Walt Disney       

Do you know what Walt Disney is Famous for? His character Mickey Mouse. Did you know that Walt was the voice of Mickey Mouse in the older films? There is more to Walt than you think.

Walter Elias Disney was born on December 5,1901 on North Tripp Avenue. in Chicago. He had three brothers and one sister. His parents were his mother Flora and Father Elias.  When Walt was four, the neighborhood became rough, so they moved to a farm in Marceline, Missouri. It was the happy time in Walt’s life. Walt loved everything about the small town, like Main Street.

Walt’s parents and brothers were always busy with farm chores, so Walt didn’t go to school until he was almost seven. By then his younger sister, Ruth, was ready for school. Walt hated going to school with his sister. He said it was embarrassing.

As soon as Walt could hold a pencil he would spend hours drawing. His neighbor Doc Sherwood thought Walt was a good drawer and asked for a portrait of his horse. Walt would even get in trouble for drawing, like drawing with black tar on the house and drawing on his school work when he should have been doing the work.

Walt started his first job as a newspaper boy. During the summer when he was 15 he worked on a train traveling between Kansas City, Missouri, and Spiro,Oklahoma.  He walked up the aisles selling items.When the Disneys moved again Walt attended McKinley High school in Chicago. After a year he dropped out and started taking night class at Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. Walt got himself a camera and made short films with his new friend Russell Maas. To support himself, Walt applied for a job with the post office. The the boss said he was too young, so he went home, changed his clothes, put on a man’s hat, and drew a mustache on his face. Then he went back to the post office, talked to the same man again and this time he got the job!

While Walt worked at the post  office, two of his brothers, Herbert and Roy, were serving in the army. It was wartime. World War 1. Walt felt as if he was missing out on all the action. He was too young to enlist, but he was able to convince his mother to sign papers for him to drive an ambulance.

Walt went back to Kansas City where he teamed up with another artist, Ub Iwerks. Ub was very talented. So the two of them started up their own company. They hoped to create art for ads and signs. They had plenty of ideas. They were missing one thing, customers. The shop closed after only a month.

Walt and Ub Iwerks found a job at Kansas City Slide Company. It turned out to be a lucky break. This job changed Walt’s life. Walt set up a studio in the shed behind his house. Every evening he would draw cartoons in different positions and filmed them. Walt made a cartoon called Laugh-O- Grams. They were silent, full of humor, and only lasted a couple of minutes. After a selling of the cartoon to the Newman theaters in Kansas City, he started up a small company to make more.

Ub Iwerks and a few other young men joined Walt in his new business. They spent all day drawing characters, making up jokes, and goofing around with a movie camera. Walt started to work on a film called Alice in Wonderland, but before he could finish the movie his company went bankrupt. Walt knew that if he wanted his company to stay in business, then he better move where movies were made, Hollywood.

Walt packed up and moved in with his uncle who lived in California. He went to every studio in town but nobody offered him a job. So he went on making cartoons and selling them. Later on in October, he finally got his big break.  Margaret Winkler saw and liked what Walt had done in Alice’s Wonderland, and she agreed to pay Walt for a series of the cartoons; she would sell them to theaters.

Walt was so happy, but he only had three months to make a new film, and his young actress was back in Kansas City. Walt didn’t have any money to make the movie, a movie camera, a studio and no any artists to work with. So Walt turned to his brother Roy for help, and they were able to form Disney Brothers Studio. They got money from their uncle and parents. Walt was also able to buy a camera.

Walt was able to get Virginia Davis ( the girl who played Alice) and her family to move to Hollywood. Walt did all of the creative work at first. But making a whole series of Alice Films by himself was too much work, so he hired three men to operate the cameras and help with animation and three women to ink and paint the black-and-white cartoon drawings. He also got in touch with Ub Iwerks to help.

Walt and Ub created a new character named Oswald the Lucky Rabbit and started making a series of Oswald cartoons. It was a good decision because he was a big hit. The studio started selling so many cartoons they moved into a bigger office, and Walt changed the name to Walt Disney Studios.  Later on Lillian Bounds (one of the artists) and Walt got married. Lillian quit her job at the studio and stayed home, but she was lonely, and Walt sometimes worked late. For Christmas Walt decided to get Lillian a puppy, and she named it Sunnee. Every night Walt would tell Lillian how the new character was going. At first Walt had named the mouse Mortimer, but Lillian didn’t like the name, so she suggested Mickey.  As years went Walt made cartoons and movies. When talking movies came out this gave Walt more ideas. Then Colored film came and Walt was even more excited for that.

Lillian finally had a baby girl, and they named her Diane Marie Disney. After that they adopted a baby girl and named her Sharon Mae. Walt recorded family fun. He also took the girls on outings and acted out stories and took them bike riding at the studio. A couple of years after that Elias and Flora became sick from breathing in poisonous gas that was leaking. Elias recovered, but sadly Flora died. Walt was so upset he refused to talk about his mother’s death.  Soon enough the strike at the studio came. The workers went on strike until their demands were met. When Walt went to work every day for nine weeks workers would scream and bang on his car.  He believed that the Disney Studio had always been fair to employees. He felt betrayed. His health suffered again from all the stress. In early August, he went to South America.  While he was away Roy settled with the strike leaders. The employees got their pay demands.  Only a few people worked on making a new character named Mickey Mouse.

A couple of years later there was another war and Walt’s Studio was taken over by the U.S. army. After that Walt started to make plans for Disneyland, and soon it came to life. It opened after his anniversary. Opening day did not go smoothly. People stood in line in one hundred degree heat. Some of the rides weren’t working. The train didn’t lead anywhere --- it came to a dead end. There were not enough trash cans or water fountains. But Walt fixed things right away. Soon the place was spotless. Everyone who worked there was polite and cheerful (they had to go to “ Disney University” to learn exactly how to behave towards visitors).

People all over the world were coming to Disneyland. Walt also started to make plans for EPCOT. Walt also designed an Abraham Lincoln robot (that we see at presidents hall in Disney world) that did movements and talked so well that people thought it was an actor. At one point Walt didn’t spend a lot of time at the studio. He would stay home and babysit his grandkids and bring them to the park when no one else was around. When his family went on a cruise Walt became sick. When they got back doctors found that he had lung cancer. When Roy visited Walt in the hospital, he found Walt staring at the ceiling. Walt told Roy everything was going to go at EPCOT. The next day, December 15th,1966, he died. Walt was 65, and he didn’t live to see the opening of Walt Disney World in 1971. But Roy was there. He waited to retire until WDW was completed.   

Walt had so many accomplishments that he was famous for.  Even though Walt isn’t alive anymore his work is, and everything he has done will live on for years to come.

-Abigayle Paeglow