This is the first installment of the series House of Mouse*. In each installment, the author will explore portions of Walt Disney’s life as well as those of his immediate or extended family.
*Not related to the early 2000s TV show of the same name :)
The man. The myth. The legend. Everyone who’s anyone knows who Walt Disney is and the massive legacy he left on pop culture with his dream to defy the impossible. But how much do mass audiences really know about the man behind the mouse and the family that supported him along the way?
The year is 1901. Pop culture just gained a new pioneer.
Walter (“Walt”) Elias Disney was born on December 5th, 1901 in Chicago, Illinois to Elias and Flora Disney. The youngest son and fourth child, Walt grew up with three older brothers (Herbert, Raymond, and Roy) and his younger sister Ruth. For the first four years of his life, he spent his days in Chicago’s Hermosa neighborhood, characterized by its small but dense geographical location. By the time Walt had turned four years old, his parents had grown tired of the city lifestyle and yearned for something different.
At the age of four, Walt and his family moved to Marceline, Missouri onto land that his uncle Robert (Elias’s younger brother) had recently acquired, as Elias and Flora had grown tired of the city life. Disney historian Dave Smith explains that Elias “was not pleased with the big city life and its impact on his children. [... and] he was just worried about bringing up his kids in that kind of an atmosphere.”
One of the earliest known photos of Walt Disney, taken at around a few months old.
Source: d23.com
For the next five years of his life (so roughly from the age four through nine), Walt began to develop more of his own identity, in what were very formative years of his life – he would later refer to them as “the best time of his life.” Living in rural Missouri in the early 1910s, during the onset of some of the earliest filmographic techniques*, there was not much to do. Accordingly, while his older brothers worked in the family’s farm, Walt was simply tasked with watching Ruth from the comforts of his “Dreaming Tree”, a massive cottonwood tree on his family’s land. In typical Walt fashion, he ‘rebelled’ against the norm and instead used this time to let his imagination soar. In his later years, he confessed “that he spent his time under the tree dreaming.” During his dreams, he would craft his wild fantasies of a world that defied the impossible.
*The first form of a motion-picture (video) camera was invented by Eadweard Muybridge roughly 20-25 years prior. This camera was not used for entertainment purposes until the turn of the century, with small films being produced that defied the odds
Walt and his brother Roy visiting the famous Dreaming Treee in 1956. Most of the tree is unfortunately gone, but man oh man is this tree massive.
source: disney.fandom.com
Walt the Creator is here to stay. So what’s next?
Well so far we have covered the first nine years of Walt’s life. So there’s still a whole lot more to go, haha. Walt has begun to dip his toe into the creative world and his mind still has many places to travel (destination: Mickey). His childhood was a huge part of his life, partly because of his parents’ decision to move from city to rural. Instead of dealing with the outside pressure that was rising crime, he was allowed to simply be a kid and do what kids do best: think.
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