When giving interviews later in life, Disney would sometimes use the examples of Marceline and Kansas City as a way to compare the extremes of American life—country versus city, one an ideal to strive for, the other a thing to avoid. It was a philosophy often echoed in his cartoons. Marceline was bucolic, peaceful, and full of friendly neighbors. Kansas City was the opposite: noisy, crass, filled with hustlers. Walt’s sister Ruth and his brother Roy would both claim their upbringing wasn’t nearly as hardscrabble as Walt described, but that was part of Disney’s genius: reimagining the past and shaping it to fit the aspirational myths that people want to believe.
During Disney’s freshman year in high school, the family moved from Kansas City back to Chicago after Elias invested in O-Zell, a promising (he hoped) jelly and fruit juice company. It was yet another city Walt didn’t particularly care for. He enrolled in a new school, but his teachers there remembered him as “seldom more than lukewarm about the funny business of the three Rs.” He preferred doodling in his textbooks instead, converting them into flipbooks to entertain his classmates. “Walter Disney, one of the newcomers, has displayed unusual artistic talent, and has become Voice cartoonist,” the McKinley Voice, the high school newspaper, announced shortly thereafter. When America entered World War I, his cartoons took a sudden political bent. One, a drawing of a wounded doughboy, featured the caption “Your summer vacation. WORK or FIGHT. Will you be doing either?” Disney was too young to fight, but he wanted adventure, so he dropped out of school and joined the Red Cross, which had a younger age limit than the Army.
Just seventeen, Disney remarkably found himself driving a Red Cross ambulance in France, soon after the war ended. He also moonlighted as his unit’s painter, drawing sketches for the chow hall menu, designs for the tent flaps, and caricatures of the troops. Teaming up with a young man from Georgia, nicknamed “the Cracker,” he started an artistic side hustle of salvaging German helmets from the dump, scuffing them up in the mud, shooting them to make an “authentic” bullet hole, and selling them to replacement troops who didn’t know better.
Disney returned home in 1919 and informed his family that he was going to be an artist. “This nonsense of drawing pictures!” Elias shouted when he heard the news. How could Walt reject the good job Elias had gotten for him at O-Zell that paid $25 a week!? Elias was upset but also saw that Walt was an adult now, tall and broad across the shoulders, his hands rough from his time in France. He had also started smoking, the beginning of a lifetime habit that he now used to perfect his impersonation of Charlie Chaplin’s famous kick-a-cigarette-behind-his-back move. Walt had been obsessed with Chaplin ever since high school, dissecting all his moves and performing them for friends. He loved acting as much as drawing, performing in school plays and local competitions. “[I] liked the applause, liked the cash prizes that were being handed to us, liked the weird smells and weirder sights behind the scenes,” he later recalled. When finally faced with the choice of drawing or acting, however, he got practical and chose drawing because “it seemed easier to get a job as an artist.”
“I went for it,” Disney said about his decision to move back to Kansas City. Roy was living there, and Walt managed to get a job for a printing company designing catalogue and letterhead art for publications like the Restaurant News and the United Leather Workers’ Journal. He drew comics on the side, but no money came from them, only yellow rejection slips from magazines like Life and Judge. Thinking wishfully, he made “cuts” of his unpublished comics on the blank margins of his customers’ printing plates, later pressing them onto blank newspaper stock and surrounding them with news stories, pretending they had been published. His coworkers, as a rule, respected his work but didn’t admire it—by Disney’s own admission, he was never a great artist, just an adequate one. His coworkers did, however, admire his work ethic. “He had the drive and ambition of ten million men,” one secretary remembered. During breaks, the other artists played poker, gently making fun of Disney, who chose instead to huddle in the corner, hunched over a pad of paper so he could practice his autograph.
That fall, in 1919, Disney told a federal census-taker that he was a “commercial artist.” As the census-taker walked away, Walt reconsidered his answer and waved him back, correcting his response to “cartoonist.”
Disney was laid off from the printing shop after the holiday rush but quickly got another job at the Kansas City Slide Company, located in a pale-brick building lined with tall windows that provided good light for the artists. They drew advertisements to play in movie theaters before the main attractions. Disney wrote to an old Red Cross friend to say he was now drawing “cartoons for the moving pictures—advertiser films . . . and the work is interesting.” Soon he convinced his boss to let him write and shoot his own ads, rather than work with the copy department, and to lend him an old camera that was otherwise collecting dust on a shelf.
Walt Disney’s business card from 1921.
Disney’s interest in animation quickly swelled into an obsession, consuming his nights and weekends. His parents had moved back to Kansas City after O-Zell failed to pan out, and he converted the shabby garage behind their house into a makeshift studio. He worked there at night, after a full day at the Slide Company, with Roy dropping by for late visits. Roy recalled later how the studio window was always the last on the street to go dark, with Walt inside, “puttering away . . . experimenting, trying this and that.”
Disney learned the basics of animation by picking the brain of a former Slide Company artist called “Scarfoot” McCrory, who had left Kansas City to work at a New York animation studio but frequently returned for visits. He also began studying a book by Edwin Lutz entitled Animated Cartoons: How They Are Made, Their Origin and Development; the work was a gateway read for many budding animators. Its advice included making films that satirized “topics of the hour,” prompting Disney and a handful of friends to make a series of shorts spoofing Kansas City’s potholes, local news, and slow streetcar service. They called them “Laugh-O-Grams,” and the local Newman Theater liked them well enough to place an order. For about an hour after the sale, Walt was ecstatic, “walking on air,” until he suddenly realized the price he had quoted the theater didn’t include profit—his greatest gifts didn’t involve finance, a deficiency that Roy would later help remedy. Still, the attention he got from the Laugh-O-Grams was worth it. “I got to be a little celebrity in the thing,” he remembered.
In the summer of 1920, the Slide Company changed its name to the Kansas City Film Ad Company and began shifting its business from slides to movies. This was lucky for Disney, who now had access to more equipment that would help him pursue animation in his free time. He recruited a “staff”—mainly friends—for his own upstart studio, telling them that he could pay them only “in experience.” They didn’t seem to mind, though—“It was more fun than pay,” his friend Walt Pfeiffer charitably remembered. Profits, once they came, were razor-thin—exhibitors weren’t willing to pay much for material they considered little more than a way to kill time before the main attraction. Disney slept in his office on a few thin rolls of canvas and some moth-eaten old cushions. He couldn’t afford to heat the beans he lived on, prying them cold from the can. This didn’t bother him, however—“I love beans,” he said, keeping a positive attitude. (Even after he was a success, he often continued eating cold beans from a can for lunch, munching away on them while sitting in his spacious office.)
Disney eventually decided to leave the Film Ad Company and start his own outfit, called the Laugh-O-Gram Studio. The tiny staff focused its efforts on gag cartoons similar to Paul Terry’s spoofs of Aesop’s fables, as well as inventive adaptations of other stories such as Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. This is how he came to make the sample films he would later take to California. But Disney’s talent and drive notwithstanding, his cartoons failed to find a market and his studio was forced into bankruptcy—he still couldn’t match the quality of New York animation. It was time to admit the drawbacks of being in Kansas City. “Our ideas were great, but we were in the wrong area. Kansas City wasn’t the place for this kind of work,” animator Rudy Ising recalled.
Refusing