The Animated Man (68 page)

2
. Richard Hubler to author, July 29, 1969.

INTRODUCTION
“It's All Me”

1
. Anthony Bower, “Snow White and the 1,200 Dwarfs,”
Nation
, May 10, 1941, 565.

2
. “ ‘Snow White' Sets Mark with $6,740,000 Gross,”
New York Times
, May 2, 1939, 29.

3
. “Drive on Walt Disney by Cartoonists Guild,”
Variety
, January 15, 1941, 16.

4
. George Goepper to Walt Disney, memorandum, February 4, 1941, WDA.

5
. Adelquist exhibit 11, NLRB/Babbitt. A copy of the memorandum is also at CSUN/SCG.

6
. George Goepper, interview with Milton Gray, March 23, 1977.

7
. Disney's speech exists in three versions. The version delivered on February 10, 1941, in manuscript and on discs at WDA, includes remarks directed specifically to the animators. The version of February 11, which is Lessing exhibit 29, NLRB/Babbitt, was delivered to lower-ranking employees at the studio, particularly the women who inked and painted the cels. An abbreviated version of the February 10 speech, with Disney's profanity removed, is part of CSUN/SCG. Memos listing the departments summoned to each of the two speeches are also part of that collection.

8
. “Labor Fantasia,”
Business Week
, May 17, 1941, 50.

CHAPTER 1
“The Pet in the Family”

1
. A “History of Marceline,” first published in the 1938 Golden Jubilee edition of the
Marceline News
, was reprinted in
The Magic City, Marceline, Missouri, Diamond Jubilee Celebration
, a program book published by the Marceline-based Walsworth Publishing Company for the celebration of Marceline's seventy-fifth anniversary, June 29–July 4, 1963.

2
. Census records show only eight siblings, but all ten are listed in the most thoroughly researched genealogical examination of the Disney family, Edward Disney,
A Story of Disneys: Some Myths Exploded
(Bristol, England, 1997), 166.

3
. Elias Disney's visit was reported in the
Marceline Mirror
, February 9, 1906 (this citation and other Marceline newspaper citations are from clippings compiled by May Bartee Couch). His sale of his Chicago house to Walter Chamberlain on February 10, 1906, is recorded in Torrens Book 221-A, p. 302, Cook County Recorder of Deeds.

4
.
Marceline Mirror
, December 1, 1905.

5
. From records of those transactions at the Linn County Abstract Company, Brookfield, Missouri.

6
. The house number was changed to 2156 in 1909 as part of a citywide rationalization of Chicago house numbers.

7
. 3515 Vernon Avenue is the address on the “Return of a Birth,” or birth certificate, for Raymond Arnold Disney (misidentified on the certificate as “Walter”) and in Elias Disney's city directory listing.

8
. Elias Disney's purchase of the lot from James E. McCabe is recorded in Torrens Book 221-A, p. 302. The 1892 date was assigned to the house during a Historic Resources Survey by the Chicago Landmarks Commission in 1983–95.

9
. On Hermosa, see the
Encyclopedia of Chicago
, online edition,
www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/578/html
.

10
. Roy Disney, interview with Richard Hubler, November 17, 1967, BU/RH.
The incomplete transcript at Boston is a preliminary version of a complete transcript bearing that date at the Walt Disney Archives.

11
. Roy Disney, 1967 interview. Roy seems to say that Elias and the older boys left first, but Bob Thomas,
Building a Company: Roy O. Disney and the Creation of an Entertainment Empire
(New York, 1998), 18, says that Flora and the younger children moved to Marceline ahead of Elias and the two older boys, as Walt Disney's memory of the event suggests.

12
. “Walt Disney Recalls Some Pleasant Childhood Memories,”
Marceline News
, October 13, 1960. The newspaper marked a Disney visit (to dedicate an elementary school named for him) by reprinting a letter he wrote more than twenty years earlier on the occasion of Marceline's fiftieth anniversary.

13
. Roy Disney, 1967 interview.

