Marceline was the most important part of Walt's life. He didn't live there very long. He lived in Chicago and Kansas City much longer. But there was something about the farm that was very important to him.

Only nine years old, Walt was nevertheless tethered to the route. On weekdays he would rise early, in the darkness, to get his allotment of fifty papers and deliver them-the first year by foot, the second by bicycle.

He returned home at five-thirty or six, took a short nap, and then woke and ate his breakfast.

Since he received virtually no compensation, for pocket money he delivered medicine for a pharmacy along his route and eventually talked his father into letting him take fifty additional papers to sell for himself at a trolley stop and, when other newsboys evicted him from his curb, on the trolley itself.

After he finished on the trolley, he headed for school, though he never completed the school day. He had to leave a half-hour early to pick up the papers for the afternoon run. At three-thirty the next morning the routine would begin again.

"Don't be afraid to admit your ignorance," Doc Sherwood told him, a philosophy that Walt, who was always inquisitive, said "lasted me a lifetime."

But what Walt remembered most about Doc Sherwood—what he would recount throughout the rest of his life—was the time the doctor asked him to fetch his crayons and tablet and sketch Rupert. The horse was skittish that day. Doc Sherwood had to hold the reins, and Walt had difficulty capturing him.

"The result was pretty terrible," he recalled, "but both the doctor and his wife praised the drawing highly, to my great delight."

The drawing became, in his brother Roy's hyperbolic words, "the highlight of Walt's life."

He had never stopped drawing. In school he propped up his books as a blind so he could draw. He spent hours decorating the margins of his textbooks with pictures and then entertaining his classmates by riffling them to make them move.

One classmate recalled him going to the blackboard and drawing a perfect likeness of Teddy Roosevelt in chalk, while one teacher remembered him drawing flowers during an art assignment and animating them.

It was a sign of the partners' wavering commitment that when Iwerks spotted a want ad in the Star late in January seeking an artist for the Kansas City Slide Co., he recommended that Walt pursue the job.

Walt thought the Slide Co., which produced promotional slides shown in movie theaters before the feature, might hire Iwerks-Disney as a sub-contractor, but when he brought his samples and made the suggestion, he was told that they wanted a full-time employee.

Ubbe then advised Walt to take the position, which paid thirty-five dollars a week, since the ad called for a cartoonist. They agreed that Ubbe would continue to run their shop.

But to the go-getter in Walt, and to the Disney in him, animation had another appeal. It was a way to make his mark since, unlike newspaper cartooning, animation was something that Walt thought he might do better than anyone else because so few people at the time were doing it and so few people had any expertise in it, and the idea of being the best, the most noted, clearly appealed to him.

When he'd come home and long after everybody else was in bed, Walt was out there still, puttering away, working away, experimenting, trying this and that, drawing, and so on.

For all their obviousness and crudeness, the Laugh-O-Grams, playing as they did at Kansas City's largest and most opulent theater, got noticed, and though Walt did not make any profit on them, he gained something he seemed to relish more than money. He got attention. "I got to be a little celebrity in the thing," he said.

Harman and Disney even had a name for their little enterprise: Kay Cee Studios.

Though the idea of his own studio was wishful thinking, it was not entirely frivolous, any more than the idea of his own commercial art studio had been.

With the popularity of the Laugh-O-Grams, which were only a minute or two in duration, he began to think of animating longer cartoons of six or seven minutes.

Still as much an opportunist as an artist, he was beginning to think of branching out into business for himself, using his Film Ad job to subsidize his scheme.

In the fall, with three hundred dollars in savings, he purchased a Universal camera and a tripod and began advertising again for prospective animators whom he would pay, as he paid Ising, in experience, promising that if the project were a success, he would give them jobs in his new studio.

Several began stopping by the house at night and joining in the drawing. Meanwhile, to make additional money, Walt and Fred Harman, who now worked with his brother Hugh and Walt at the Film Ad Co., bought a secondhand Model T and trolled for jobs shooting news footage with the Universal camera. "Our sights," Harman said, "were set for long-range money and fame."

