Back on the road, only minutes west of here, I knew my car would stop at Main Street USA. The real one.
The World’s Imagineer
It was cocktail hour when they cornered me. We were churning up the Tennessee River toward Chattanooga on an old paddle-wheel steamboat. Four hundred travel agents had turned the steamer into a floating tourism convention. A couple from Carolina put me on the defensive. They couldn’t resist the temptation to ask, “Why would anybody go to Missouri?”
My answer was a question. “Do you book family vacations to Orlando?”
“Hundreds,” they said.
“And Disneyland, too?”
“Of course,” they answered, and eyed me like I was an idiot.
“Well, after they’ve seen Main Street at the Disney parks, send ’em to Marceline to see the real thing,” I said. They looked puzzled at my blasphemy against the Great Disney. After all, on the world stage, Marceline’s main street remains a secret.
That’s understandable. A tiny Midwest town founded with little fanfare by the Santa Fe Railroad surely can’t have a main street that competes with the bright lights of Broadway, the music on Bourbon Street, the stars along Hollywood Boulevard.
Nevertheless, perhaps the most replicated street in the world runs through the middle of Marceline.
Flash back to 1955: Walt Disney had long since moved away from Marceline and made his mouse tracks in the world. But a half century hadn’t dulled Disney’s memories of the happiest time of his life. That’s why Marceline’s main street inspired Walt’s blueprint for Main Street at Disneyland. For sure, the Magic Kingdom’s Main Street was a communal effort among Walt and his art directors, who jazzed it up with bells and whistles and walking photo-ops in the forms of life-size cartoon characters. But every element of Disney’s Marceline is represented at the theme parks. The train station. The locomotive. The gazebo. The picture show. Walt described the essence of his Main Street vision: “Main Street is everyone’s hometown—the heart line of America. To tell the truth, more things of importance happened to me in Marceline than have happened since, or are likely to in the future.”
Even with Hollywood success, Disney remained loyal to his roots. “I’m glad I’m a small-town boy,” he said, “and I’m glad Marceline was my town.” So Main Street in Disneyland maintains that Marceline feel, albeit with more window dressing. Ditto for Disney World and for the other magic kingdoms from Paris to Tokyo. Walt Disney wanted them that way.
Marceline’s main drag wasn’t always known as “Main Street.” For most of its history, street signs carried its given name, Kansas Avenue. And the Missouri state highway map calls it Route JJ. But to anybody who sees it now, it’s Main Street USA, right down to the black wrought-iron street signs sprouting mouse ears.
It’s nearly impossible to travel more than one block in Marceline without opening a page in the storybook of young Walt’s life. The icons pop up everywhere, testament to Walt Disney’s influence on the town, and the town’s influence on Walt. The Walt Disney Post Office. The Walt Disney Elementary School. The picture show where Disney’s “The Great Locomotive Chase” premiered.
Kaye Malins’ eyes sparkle when she tells stories about the young imagineer. Her dad and Walt were pals. She showed me around town, pointing out the spots where young Walt first discovered the world. When he wasn’t hanging out downtown in a vacant lot beside a giant wall painted with a Coca-Cola logo, he might be found in his back yard engaged in what he later called “belly botany.” Lying on his stomach in a field, he’d conduct an up-close study of ants and aphids, crickets and critters. Indeed, the descendants of Jiminy Cricket still live here.
On every trip back home, Walt would depart the train and walk through Marceline’s Santa Fe depot, a building that fell into disrepair after his death. But Kaye Malins and crew brought it back to life as the Walt Disney Hometown Museum, with hundreds of artifacts like the Midget Autopia kiddie-car ride. Kaye says it’s the only ride Walt allowed to leave a Disney property and operate elsewhere.
Kaye is a walking encyclopedia on Walt’s Marceline years. She literally dreams Disney, living in his boyhood home on the outskirts of town. That’s a Disney tale in itself. Her father, Rush Johnson, became a business associate of Walt Disney. The partners agreed to repurchase the old Disney farmhouse and eventually establish a living-history farm. Although both partners are gone, Kaye has taken steps to enhance living history at Walt’s boyhood home. She showed me the house, including the bedroom Walt and brother Roy shared, unchanged from their childhood.
Behind the house, young Walt’s Dreaming Tree still stands unbowed in the fields behind the Disney home. One of the oldest cottonwood trees standing in Missouri, it was mature even when Walt was a boy. The tree has survived two lightning strikes, which only added power to the inspiration that flows from its branches.
Not fifty paces from the Dreaming Tree sits the barn. In typical Disney style, the townspeople raised a new barn in 2001 to replicate the structure where eight-year-old Walt got his showbiz start. It’s a faithful replica, with a swayback roof—like the one that faithful Mouseketeers remember on TV—a shrine on the spot where his imagination began.
The original barn was the venue for Walt’s first showbiz production, a circus. He charged neighborhood kids a dime apiece to see barnyard animals dressed in toddlers clothes. Most of his fellow eight-year-olds left the show less than satisfied. Locals testify that Walt’s mother made him return the proceeds to his disgruntled patrons. Therein he learned his first valuable showbiz lesson: When promoting a show, under-promise and over-deliver. In retrospect, the attendees probably consider the admission price a bargain for the memories those thin dimes bought the lucky crowd.
From all over the world, pilgrims visit the new barn, scribbling thousands of notes, verses, and signatures in every language on the rough-hewn wood walls and beams.
Somewhere, a belly botanist is beaming.
Blackjack, Zack and the Bread Rack
We drove west toward a horizon smeared with smoke. Even from a distance I could tell it wasn’t the steamy cloud produced when volunteer firefighters pour water on a burning barn, or the black-orange roiling of a gasoline fire from a wreck. We got closer and veered off the Avenue of the Greats to investigate. What we encountered was surreal. Crossing the boundary into this domain, we were surrounded by scorched earth on all sides. Smoke rose from the smoldering ground, commanding the senses to yield to confusion. Slowly, Erifnus and I felt our way forward, immersed in the conflagration that might’ve been Verdun.
But it wasn’t. The road led us through the forests and fields that were the playground of a child named John Pershing. Young John would grow up with the ambition to be a school teacher. But an education at West Point changed his course, and he rose through the ranks to become General of the Armies. With a nickname he picked up during his command of the army’s vaunted Buffalo Soldiers, General Blackjack Pershing led doughboys to save the world, in his role as Commander-in-Chief of the American Expeditionary Force during World War I. His remains lie beneath a simple marker in Arlington National Cemetery.
But on this day, his ghost moved in the cover of smoke that rose from his childhood playground, now called Pershing State Park. Park rangers had set a series of controlled grass fires that burned through leaves and brush. The fires would energize the soil, but as we moved deeper into the smoke, it was an eerie, unintended remake of a battle during the War to End All Wars.
Obviously,