Even after the bombing, Walt jockeyed for additional mail routes; when he failed to get one, he would stand in line at rush hour for odd jobs that paid $0.40 an hour. This left little time for social pursuits, but Walt didn’t care. “. . . girls bored me,” he said about those years. He was saving money and soon had enough to buy $70 motion-picture camera, which he paid in installments.
He continued to take drawing lessons at night at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. His teacher was the institution’s founder
Carl Werntz
, a painter, illustrator, and cartoonist whose work had been published in the
Chicago Record
, among other publications. Two other Chicago newspaper cartoonists,
Carey Orr
and Leroy Gossett, tutored Walt and took him into their respective newsrooms where they introduced him to the writers and editors.
In 1918, with
World War I
still underway, Roy Disney joined the Navy. Walt wanted to enlist, but at sixteen, he was too young to serve. The Red Cross Ambulance Corps accepted enlistees at the age of seventeen, but Walt, a few months shy of his birthday, didn’t want to wait. Despite his father’s refusal to lie about his age, his mother helped Walt forge his birthday on a passport. He dropped out of the ninth grade and joined the ambulance corps.
Disney was sent to Camp Scott on Chicago’s south side for Red Cross training, but soon after he arrived, he came down with the flu and was sent home for three weeks to recuperate. By the time he returned to camp, his unit had deployed to France. He was stationed in South Beach, Connecticut, where out of boredom, he acted the fool and his commanders locked him in a guardhouse for “clowning.” The
Armistice
with Germany on November 11, 1918, ended the war, but another opportunity to deploy overseas soon presented itself.
Walt was sent to France to deliver relief supplies for the Red Cross during post-war operations and got to see much of the country. On the road, with no one to keep him in line, a bad move nearly got him discharged. When his truck broke down, Disney left it to his assistant to radio for help, but instead, the assistant got drunk. Disney, tired of waiting, was asleep in a nearby shack when his truck finally got towed. After an official inquiry, Disney managed to keep his post.
In France, Disney employed his artistic talents to earn extra money. While driving a canteen truck at the small northeastern town of Neufchâteau, he painted a cowboy on the side of his vehicle. His supervisors were soon paying him to paint signs for the canteen. On a whim, he painted the
Croix de Guerre
,
a French military decoration, on the back of his leather jack. Enamored by this design, everyone in his unit paid Disney ten francs for him to do the same for them. Next, a con man Disney called The Georgia Cracker hired him to fake German sniper helmets to sell to unsuspecting American recruits eager for a souvenir of the war. The Georgia Cracker shot a single bullet hole into each new helmet, then dented and scuffed them with rocks. Disney’s job was to add authenticity by painting them in camouflage for ten francs per helmet.
After a year in Europe, Disney returned to Chicago with enough money to afford to turn down his father’s offer of a $25-a-week job at the jelly factory. Walt believed his future was in commercial art. He left $500 with his mother for safe-keeping, and moved back to Kansas City, determined to get a job at the
Kansas City Star.
Two years earlier, the newspaper’s city desk had been a training ground for a cub reporter named
Ernest Hemingway
, who would go on to be a Nobel- and Pulitzer-Prize-winning author. But the
Star
wouldn’t hire him.
Disney heard of an opening at the Pesmen-Rubin Art Studio, a commercial art shop. He went in with samples of his work – mostly cartoons he had drawn while stationed with the ambulance corps in France – and to prove himself, he worked a week at the studio for free. For $50 a month, he worked mostly on advertising layouts for newspapers and magazines, including pencil sketches of farm supplies and equipment. The work wasn’t challenging, but Disney appreciated it. “When you go to art school you work for perfection,” he said later. “But in a commercial art shop you cut things out and paste things over and scratch around with a razor blade. I’d never done any of those things in art school. Those are timesaving tricks.”
The shop suited Disney. Here he met
Ubbe “Ub” Iwerks
, another eighteen-year-old born in Kansas City to German immigrants. While their artistic sensibilities were complementary, Iwerks was shy and reserved where Disney was an extrovert.
The November 1919 Christmas rush on advertising didn’t last. Disney was laid off after just six weeks on the job. Iwerks followed not long after.