Though the financial situation was never less than dire almost from the company's inception, Walt maintained his peculiar confidence and persistence.

"He had the drive and ambition of ten million men," claimed a secretary who was dating a photographer across the hall and did some of Walt's clerical work at the time.

Though Walt normally did possess a kind of intrepid faith, a child's faith that things would turn out right, which explains his doggedness and his myopia, at the time of the Laugh-O-Gram bankruptcy, at the age of twenty-one, he was less unaffected than he may have seemed or wanted others to think.

He was, he later admitted, "crushed and heartbroken"—crushed at having failed and heartbroken at having disappointed so many who had trusted in him and had lost money for their trust: "That first big setback got me right down and out."

He swore he would make good and pay the creditors back. At the same time he said that the Laugh-O-Gram bankruptcy had left him tougher, more determined, and inured to failure.

He now felt he had gotten into the business too late, that it was too insular, that he would not really be able to break into the big time of animation, which was, in any case, centered in New York.

"I had put my drawing board away," he told an interviewer years later. "What I wanted to do was get a job in a studio—any studio, doing anything," though in truth his aspirations were larger and more fanciful. He now hoped to get a job as a live-action director somewhere.

He sincerely wanted to make good animations, sincerely wanted to be counted among the best at his craft. As it was, Winkler seemed mollified by the next Alice, Alice's Spooky Adventure, calling it the "best you have turned out" and telling Walt that on the strength of it she was able to make deals for the series from southern New Jersey to the District of Columbia.

But Walt, continuing to apologize for the quality of his cartoons, insisted he could make them better, saying that he had invited professional critics to his previews and that he was trying to be a "little different from the usual run of slap stick and hold them (the films) more to a dignified line of comedy."

On receipt of his fourth film, Alice's Wild West Show, Winkler wired: "if none of the future ones are any worse we will have the leading single reel of the film market."

One evening when Walt and I were discussing our move, Walt said to me, “Roy, when we move to Hyperion, I'm going to have a large neon sign erected, reading “Walt Disney Studios.”

He looked at me as if expecting an argument.

I said, 'If that's the way you want it.'

And Walt said, “That's the way I want it and that's the way it will be!”

And that's the way it was.

When he was not venting about Mintz and his own treasonous crew, he spent most of his time on the trip sketching on the train stationery.

Somewhere between Chicago and Los Angeles, he later said, he wrote the scenario for a cartoon he called Plane Crazy, about a mouse who, inspired by Charles Lindbergh's 1927 solo flight over the Atlantic Ocean, builds himself a plane to impress a lady mouse.

Walt read the story to Lillian, but she said she couldn't focus because she was upset by the name Walt had bestowed upon his character: Mortimer.

"The only thing that got through to me," she told an interviewer, "was that horrible name, Mortimer... I'm afraid I made quite a scene about it."

"Too sissy," she said. When she calmed down, Walt asked her what she thought of the name Mickey, an Irish name, an outsider's name. "I said it sounded better than Mortimer, and that's how Mickey was born.”

But what made it different from its animation forebears and competitors was the extent to which Walt had imagined it fully as a sound cartoon in which the music and effects were inextricable from the action—truly a musical cartoon rather than a cartoon with music.

The biggest difference, however, between the Disney studio and the animation studios in New York was not in preparation or specialization; it was in expectation.

Walt Disney had to be the best.

As he had with the Alices and the Oswalds, though with indifferent results, Walt insisted upon excellence, and Sharpsteen admitted that he soon had some misgivings about joining the studio when he came to realize how high Walt's standards were.

Assigned what he believed was a run-of-the-mill scene in one of the early Mickeys, he saw that Walt did not regard it or any scene that way. "In Walt's estimation, everything that was done had to be executed with a great deal of thought toward finesse in order to make it better."

At the beginning no effort to catapult Mickey into stardom was too small. Walt would even have friends call theaters asking what time the Mickey Mouse cartoon would show, and if they were told that there was no Mickey, he instructed them to ask why.

More aggressively, Walt arranged with one downtown theater to make a cartoon of Mickey leading the theater's live orchestra and then being pelted by the musicians.

