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In short order Walt turned out four cartoons burlesquing contemporary politics, and sold them to a New York distributor. The distributor went broke before he paid off, and Walt soon did the same. But for six months after that, he tried to keep the business going. Some days he had nothing to do but sit and play with the mice that infested the studio. Walt kept a few in a cage in the office, and some of them became quite tame. One mouse known as Mortimer showed no desire at all to escape, so he was made a trusty, and lived on Walt's desk.
Before long Walt ran out of both money and credit. One day he realized that he had missed at least three meals in a row. He borrowed a camera, photographed some babies, took the $40 he earned and headed for Hollywood. Brother Roy, who had just been released from a TB sanatorium in Arizona, met him there, and they set up shop in the $5-a-month corner of a Hollywood real-estate office. In the next four years the Disney studios produced 24 cartoons in a series called Alice in Cartoonland and 52 more about Oswald the Rabbit. At first, each cartoon took eight people one month to make, and sold for only $750, "with the result," says Walt, "that there was many a week when Roy and I ate one square meal a day—between us." In July 1925 Walt married a girl named Lillian Bounds, who worked in his office; they now have two grown daughters.
Mickey Is Born. After an argument with his financial backer in 1927, Walt was out of business. On a train trip, he thought and thought about a new cartoon character to market. Cats, dogs, cows, horses, pigs, chickens, ducks, apes, elephants and even dinosaurs—they had all been used before. And then, as the train clacked along somewhere between Toluca, Ill. and La Junta, Colo., Walt suddenly remembered Mortimer.
"Mortimer Mouse!" he shouted.
"Not Mortimer," said Mrs. Disney. "How about Mickey?"
When the train rolled into Los Angeles, the first sketch of the historic rodent was tucked safely in Walt's pocket, and the roughs of his first cartoon, Plane Crazy, were drawn. Plane Crazy, however, was not the first to reach the public. Sound came roaring in just then, and silent pictures silently expired. Walt rushed to New York, recorded sound track for a new Mickey Mouse cartoon called Steamboat Willie, and released it in Manhattan. "It's a wow!" cried one critic after another, and the public came piling in. Man was about to be conquered by a mouse (see box).
In the next few years Walt made a Mickey Mouse cartoon every month. His staff quickly grew from 20 to 50 to 150 (he now employs almost 1,000 people at his studio). Dozens of dazzling offers were dangled before him, but Walt declined to sell out; he knew he could not be happy except as his own boss. With a foresight remarkable in a man only 28 years old, Walt set about strengthening his organization for a long creative haul. He started the Silly Symphonies, even though there was every sign that they would not be very popular, because he felt that he and his staff, already weary of drudging at Mickey Mouse, needed "something to grow on."