Disney went back to work at the post office, but spent his evenings working on his portfolio, using the tricks and techniques he had learned at the print shop to clean up his samples. Just after Christmas, he and Iwerks decided to strike out on their own, and in early 1920, they formed Iwerks-Disney Commercial Artists. Disney wrote his mother, asking her to send him the $500 he had left with her; when he told her he was starting a business for himself, she sent him half.
The owner of
The Restaurant News
gave Disney and Iwerks office space to work in, rent-free. Disney’s $250 paid for drawing boards, an air brush, and a tank of air. Iwerks-Disney made $135 in its first month with some of the business coming from $10 engravings for
The Restaurant News
. The publication’s owner also drummed up customers by recommending the studio to its advertisers.
Halfway into their second month, Iwerks and Disney saw a classified advertisement by the Kansas City Film Ad Company seeking an artist for $40 a week. Disney and Iwerks tried to convince the firm to hire them both, but when that tactic failed, artists had to make a choice. Iwerks left the decision to Disney, who took the job. Without Disney, who was the better salesman, Iwerks-Disney lasted only a few more weeks, a setback softened by the fact that the principals were still teenagers.
The Kansas City Film Ad Company produced animated short commercials using a primitive
stop-motion
technique. Paper cut-out dolls, on wooden dowels, were moved slightly between individually photographed frames so that they appeared to spring to life when the film was run. It was a crude process, not much more advanced than the flipbooks Disney used to doodle in his school textbooks, but it embodied the fundamental principle of animation: a sequence of stills that creates the illusion of movement. It was also cheap; finished film cost thirty cents a foot. Local theaters showed the animated shorts, typically a minute in length, before feature films.
Disney was captivated by animation and learned everything he could about it. Within a few months, he convinced the Kansas City Film Ad Company to hire Iwerks. The former partners improved on their employer’s animation techniques almost immediately by making the cut-out dolls move more naturally and fluidly by concealing joints and other mechanics.
Soon, Disney became convinced that a process called celluloid animation was superior to using cut-out figures. Celluloid animation, drawing directly on a clear material made of cellulose nitrate and camphor, had been invented in 1914 in Kansas City by film producer
John Randolph Bray
and his chief animator,
Earl Hurd
, who had developed a series of animated short films called
Bobby Bumps.
Disney became Hurd’s eager apprentice.
The owner of the Kansas City Film Ad Company loaned Disney a camera to experiment with on his time off, and he promptly came up with a series of animated shorts. These shorts, played at Kansas City’s Newman Theater, were called Newman Laugh-O-Grams.
The theater was owned by Milton Feld, who started as an usher and would go on to produce stage shows and films in Los Angeles. Feld contracted with Disney for twelve shorts, including some created specifically for the Newman. One of these depicted movie stars jumping out of a cake to celebrate the theater’s anniversary. Another short joked that the theater seats were rigged to drop, through a chute, any audience member that read a movie’s
title cards
aloud. Although Feld had told him to name his price, Disney lost money on the Laugh-O-Gram project because he underestimated costs and failed to factor in a profit.
But this job led to others, and before long, Disney bought his own camera and was ready to open a new studio. Through his connections with the Newman Theater, he found a number of investors and raised some $15,000.
In May 1922, Disney opened
Laugh-O-Gram Films
. The studio occupied the second floor of the McConahay Building, a warehouse on East 31st Street in Kansas City. He hired Iwerks and
Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising
,
Friz Freleng
, and Carman Maxwell, animators who would eventually form the nucleus of the Warner Brothers studio. He paid some of his recruits little or nothing at first, banking on their desire to learn on the job. There were also promises of a share in future profits, but Disney was a shrewd negotiator. His apprentices turned out quality work very cheaply.
The company contracted with a local theater owner to produce seven cartoons based on popular fairy tales, including
Little Red Riding Hood
,
Jack and the Beanstalk
,
Puss ‘n’ Boots,
and
Goldilocks and the Three Bears
. Disney’s senior apprentices shared in the company’s success, earning a salary for the first time.