In exchange the theater booked another Mickey cartoon and put the title on the marquee, where Walt could have it photographed for publicity.

By August he was taking out full-page ads in the motion picture trade papers declaring Mickey Mouse "Amazingly Clever—Screamingly Funny—Perfectly Synchronized Sound Cartoons."

But the biggest boost to Mickey Mouse, aside from sound itself, occurred not through Walt's promotions, which were scattershot, but through those of Harry Woodin, the young manager of the Fox Dome Theater in Ocean Park, a Los Angeles suburb.

On his own initiative late that summer, Woodin had organized a Mickey Mouse Club, filling his theater on Saturday afternoons with children who took a Mickey Mouse pledge, performed in an impromptu Mickey Mouse band, and then watched Mickey Mouse cartoons.

Woodin had invited Walt to one of the matinees, and Walt said he got "quite a kick to see about one thousand kids cheering for Mickey Mouse."

But Woodin himself, not unlike Walt Disney, had larger aspirations. He convinced Walt that what he was doing locally he could also do nationally.

The constant strain focused Walt, but even without the financial pressures he would have been a man obsessed. He had always lived for his studio.

Bill Cottrell, who often worked at night at the studio on the camera, said that Walt never left at five or five-thirty when most of the rest of the staff did. He stayed until six or seven and then returned, often with Lillian. Walt himself admitted that he liked to wander the studio at night.

"There wasn't a night we didn't end up at the studio," Lillian recalled. So she would curl up on the davenport in his office and sleep while Walt worked, waking up at intervals to ask how late it was, to which, regardless of the time, Walt would answer, "Oh, it's not late."

Walt admitted years later that he would turn back his office clock while Lillian slept so that she never knew how late he had worked. Even in bed, Lillian said, he would usually toss and turn, thinking of studio problems, then rise early and declare, "I think I've got it licked."

The breakdown, he said, "woke me up to the fact that life is sweet and work is not everything."

So he took up sports, for which he had never had time even as a child—ice skating, swimming, horseback riding, and boxing.

He even joined the Hollywood Athletic Club and wrestled there two or three times a week, though he admitted he didn't like having to "get down there in somebody's crotch and sweaty old sweatshirt."

For a while he took up golf, rising at four each morning so he could be on the course by five-thirty without intruding on studio time, playing five holes, then eating a hearty breakfast and heading for the studio, as he put it, "full of pep."

As early as 1929 Walt would drive several of his animators to downtown Los Angeles to attend Friday night classes at the Chouinard Art Institute, then go to the studio to work, and then return to pick them up.

Sometime in 1931 he contracted with Chouinard to train a dozen or so of his artists one night a week.

One of them, Art Babbitt, decided that it would be more efficient for the artists to gather at his house near the Hollywood Bowl for informal drawing sessions with live models, and in the late summer or early fall of 1932 he began hosting these get-togethers.

The first week he invited eight artists, and fourteen arrived. The next week he invited the fourteen, and twenty-two appeared. Several weeks later Walt called Babbitt to his office. "Suppose it got in the newspapers that a bunch of Disney artists were drawing naked women in a private home," he said. "It wouldn't sit very well." Instead, obviously hoping to attract even more of the staff, he offered them the studio soundstage and free materials.

After Walt's proposal another young animator who had been attending the sessions at Babbitt's house, Hardie Gramatky, suggested they formalize the instruction by inviting the man who had conducted the Chouinard classes, Donald Graham, to serve as the teacher. Babbitt contacted Graham, and on November 15 the "great Disney Art School," as Graham called it, held its first class.

It brought us honors and recognition all over the world and turned the attention of young artists and distinguished older artists to our medium as a worthwhile outlet for their talents.

Walt said, not disapprovingly, that Hyperion was coming to resemble a "Ford factory," with the difference that "our moving parts were more complex than cogs-human beings, each with his own temperament and values who must be weighted and fitted into his proper place."

Walt had always been as concerned with the process of making cartoons as with the cartoons themselves, and in comparing his studio to a factory production line, he was acknowledging the new pressure on him to streamline that process.

