' trains to surrounding states. For him, as for so many of his contemporaries, railroads opened up the world as nothing else could. “I loved them,” he said of the trains he rode.

In Chicago, the Disneys rented a flat in a two-flat building at 1523 Ogden Avenue on the Near West Side, about five miles closer to the downtown Loop than their old Tripp Avenue address.
⁵⁷
Walt enrolled in the eighth grade at McKinley High School at 2040 West Adams Street—and, as always, he worked, this time in the jelly factory of which Elias was part owner, in the 1300 block of West Fifteenth Street.
⁵⁸
He washed bottles, crushed apples, and once carried a pistol as a very nervous sixteen-year-old night watchman. He also took classes three nights a week at an art school, the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts.
⁵⁹
That was his only formal art training of any kind, apart from some children's classes that he attended “two winters, three nights a week” in Kansas City, sponsored by the school then called the Fine Arts Institute.
⁶⁰

At McKinley he was a typical high school cartoonist, displaying in his stiff, awkward drawings such limited artistic ability that most others would have shed any ambitions of that kind in favor of more mundane employment. The characters in Disney's cartoons for the monthly high school magazine,
The Voice
—pug-nosed and vaguely Irish—owe a great deal to the cast of George McManus's comic strip
Bringing Up Father
.
⁶¹

While he was in school in Kansas City and Chicago, Disney said, “I was quite a ham. . . . I loved this drawing business but everything was a means to an end. When I put on a stage play I would make my own scenery. . . . I was putting on these little plays at school where I was always staging 'em, directing 'em, acting in 'em. . . . I always got something where I could fit the kids, because the kids would always laugh at the other kids.” In Kansas City, he and his neighbor Walt Pfeiffer presented skits on amateur nights at local theaters, with Pfeiffer's mother accompanying them on the piano.

Disney performed at home, too—“I'd do anything to attract attention”—with
the help of hoary magic tricks like a “plate lifter,” a bladder that he put under a plate or pan and then pumped full of air when he squeezed a rubber bulb attached to a tube running from it. His mother “got a big kick out of it” when he put the bladder under some kitchen pans, he said, and at her urging he put it under his father's soup plate. “Every time my dad would go down to get a spoonful of soup my mother would rock the plate. . . . My mother was just killing herself laughing.” Elias noticed her laughter, but not the animated plate.

Walt Disney's capacity for hard work was enormous. From July to September 1918, he went to work at the Chicago post office around seven in the morning as a mail sorter and substitute carrier.
⁶²
(The post office hired him, Disney said, only because he wore his father's clothes and lied about his age after he had been turned down as too young.) When he finished with that job in midafternoon, he sought out other work at the post office—carrying special-delivery letters or picking up mail from boxes—for an hour or so, until he rode the elevated line to the South Side to work as a “gate man,” loading the trains during rush hour.

Roy Disney had joined the navy on June 22, 1917, soon after the United States entered the First World War. He was called up in the fall of that year, and after leaving Kansas City he passed through Chicago with other recruits on their way to Great Lakes Naval Training Station.
⁶³
Walt met Roy at the rail terminal, where Walt was briefly mistaken for one of the recruits. “It put a bee in my bonnet,” he said. When Roy came down from Great Lakes to visit the family, “he looked swell in that sailor's uniform,” Disney said. “So I wanted to join him.”

He was too young, but in the summer of 1918, when he was working in the Chicago post office, he signed up with “a private subscription deal forming for the Red Cross,” as a driver in the American Ambulance Corps. “I was still a year too young,” he said, and his father balked at signing the required affidavit, so his mother signed for both of them. Disney then altered his birth date on the affidavit, changing “1901” to “1900,” so that he would appear to be seventeen, rather than sixteen, and thus old enough to get the required passport.

Disney was sick for weeks in the great flu epidemic of 1918, and so his departure for Europe was delayed. The war had ended by the time his Red Cross unit reached France on December 4, but he spent almost a year in a motor pool there before returning to Chicago early in the fall of 1919. His time in France was, in Disney's account, much like a greatly enlarged version of his summer as a news butcher. (In one echo of that earlier experience, his comrades surprised him immediately after their arrival in France
with a seventeenth-birthday celebration at a French bar—they drank cognac, he drank grenadine—and left him to pick up the tab.) He was grateful, Disney said many years later, that he was so young then, “because I did things that I know when I got up to my twenties that it would be an ordeal for me to do. I'd sleep on the floor of my truck and never thought anything about it. I didn't need a cushion or a big featherbed. . . . And I didn't care where I ate. . . . Everything was an experience to me then.”

There is nothing in Disney's history, or his memories of it, to suggest that he ever resented working so hard, starting so early. Disney himself professed to see continuity between his work for Elias and his work as a news butcher and as a driver in France, when Elias was far away. “I don't regret having worked like I've worked,” he said. “I can't even remember that it ever bothered me. I mean, I have no recollection of ever being unhappy in my life. I look back and I worked from way back there and I was happy all the time. I was excited. I was doing things.”