Long before Disney became a woke mouthpiece for the progressive agenda, one man’s dream quietly launched an empire. From humble beginnings with an unsupportive father to creating the stuff of childhood fantasy, here is Walt Disney’s amazing story of hope and determination.
Disney’s childhood wasn’t full of magic, talking animals, and dreams coming true. In fact, throughout his early years spent on a farm in Marceline, Missouri, his father refused to allow his children to do anything but work.
Elias Disney set strict rules for his five children, pushing them to work hard. This didn’t leave much time for fun, and he didn’t let them have games or toys. Elias’ domination over his children’s lives continued after he moved his family to Kansas City when Walt was about ten. Elias bought a newspaper route in Kansas City and insisted that Walt and his brother Roy work it.
Walt’s days were spent in a blur of work in school. His father would wake him and Roy at 3:30 AM to deliver newspapers. From there, it was off to school. After school, the pair delivered the afternoon edition of the paper. Elias took every cent the boys earned from their hard work, leaving them with nothing but exhaustion to show for their labor. Elias said he kept the money because the boys weren’t yet old enough to “understand the value of money.”
Walt secretly took a second paper route and would work during his school lunch at a local candy store. He squirreled away a tiny bit of money, and his father never knew about the side jobs. Walt used his secret money to take Saturday classes at the Kansas City Art Institute, signed up for a drawing cartoons correspondence course, and took classes at night at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts in high school.
Disney got his first break while still on the Marceline farm. A neighbor asked him to draw his horse and paid him for his work. From there, Disney’s dream of illustration only grew. He would copy the comics from the newspapers his father subscribed to and began to improve his skills with crayons and watercolors. Unsurprisingly, Elias disapproved.
For Disney, drawing became an escape from reality. Despite his father’s opposition, his mother, Flora, bought him his first pad of drawing paper and some colored pencils. Disney created a fantasy world for himself to feel safe and loved. He started drawing to escape into imaginary places and avoid a childhood devoid of emotional support and material things.
In 1918, Disney decided to join the military so he could be shipped overseas and fight in World War I. Even though the army wouldn’t accept him because he was too young, he managed to trick the Red Cross by changing the birth date on his birth certificate. Because of this, he became an ambulance driver for them and was sent to France.
Disney spent some of his free time drawing cartoons on the side of his ambulance and even had some of his art published in Stars and Stripes, the Army’s newspaper. A year later, he returned to Kansas City and started an apprenticeship at Pesmen-Rubin Commercial Art Studio. It was this apprenticeship that launched an empire.
As Disney’s success grew, so did his father’s disdain. Elias refused to consider animation a ‘real job” despite his son’s success and newly found wealth. The rift between father and son only widened over time. Neither his mother nor his father attended his wedding to Lillian Bounds. When his father passed away, Walt was away on a business trip. He didn’t even change his schedule to accommodate the funeral and missed it entirely.
In an obituary for Ilene Woods, the voice of Cinderella, CNN shared that she remembered a touching moment with Walt Disney. He told her she was his favorite heroine when she visited his office. “There’s something about that story I associate with,” he told her.
By the time he died in 1966, over 240 million people had seen a Disney movie, 100 million had watched a Disney show on TV, and 80 million had read a Disney book.
Although Disney lived to see his legacy, he could never have imagined how it would grow. He left behind an empire of books, movies, and TV shows, enchanting generations of fans. Despite Disney’s recent embrace of woke activism, Walt’s personal Cinderella story reveals how one man created an empire from nothing more than a dream.
