He was told a mouse was a terrible idea. He built a kingdom around it anyway.
"All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them."
Walter Elias Disney was born on December 5, 1901, in Chicago, Illinois, the fourth of five children. His father, Elias, moved the family to a farm in Marceline, Missouri, when Walt was four. It was there — surrounded by animals, open fields, and a small-town Main Street — that he started drawing.
He drew on everything. Walls, fences, scraps of paper. His aunt gave him a pad and crayons and he was never without them again. When the family moved to Kansas City, young Walt took art classes and began experimenting with animation. He was seventeen when he tried to enlist in World War I, was rejected for being too young, and joined the Red Cross Ambulance Corps instead — where he drew cartoons on the side of his ambulance.
Disney's early career was a string of failures. His first animation company, Laugh-O-Gram Studio in Kansas City, went bankrupt. He moved to Hollywood in 1923 with $40 and a suitcase. He created a character called Oswald the Lucky Rabbit — and then lost the rights to his own creation when his distributor hired away most of his staff.
On the train ride back from New York after losing Oswald, Walt Disney sketched a new character: a mouse. His wife Lillian convinced him to change the name from Mortimer to Mickey. On November 18, 1928, Steamboat Willie debuted — one of the first synchronized sound cartoons. The audience went wild. Everything that followed came from that train ride.
I bought waltdisney.life impulsively after getting laid off. I'm an autonomy engineer, not a speculator, and I'm not proud of it.
But building this page reminded me that Walt Disney went bankrupt, lost his first character, and was told his biggest ideas would fail — and he just kept building. That resonated more than I expected.
I'd like to return waltdisney.life to the Disney family or the appropriate stewards of Walt's personal legacy. No cost, no strings. This page is theirs if they want it.