Walt Disney

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Walt Elias Disney was born in 1901 in Chicago (Karwatka, 2008, p. 10). He spent a lot of his childhood in the Midwest near Kansas City, Missouri but he was most fond of a farm in Marceline, Missouri where he stayed for a couple of years (Croce, 1991, p. 92). According to Croce (1991), a professor and chair of American studies at Stetson University, Disney’s family went through a series of relocations because of his father’s job jumping (p. 91). Croce quoted Roy, Disney’s older brother, when he described their father as always having ants in his pant; “He could never stay in one place long enough to warm a seat” (p. 91). Disney was the youngest of five children but unfortunately three of his siblings ran away from home due to the fact that their father was an oppressive patriarch (Karwatka, 2008, p. 10; Croce, 1991, p. 92). Disney was extremely close to Roy, who actually became his business partner when they decided to move to California.

Dennis Karwatka (2008, p. 10), a former professor in the Department of Industrial Education and Technology at Morehead State University, expressed how Disney began sketching when he was just five years old and Croce (1991, p. 92) discussed how he was just a small child when he received his first payment of fifty cents for a drawing of a horse. He later enrolled in the Kansas City Art Institute (p. 92). As he got older, though he was too young for the armed forces, Disney served in the First World War in Red Cross services and in the ambulance corps in France while still finding time to entertain his artistic side (Karwatka, 2008, p. 10; Croce, 1991, p. 92). He drew comic characters on the sides of his truck while he also preparing a sketch portfolio as he pursued a job as a commercial artist ...

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...hat he took after his father when it came to being a stern dictator. Sadly, Disney died of cancer in 1966 which went unnoticed and undetected until just a few months before his death (Croce, 1991, p. 99). In 2000 Walt Disney was inducted into the Inventors Hall of Fame (Karwatka, 2008, 11).

References

Croce, P. (1991). A Clean and Separate Space: Walt Disney in Person and Production. Journal

Of Popular Culture, 25(3), 91-103.

Karwatka, D. (2008). Walt Disney and His Multiplane Motion Picture Camera. Tech Directions,

67(6), 10-11.

Walt Disney and the creation of emotional environments: interpreting Walt Disney's oeuvre from

the Disney studios to Disneyland, CalArts, and the Experimental Prototype Community

of Tomorrow (EPCOT). By: Chytry, Josef. Rethinking History. Jun2012, Vol. 16 Issue 2,

p259-278. 20p. DOI: 10.1080/13642529.2012.681194.

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