This week in history we travel to the happiest place on earth, to the beginning of an American icon: Walt Disney and his theme park.
July 18, 1955
The boy
Walter Elias Disney first entered the world a squawking newborn on the upper floor of a square, neat little house at 1249 Tripp Avenue, Chicago. It was Dec. 5, 1901.
Named after the preacher Walter Parr, a friend of his father Elias, Walt Disney became the youngest son in a growing family. With eight years separating him from his next oldest brother, Roy, Walt was lavishly spoiled by his mother.
When he was just 2 years old his parents moved the family from the big city to the small Midwest town of Marceline, Missouri.
For the next several years the family lived and worked on a farm – a time that populated Walt’s mind with happy memories cherished well into his twilight years. Unfortunately, the happiness didn’t last and in 1909, the Disney family lost their farm and Walt and his siblings watched in agony as their favorite farm animals were auctioned off.
Following this unfortunate setback, the family moved to Kansas City where Elias picked up a distributorship job for local newspapers. The task of delivering the papers fell on his youngest boys: Roy and Walt.
Roy soon grew restless under the overbearing domination of their father and in 1912 he ran away from home – following the footsteps of their two older brothers who had done the same.
With no one between him and his father’s strict temper, Walt would have suffered severely if it weren’t for his mother, Flora.
Flora brought a warmth and gaiety to the Disney household that protected the budding creativity and humor of the young Walt from her husband’s sternness.
Over the years, and through friendship with similarly-inclined boys in the area, Walt grew to love the movies and vaudeville shows.
He quickly developed a delightful sense of humor that emerged in the form of practical jokes, which he played on his mother who loved them and his father who didn’t understand them.
After a few more diversions in his young adulthood, Walt finally discovered his calling as a cartoonist when he landed a drawing job for an advertisement company in Kansas City at the young age of 18.
When he started working for Kansas City Film Ad, however, Walt was able to combine his love of motion pictures with his love of cartoons, drawing and designing the short one-minute advertising films that appeared before movies.
Tough times and success
The next decade held an equal measure of pain and pleasure for the emerging artist. When his first film company – which produced cartoon shorts for movie theaters – went bankrupt, Walt moved to Hollywood to try his luck out West.
It was actually from the rubble of his first film company that he salvaged his first success.
Taking the short series he had created in his old venture called “Alice’s Wonderland,” Walt succeeded in selling six of these comedies to a cartoon distributor in New York.
After a few more years of success and setbacks alike – all endured with his brother Roy by his side as a business partner – Walt Disney Studios was born.
The new studio’s first major breakthrough came with the creation of Mickey Mouse, a character who first appeared in a number of cartoon shorts beginning in the mid-1920s.
Walt Disney recognized early on the importance of sound in movies and he made sure his shorts were syncopated with music and narrative.
Mickey Mouse grew to superhero proportions. By 1931 the Mickey Mouse Club had over a million members and the cartoon was beloved in every major country in the world. Walt Disney had finally made it big.
The 1930s would see Walt Disney Studios make its first feature-length animated movie and continue pushing the boundary of animation and films. Disney became a household name the world over and the sky was the limit for the creative mind of the man behind the scenes.
The war brought a host of challenges to the studio, as it did to Hollywood as a whole. Alongside other filmmakers, Walt Disney joined forces and helped produce films for the war effort including shorts on identifying aircraft for volunteer lookouts, which he made for the Navy. He also commissioned his cartoonists to create the anti-Nazi cartoon “Chicken Little.”
The war years were a lean time for the studio and following victory, Walt looked forward to returning to his bread and butter.
It would be in the atmosphere of economic and social growth following World War II that he would finally realize a long-held dream: the creation of a family-friendly theme park.
Disneyland is born
An abortive attempt to build a family park in Burbank in 1932 did not extinguish Walt’s dream. Following the war and riding the wave of renewed success with the studio, Walt turned once more to the idea.
He was almost alone in his enthusiasm for the project and to get seed money for it he sold off his own vacation homes and took loans out on his life insurance policy.
Finally, by 1952 he had gathered a creative team to design the park, which itself was not yet a financial possibility. After hiring a research team to identify the ideal site for his proposed park, Walt then went looking for financial backers.
The great movie-maker, Walt had for years refused to create anything for the newly-created medium of television despite numerous requests from TV executives.
However, with his proposal in hand, Walt went to TV studios with an offer to produce shows for television if the studio in question backed his park. After several refusals, ABC agreed to his proposal and made Disneyland a financial possibility.
Now it was up to Walt and his creative team to make it a reality.
His team broke ground in July of 1954 and over the next year worked tirelessly.
Gradually, as the months passed, tropical oases, an ornate castle and many other fantastical landscapes replaced the former orange groves and California chaparral along the highway south of Los Angeles.
On this day in 1955 the gates of Disneyland opened to its first visitors. From those first happy families in 1955 to today, Walt’s legacy of Disneyland continues to incite the imagination and provide memorable experiences for all those children who pass through its gates.
And all of this from a boy from Kansas City.
Further reading
Thomas, Bob. Walt Disney: An American Original. Disney Editions, 1994.
Gabler, Neal. Walt Disney: the Triumph of the American Dream. Knopf, 2008.
Antone Pierucci is a Sacramento-based public historian and a freelance writer whose work has been featured in such magazines as Archaeology and Wild West as well as regional California newspapers.