A year after that, in 1934, Kamen, with a staff numbering fifteen in New York alone, had helped orchestrate $35 million of sales in Disney merchandise in the United States and an equal amount overseas, and he had opened branches across Europe and even in Australia. Thanks largely to Kamen's efforts, the image of Mickey Mouse was ubiquitous and unavoidable.

The mouse as merchandiser had roughly the same effect on his own studio. In his first four years Kamen had increased the licensing 10,000 percent to just under $200,000 in royalties a year, and as early as 1934 Walt was claiming that he made more money from the ancillary rights to Mickey than from Mickey's cartoons.

Thus Disney became the first studio to recognize what would become a standard business practice in Hollywood forty years later—that one could harvest enormous profits from film-related toys, games, clothing, and other products.

The first decade was crawling— just bacon and eggs without the bacon. Then the second decade when the country was in the doldrums—we were relatively prosperous, and while we were in small time... small money, we could pay all our bills, pay all our salaries. Up to that time we never drew a regular salary.

The short subject was just a filler on any program and so I just felt I had to diversify my business and get into these other things, and it would give me a better chance.

He was hiring them to train for the herculean task that lay ahead of in-betweening and assisting on Snow White.

Walt still griped that when he hired veteran animators, he had to put up with their "goddamn poor working habits from doing cheap pictures."

It was easier, he believed, to start from scratch with young art students and inculcate in them the Disney system.

The trainees spent all morning and then, after a lunch break, the rest of the afternoon in life classes taught by Don Graham— eight hours each day in all.

After several weeks they were assigned to animators as in-betweeners at eighteen dollars per week. Even then, however, they would be excused to attend classes for a third or half a day, and beginning in February 1935, they were expected to attend an evening class every Wednesday night on the studio soundstage.

Graham described his course as "Intensive lectures on character construction, animation, layout, background, mechanics and direction [that] extended studio knowledge to the youngest neophyte."

But it wasn't only the trainees who were now attending classes. By the fall, with the Snow White script being fine-tuned and the film nearing the animation stage, Walt reinstituted mandatory classes for the entire studio art staff on Tuesday nights after having suspended them in the face of the heavy workload.

Walt had worked for years to improve the colors on his cartoons. Though after much trial and error he used water opaque paints manufactured by the F. R. Miller Paint Company, inkers and painters complained of mildew, streaking, tackiness, lack of intensity, lumpiness, limited range, and staining. Walt sought to devise a solution.

Eventually the studio developed its own binder, which held the paint together, with a gum arabic base that was even rewettable so that painters could correct mistakes.

The studio also ground all of its own paint with a set of disk mills that had once been used to grind food, and it installed a spectraphotometer, one of only twenty in the world at the time, to measure colors exactly.

By one count the Disney painting department had twelve hundred distinct pigments. Knowing that Technicolor couldn't reproduce them exactly, Walt had a large chart on the wall, some six or seven feet high, showing how the colors would register on the screen.

As they headed into the fall, the staff was working twenty-four hours a day in eight-hour shifts, and many of them worked on Saturdays and Sundays as well, for which, as further proof of their commitment to the cult, they received no overtime pay.

The animation lightboards would grow so hot that the artists could burn their arms and hands. So many cels remained to be photographed that the camera department worked in two twelve-hour shifts-from eight o'clock to eight o'clock.

As far as I can remember, being a celebrity has never helped me make a good picture, or a good shot in a polo game, or command the obedience of my daughter, or impress my wife. It doesn't even keep the fleas off our dogs.

I could buy a big place in Florida and fill it with expensive paintings and other junk, but what for? That's for people who are bored or want to impress the neighbors.

That December as he was tinkering with Bambi, Walt Disney had yet one more imposing task before him: he was supervising the move from Hyperion to the new studio in Burbank.

All the time that he was working on Pinocchio, Fantasia, and Bambi, through the dozens upon dozens of meetings and sweatbox sessions, he had also been engaged in the planning and construction at Burbank, typically consulting with the engineers and architects three times a week and advancing the project in a trial-and-error manner not unlike that on Bambi.

