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Through his feeling for animals, says a friend, Walt is related to nature and to the mother warmth of the earth. Out of this earthiness, Walt feels, there sprout whatever seeds of creativity he has. "I'm an earthy guy, all right," he says. Some of Disney's detractors disagree. The cartoon animals bear almost no relation to real animals. Nature in them is not idealized; she is at best played for pratfalls and at worst she is simpered over and over-sanitized. Indeed, the man whom all the world knows as Mother Nature's right-hand man has hardly ever lived outside city limits.
A Mouse in School. Walter Elias Disney was born on Dec. 5, 1901 on the North Side of Chicago, the fourth of five children. His father was a small building contractor who argued Debs Socialism all week and on Sunday played fiddle in St. Paul's Congregational Church. When Walt was about six, the family moved to a farm in Marceline, Mo. There, on the day when an old man down the road gave him a dollar for drawing a picture of a horse, Walt decided that he wanted to be "an artist." A few years later, father Disney bought a newspaper route in Kansas City and the family moved there. Walt and brother Roy got up at 3:30 every morning to deliver papers. The two brothers, who are now partners in Walt Disney Productions, Inc., were very close from the first. In school Walt was chiefly noted for sleeping, for squiggling doodles in the margins of his books, and for the time he brought a mouse to class.
Walt was in his teens and back in Chicago, where his father had bought a jam factory, when he got the camera bug and bought a $70 movie camera on the installment plan. Girls, he recalls, were a nuisance. "I was normal," he says, "but girls bored me. They still do. Their interests are just different." Besides, Walt was busy. After school he worked as a gateman on the Wilson Avenue elevated line, got a Christmas job in the local post office. During summer vacations he worked as a candy butcher on the Katy Railroad.
Actor or Artist? When he was 16 the U.S. entered World War I, and he decided to go to France as an ambulance driver. He managed to get his mother to sign his father's name on a parental permit, then he forged the date of his birth, and was off. Home again, he was no longer interested in the ninth grade. "I tried to decide," he says, "was I going to be an actor or an artist?"
Walt heard of a job in a commercial art shop at the princely salary of $50 a month, and that decided it. Pretty soon he was getting $35 a week from an outfit that produced animated advertisements to run before the feature at local movie houses. In a few months Walt thought he knew enough to start a studio of his own in the family garage. At 19 he had hit the main drag of his career.