14
. Walt Disney, interview with Pete Martin, May or June 1956. Except as noted otherwise, all quotations from Walt Disney throughout the book are from the Martin transcripts, copies of which are housed at both WDA and BU/RH. Lillian Disney and her two daughters, Diane and Sharon, were interviewed by Martin at intervals during the marathon taping sessions with Walt Disney when he was unavailable, and their comments are part of the Martin transcripts.

15
. A recording of Disney's brief speech at Marceline is included on a compact disc accompanying Robert Tieman,
Walt Disney Treasures
(New York, 2003). He also spoke of being a “champion hog rider” in the 1956 Martin interview.

16
. Roy Disney, interview with Hubler, June 18, 1968, BU/RH.

17
. In the 1900 census, almost 46 million Americans lived in “rural” places with a population of fewer than 2,500; about 30 million lived in larger towns.

18
. The telephone directory was published in a newspaper, the
Marceline Mirror
for February 22, 1907.

19
.
Lady and the Tramp
meeting notes, May 15, 1952, WDA.

20
. Roy Disney, 1967 interview.

21
. Disney,
Some Myths Exploded
, 154.

22
. Disney,
Some Myths Exploded
, 169.

23
. The Chicago Historical Society maintains a database with information from building permits cited in
American Contractor
from 1898 to 1912. Elias is listed as the owner of four properties for which permits were issued between 1898 and 1901. Contractors were not listed on building permits at the time, so Elias could have been, and probably was, the contractor for many other properties he did not own.

24
. Roy Disney, June 1968 interview.

25
. Saint Paul Congregational Church (Chicago) record books, now housed at Chicago Theological Seminary.

26
. Roy Disney, 1967 interview.

27
. Saint Paul record books. The name “Walter” was one that Elias and Flora had in mind for some time. When their second son, Raymond, was born in 1890, his birth certificate (filled out on January 8, 1891) showed his name as “Walter Disney.”
There is also a birth certificate for Roy Disney, but none for either Walt Disney or his sister, Ruth, both of them also born in Chicago; there was no requirement that births be registered with the Cook County clerk until 1916. Walt's birth date is noted, however, in the Saint Paul baptismal record.

28
. Roy Disney, June 1968 interview.

29
. Roy Disney, 1967 interview. Thomas,
Building a Company
, 24, says the trigger for the two boys' break with their father was his insistence that they give him the money they had earned by farming land Elias leased from Robert Disney.

30
. Roy Disney, June 1968 interview.

31
. Roy Disney, June 1968 interview.

32
. Diane Disney Miller, Martin interview.

33
. Don Taylor, “The Disney Family as I Remember Them,” in
Our Marceline Heritage, Part 1
(Marceline, 1974), 16.

34
. Roy Disney, June 1968 interview.

35
. Roy Disney, June 1968 interview.

36
. Mary Richardson Disney died on March 10, 1909, at Ellis, Kansas. Her husband had died in 1891.

37
. Roy Disney remembered Margaret Disney as “a wonderful character with an infectious laugh . . . and she was always enamored with Walt from the time he was a little fellow. She was the one used to bring him tablets and pencils, you remember the Big Chief Indian red tablet that we used to buy as kids? She used to keep him supplied with those.” June 1968 interview.

38
. Roy Disney, June 1968 interview.

39
. Taylor, “Disney Family as I Remember Them.”

40
. Bob Thomas,
Walt Disney: An American Original
(New York, 1976), 31.

41
. Roy Disney, 1967 interview.

42
. Walt and Roy Disney identified the house to their Marceline hosts on their 1956 visit, but there is no documentary record the Disneys lived there.

43
.
Marceline Mirror
, May 18, 1911. A brief notice: “Elias Disney and family left Wednesday morning for Kansas City to make their future home.”

44
. That is the address for Elias Disney shown in Kansas City city directories for 1912–14.

45
. Elias and Flora Disney purchased the house at 3028 Bellefontaine Street from Florence E. and James R. Scherrer on September 4, 1914, and executed a deed of trust to J. P. Crump on the same day. Jackson County (MO) Records Office, KCWPA 1900–1920 Grantee Index COO-FZ, Grantor Index CA-DZ, Deeds 1002149 and 1002150.

