35 pages • 1-hour read
Who Was Walt Disney
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Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of substance use.
Chapter 1 Summary: “The Farm”
Walt Disney was born on December 5, 1901, in Chicago, Illinois. His father, Elias, was a construction worker and an entrepreneur. His mother was a schoolteacher but gave up her career to raise her children. He had three older brothers, Herbert, Raymond, and Roy, and one younger sister, Ruth.
Walt’s family moved to Missouri to live on a farm, where Walt loved being close to nature and farm animals. He spent his childhood observing and exploring outside and learning to draw. He spent many hours making pictures and was so talented that his neighbor commissioned a picture of his horse.
Walt loved entertaining others and making people laugh. He also liked acting. He once saw a performance of Peter Pan and wanted to recreate it in a school production where he could play the main character. Walt loved the idea of a world of wonders where children could be imaginative and never grow up. He convinced his brother Roy to help him create a rope system that would pull him up in the air, to appear as if he were flying during the school play.
From a very young age, Walt demonstrated several characteristics that would later allow him to become an icon in the entertainment industry: He was creative, liked exploring the world, was good at drawing, and loved to tell stories to make people laugh.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Newspaper Boy”
Walt’s childhood was characterized by a lot of moving. Elias struggled to earn enough money to support his family as a farmer, so the Disneys moved to Kansas City, where Elias found work in the newspaper industry. Walt got a job delivering the Kansas City Times door-to-door in the morning before going to school each day, getting up before sunrise to help his family.
Walt was not a very good student, often doodling funny characters in his textbooks instead of paying attention in class. He liked to act in plays and show off: He made a friend who was also called Walt, and the two performed for their class, once even winning a prize of 25 cents each. Walt liked Charlie Chaplin, one of the biggest Hollywood movie stars of the time, and tried to play him while his friend played Chaplin’s rival, the Count.
During this period of his life, Walt had a lot of time to practice his drawing and acting skills. He also continued to explore the world and go on new adventures: During the summer he turned 15, he worked for a train company that allowed him to travel to Missouri and Oklahoma. Walt’s childlike wonder and imagination developed when he was very young and stayed with him for the rest of his life.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Seeing the World”
Walt’s family moved again in 1917, when Elias was still not earning enough from working at the newspaper firm. This time, they settled back in Chicago, where Elias invested in a fruit and jelly company. Walt attended McKinley High School but dropped out because he was bored. Instead, he took art classes at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and practiced using a movie camera. He made a few short films with a friend for fun.
When World War I began, Walt’s older brothers Herbert and Roy were shipped off to Europe, and he wanted to join them, believing that war would be a fun adventure. He found work as an ambulance driver, but by the time he arrived in France, much of the fighting was already over, and Walt never saw an actual battlefield. Instead, he doodled all over his ambulance car and picked up the habit of smoking.
Walt returned to America in 1919, but when his father asked him to stay in Chicago to work at his jelly factory, Walt refused. He was 18 years old now and knew that he wanted to become a famous artist, so he returned to Kansas City.
Chapters 1-3 Analysis
This section covers the period from Walt’s childhood to age 18, establishing his resilient personality and his love of art, two important factors that would later help him become one of the most famous figures in the entertainment industry. Author Whitney Stewart locates the origins of Walt’s famed career in his childhood experiences, particularly since early challenges showed him The Importance of Resilience in Overcoming Setbacks.
Stewart suggests that the setting of Walt’s childhood, on a farm in Missouri, inspired his future films by giving him plenty of opportunities to observe nature, from farm animals to plants to people. Despite the hard work involved in farming, Walt found time to draw the world around him and make up fun stories to make people laugh, discovering a talent and passion for entertainment. Farm life was a far more common experience in this era than it is today, with more than half of Americans living in rural communities at the turn of the 20th century. Walt’s transition from the rural Midwest to the entertainment-centered metropolis of Los Angeles, California, mirrors a cultural shift in American life more broadly.
Walt’s childhood is also characterized by a lot of moving. His family did not stay in one place for long, and they also weren’t always financially stable. This meant that Walt had to learn to work hard from a very young age to help out. Though these experiences were common to many families in the early 20th century, Stewart uses them to imply a continuity between Walt’s childhood and his adult career, suggesting that the strong work ethic he developed in childhood suited him to the hard work of making and perfecting animated cartoons and that the breadth of experience he gained by moving frequently with his family gave him an opportunity to learn more about the world and decide to become a great artist in the future.
Walt’s youth coincided with the rapid growth of the film industry, and Stewart argues that his early interests in drawing, acting, and storytelling prepared him to enter this growing industry just as it was hitting its stride. The newness of the industry itself made it well suited to a personality like Walt’s, as his obsession with Innovation as a Driver of Success aligned with the needs of an industry in its infancy.
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