Document details

HOLLYWOOD (AP) - The wellspring of Walt Disney‘s unique talent long puzzled both admirers and critics.

Certainly nothing in his family background provided any hint of future greatness as creator of a new art form, the animated film, as well as superlative showman in a variety of other mediums. He came from humble beginnings.

His father was of irish stock, born in Canada and raised in a big family on a Kansas farm. Elias Disney dabbled in a variety of enterprises, usually with scant success. He was a carpenter-contractor in Chicano, where Walt was born. Later the elder Disney went broke with a Missouri farm, then became a newspaper dealer in Kansas City, Mo.

Flora Call Disney, Walt’s mother, came from simple German stock; she was a patient, understanding woman who tempered her husband's harshness toward their four sons. They also had a daughter.

Neither parent was artistic in nature, and Elias Disney displayed impatience with Walter's ambitions to study art.

“But I wanted to draw,” he told me a few months ago as he reminisced about his youth. “The thing I wanted most was to be a political cartoonist. My father fancied himself as kind of a Socialist, and he subscribed to Socialist newspapers of the time. I studied their cartoons and tried to copy the style.
[…]