Walt Disney, the Driven American Entrepreneur
Creative and talented genius
A brief bio about Disney’s early years
Walter Elias Disney was born in Chicago on December 5, 1901. When he was five, his family moved to a farm close to the small town of Marceline, Missouri. There’s even a museum there called Walt Disney Hometown Museum. It’s not affiliated with the Walt Disney Company. When he was nine, they moved to Kansas City, Missouri.
Disney attended Benton Grammar School. He took drawing classes at the Kansas City Art Institute on Saturdays. Supposedly, he got his start drawing animals from books he checked out from the Kansas City Public Library. In 1917, his family moved back to Chicago where he attended high school.
During World War I, Disney worked overseas for the Red Cross as an ambulance driver. He returned to Kansas City and as his luck would have it, he was hired as an artist for an advertising agency. In 1920, he began an animated film business with a secondhand movie camera with an old mentor by the name of Ub Iwerks who was also an artist. They had a studio where they made animated cartoons for local movie venues called “Laugh-O-Grams.”
Allegedly, there was a little mouse that lived in one of Disney’s desk drawers at the studio. It’s believed this mouse…