"All was nebulous then," Frank Crowhurst, the general contractor, said of the various ideas they considered. "We hoped it would work."

They had broken ground on the Animation Building in late February 1939, with the intention of finishing everything but the Administration Building by October.

Walt himself, though bristling at any suggestion that Pinocchio had not done well, had a simpler explanation.

He blamed the competition from Gone with the Wind, the movie blockbuster that had been released just a few weeks earlier, and the war itself, which significantly cut profits.

Because of the war, the film was translated into only two languages, Spanish and Portuguese, and received only 45 percent of its gross from outside the United States and Canada, significantly less than Snow White.

In England alone, where Snow White had grossed $2 million, Pinocchio grossed only $200,000. When all was said and done, it took in roughly $2 million, out of which the studio received $1.2 million on a total investment of $2.7 million. Even so, many would regard Pinocchio as Walt Disney's masterpiece, the pinnacle of animation art.

Roy, we’ll make the pictures, you get the money.

I'm almost ready to give up the idea of an amusement park after seeing Coney Island. The whole place is so run-down and ugly. The people who run it are so unpleasant. The whole thing is almost enough to destroy your faith in human nature.

That's exactly the point. Mine isn't going to be that way. Mine's going to be a place that's clean, where the whole family can do things together.

Disneyland will be something of a fair, an exhibition, a playground, a community center, a museum of living facts and a showplace of beauty and magic.

At a party that summer Charles Luckman introduced Walt to Harrison "Buzz" Price of the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), who had done surveys for Luckman on a stadium project in Hawaii, and suggested that Walt hire Price to examine sites for Disneyland.

It sounded strange, unlike anything you would expect in an amusement park. At a time when most parks were planned as a grid with four-side access, [Disney) outlined a design concept of a single park entrance passing through a turn-of-the-century main street, which would end in a circular plaza or town square. This area would feed off radially into four thematic activity areas, the World of Tomorrow, Fantasyland, Frontierland, and Adventureland.

Whereas most amusement parks wanted all the street visibility they could get, Walt's entire park would be hidden from the outside world by a high landscaped berm... He was talking about customized rides, exhibits, and attractions instead of the standard off-the-shelf Ferris wheel and tunnel of love. ... Rides would be subordinate to story and setting. Most shocking, there were no thrill rides.

The land must be flat, relatively unpopulated but easily accessible to automobiles, and nowhere near the water.

Disney did not like the idea of sand-encrusted vacationers slopping through his park in beach dress; nor did he want to compete with the Pacific Ocean: Disneyland was to be its own attraction.

Beyond this, he offered few specifics: just that he needed about 150 acres somewhere in Southern California.

Orange County also seemed to have the least rainfall, the least humidity, and the least extreme temperatures of the areas under consideration, and perhaps best of all, it was well situated for transportation.

After eliminating more than forty sites in and around Orange County (for reasons ranging from sporting unsightly oil wells to housing a labor camp for Mexican nationals), SRI settled on a 160-acre parcel in Anaheim called the Ball Road subdivision, which was basically a large grove of orange trees, four thousand of them, in an area that was the country's largest provider of Valencia oranges.

He'd hocked his life insurance, sold his summer home, and borrowed every dollar he could to build what was a three-dimensional tribute not so much to himself as to how he would like to see the world, and persuade others to see it.

ABC needed the television show so damned bad, they bought the amusement park.

This time Walt did not want to cut corners, did not want to compromise his vision. When an employee suggested that he use cut glass instead of stained glass in an attraction called Storybook Land, Walt objected.

"Look, the thing that's going to make Disneyland unique and different," he insisted, "is the detail. If we lose the detail, we lose it all."

To achieve cinematic effects, he had manipulated the park's proportions. It would often be said that Walt had built the entire park in five-eighths scale. In truth, the railroad was five-eighths scale, which allowed Walt to use narrow-gauge rails and refurbished narrow-gauge trains.

Main Street was a function of clever foreshortening. The lower floors of the shops were nine-tenths scale, the second floors eight-tenths, and the third seven-tenths.