Disney’s Laugh-O-Grams were popular, and with the help of a distributor in New York, began to make the rounds of other theaters. Four other animated shorts, this time political satires, found an audience on this circuit. But Disney’s share of the grosses never made it back to Kansas City. The distributor went bankrupt, and Walt was forced to lay off some of his animators.
To keep the business going, Disney moved out of his apartment and into the Laugh-O-Gram offices, where he slept on a pile of pillows. This experience also inspired his most enduring creation. “They [mice] used to fight for crumbs in my wastebasket when I worked alone late at night,” he said. “I lifted them out and kept them in wire cages on my desk. I grew particularly fond of one brown house mouse. He was a timid little guy. By tapping him on the nose with my pencil, I trained him to run inside a black circle I drew on my drawing board.” Disney named the mouse Mortimer.
Despite Disney’s efforts, Laugh-O-Gram Films had trouble breaking even. Orders for fairy-tale films were steady, but expenses ran high. Walt appealed for a loan to his brother, Roy, who was in Arizona recovering from a bout with tuberculosis. “I was just helping him like you’d help a kid brother,” Roy later recalled. He sent Walt a book of blank checks and gave him permission to fill them out, in amounts up to $30, when necessary. Many of these checks, often in the maximum amount, went to appease the owners of a Greek restaurant where Walt was allowed to run a tab. The restaurant was on the lower level of the
McConahay Building
beneath the studio. Disney’s credit there was $60; when he exceeded that, the owners cut him off. When that happened, he lived on bread and beans, though he didn’t regard it as a hardship. His tastes were never very refined, and he used to say about this period in his life, “It wasn’t bad, I love beans.”
Disney was well-liked by his neighboring merchants, whose generosity made a big difference. Disney paid a local barber with cartoons, which were displayed in the barbershop window. A local dentist named Thomas McCrum paid him $500 to make an educational cartoon, teaching children about dental hygiene. When McCrum asked Disney to meet him at his office to discuss the job, the mortified Disney admitted he could not leave his studio because his shoes were in a repair shop and he didn’t have the $1.50 needed to reclaim them. The two met at Disney’s studio instead. The cartoon, titled
Tommy Tucker’s Tooth,
was intended for the Missouri school system.
With the $500 from
Tommy Tucker’s Tooth,
Disney began work
Alice’s Wonderland
, a live-action/animation hybrid. Disney hired a teenage girl named
Virginia Davis
to star in the film and agreed to pay her 5 percent of the film’s profits. The film features Disney as one of a few animators who shows Alice around their studio. During this tour, Alice gets a peek at drawing boards displaying cartoon cats dancing and playing in a band, and a pair of mice boxing. That night, live-action Alice dreams she is on a train to Cartoonland. Upon arrival, she’s thrust into a cartoon parade on the back of an animated elephant. The girl dances with her new cartoon friends until lions break out of the zoo and chase her, first into a hollow tree, then into a cave and down a rabbit hole. She ultimately escapes by leaping off a cliff, waking up safe in her bed. The film was only twelve-and-a-half-minutes long.
Before
Alice
was complete, Disney wrote to
Margaret Winkler
in New York looking for a distributor.
Winkler got her start as the personal secretary of
Harry Warner
, one of the founders of Warner Brothers, who at the time was strictly a film distributor. Warner, impressed by Winkler’s talents, encouraged her to form her own company, Winkler Productions. At twenty-eight, she became the first female film producer and distributor.
Winkler liked Disney’s idea of merging live actors with animation, and wanted to see a print of
Alice’s Wonderland.
But before
Alice
could be completed, Laugh-O-Gram was forced into bankruptcy. Disney decided his next stop would be Hollywood – home of the burgeoning film industry. To raise the money for the trip, he took his $70 movie camera and hawked his services to Kansas City mothers, filming children at their homes for movies the parents could project in their living rooms. He also freelanced for newsreel companies, which had him racing toward various calamities, most often some natural disaster. He was paid a dollar for every foot of film he produced. Typically, an assignment called for 100 feet of film. If his footage was not acceptable, the company reimbursed him for the film he used. None of his efforts raised enough for a ticket to Hollywood. He had to sell his camera.