46
. Brian Burnes, Robert W. Butler, and Dan Viets,
Walt Disney's Missouri: The Roots of a Creative Genius
(Kansas City, 2002), 53, cites an internal
Star
memorandum from 1955 in identifying Roy as the route's official owner and as the source of these circulation figures: morning
Times
, 680; afternoon and Sunday
Star
, 635. By the time the Disney family sold the route, on March 17, 1917, they served 925 subscribers
to the
Times
, 840 to the daily
Star
, and 876 to the Sunday paper. The $2,100 sales price is from Thomas,
Building a Company
, 29.

47
. Roy Disney, 1967 interview.

48
. “Walt Disney, Showman and Educator, Remembers Daisy,”
CTA
[California Teachers Association]
Journal
, December 1955, 4. The Daisy of the article's title was Daisy Beck, Disney's seventh-grade homeroom teacher, whom he remembered fondly.

49
. The 1912 graduation date comes from David R. Smith of the Walt Disney Archives. The Kansas City (MO) School District has no record that Roy Disney ever attended school there, but its records from that period are fragmentary. Even Walt Disney's attendance at Benton School is reflected only in a single school census.

50
. Meyer Minda, undated interview posted on the Walt Disney Family Museum Web site, February 2004.

51
. Minda interview.

52
. City directories show Herbert A. Hudson's Benton Barber Shop at 2914 East Thirty-first Street in 1915–17.

53
. The date, 1917, is in what David R. Smith of the Walt Disney Archives calls “Ruth's graduation book.” Smith to author, e-mail, May 1, 2006.

54
. David R. Smith of the Walt Disney Archives provided a list of O-Zell-related items stolen from Ruth Disney Beecher's former home in Portland in 1974 and later found in the possession of an antiques dealer. The archives has copies of none of the items, which are described on Smith's list mainly as stock certificates, receipts for the purchase of stock, and the like, but also include “6 [undated] IOUs signed by Elias Disney for O-Zell.” The earliest stock certificates—a hundred shares in Flora's name and two thousand in Elias's—were dated in April 1912. Smith to author, e-mail, November 3, 2005.

55
. Thomas,
Walt Disney
, 40. Walt Disney, in the 1956 interview, identified Fred Harvey as Roy's employer but remembered Roy's working as a news butcher only one summer.

56
. Roy Disney, June 1968 interview.

57
. The Disneys' address and their renter status are reflected in the 1920 federal census, which incorrectly listed Elias as “Charles Disney.”

58
. The O-Zell Company's address appears in want ads and Yellow Pages listings from that period.

59
. Not to be confused with the Art Institute of Chicago. The Art Institute was originally called the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, but it changed its name in the 1880s. The academy where Disney studied was an entirely separate school, founded around 1903—as a rival to the Art Institute's school, in fact.

60
. Thomas,
Walt Disney
, 331. The school was later renamed the Kansas City Art Institute.

61
. Five examples of Disney's
Voice
cartoons, including several showing the strong McManus influence, were published in
Chicago's American
, April 27, 1967.

62
. Disney's “roster card” from the Chicago Post Office shows he was appointed a “sub carrier” June 25, 1918; his appointment was approved July 5 and ended September 24. National Personnel Records Center, Saint Louis.

63
. Thomas,
Building a Company
, 35, has Roy proceeding immediately to Great Lakes after he enlisted, but that version of events is at odds with Walt's account of meeting his brother at the Chicago terminal, since Walt was not in Chicago until the fall.

64
. As reflected in Kansas City city directories and the 1920 federal census. Herbert apparently moved into the family home shortly before Elias, Flora, Walt, and Ruth moved to Chicago in 1917.

65
. The name Pesmen-Rubin Commercial Art Studio appears in a brief memoir written by Louis Pesmen in 1971, at the invitation of David R. Smith of the Walt Disney Archives, but there is no comparable listing in city directories for 1920 or 1921. (Pesmen and Rubin had separate listings as commercial artists in 1920, and Pesmen shared a listing with another artist in 1921.) Pesmen's memoir is regrettably dubious in most respects, his memories of the young Disney's employment far too precise to be credible.

66
. Kansas City Slide advertised for a “first class man . . . steady” to make “cartoon and wash drawings.”