As for the rest of the park, Walt wrote an old acquaintance that the "scale of objects varies according to what and where they are"—what he called a "matter of choosing the scale that would be practical and still look right."

The Mark Twain, he said, was built on a three-quarters scale. The reason, Walt averred, was psychological—a lesson learned, no doubt, from his miniatures at Disneylandia. For one thing, the altered size "made the street a toy," he felt, and provided the subliminal fun that toys did. For another, it underscored the sense of nostalgia because it associated the past and the fantastic with the small and quaint.

He cared about the stagecoaches. They were faithful reproductions of the famous Wells Fargo Concord Coaches that were everywhere in the American West for half a century, but built on a scale small enough for the miniature horses to pull them.

They were among the first of the park's attractions to be finished, but the pressure of time was already weighing on everyone.

One day John Hench stopped by to check the progress on the coaches and had an idea, which he brought to his boss. "Why don't we just leave the leather straps off, Walt? The people are never going to appreciate all the close-up detail."

The same scrupulousness that had recently made Disney refuse to license a Davy Crockett Colt revolver because the firearm hadn't existed in Davy's day treated Hench to a tart little lecture: "You're being a poor communicator. People are okay, don't you ever forget that. They will respond to it. They will appreciate it." '

Hench didn't argue. "We put the best darn leather straps on that stagecoach you've ever seen.”

The United States contained 169 million citizens on July 17, 1955, and 90 million of them watched it. That was 54.2 percent of the population—a larger proportion than would see the final episode of M*A*S*H, or any Super Bowl, or even the moon landing.

Trouble started at the gate. The newly laid asphalt was still so soft that Dick Nunis remembered seeing it suck women's high-heeled shoes off their feet, with Frank Sinatra’s wife being one of the victims;

As he strolled past the quiet, glowing buildings, "a family caught my attention, and as the mother, father, and their ten-year-old son and younger daughter walked down Main Street, I followed them. They were dressed neatly but not stylish; the father and son wore overalls. The mother wore a cotton dress and coat. They all held hands."

When the family paused at the Christmas tree in Town Square, Jack saw the girl tug her mother's arm and heard her say, "Mom, this really was better than having Santa Claus."

Lindquist realized "that Santa wasn't bringing them presents. The parents must have told their children that if they went to Disneyland, Santa couldn't bring presents."

For the new advertising manager, "this one brief moment proved to be my most meaningful memory of the park because it symbolized what we mean to people: We are not a cure for cancer, we are not going to save the world, but if we can make people that happy for a few hours a day, then we are doing something worthwhile."

With the success of Disneyland, he saw himself not just as an entertainer or even an amusement park operator but as a visionary planner who could impose his will on the environment as he had imposed it on the screen. Disneyland was just a prototype for what he felt he could do all over the country.

The truth was that Walt wasn't especially interested in building another amusement park in Disney World, as the new complex was to be called, and when Roy formed a central committee to set general strategy for the park, Walt was not even a member.

Walt had already built a park, and as Roy told one journalist, "Walt instinctively resists doing the same thing twice. He likes to try something fresh." What he had not done—what he had long hoped and dreamed of doing since at least the City of the Arts—was create an entire urban environment from scratch: a perfect city…

He called it an Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, or EPCOT, and as Marvin Davis said, "It was the real wienie" of Disney World.

The death of Walt Disney is a loss to all the people of the world. There is no way to replace Walt Disney. He was an extraordinary man. Perhaps there will never be another like him.

I was ambitious and wanted to make better pictures, but the length of my foresight is measured by this admission: Even as late as 1930, my ambition was to be able to make cartoons as good as the Aesop's Fables series.

In Walt's eyes, his studio was not to be subject to the pressures of the world; it was his refuge from them—a sacred place. And his animations could not be compromised; they had to be better than anyone else's or he would not survive in the business; nor would he want to survive.

Excellence was not only Walt's business strategy, it was the reason he ran the studio and the force that kept his personal world intact. "If you want to know the real secret of Walt's success," longtime animator Ward Kimball would say, "it's that he never tried to make money. He was always trying to make something that he could have fun with or be proud of."