The Walt Disney Family Museum

Written By: Gail Clifford | Published By: Weekend Notes | November 4, 2021

https://www.weekendnotes.com/walt-disney-family-museum/

We’ve been a “Disney family” longer than I can remember. My parents honeymooned in Clearwater, not far from where Walt Disney World (WDW) was being built. We drove from Maryland to Orlando when the seven of us were small, when WDW still used tickets per ride instead of a daily admission. And we continue to take our families on a regular basis to both Walt Disney World and Disney Land with consideration of the other international locations. Yet I’d never heard of the wonderful Walt Disney Family Museum located at San Francisco’s Presidio off the Main Parade Lawn until I was housesitting in the Bay Area and explored the Presidio.

Created by Walt’s daughter, Diane Disney Miller, and her son, Walter Elias Disney Miller, the tone for the visit is set in the awards lobby. It includes displays from the family furniture that was kept in the Disney apartment at Disney Land (you knew they stayed there on Main Street, right?) to an extensive award display including Academy Awards, Golden Globes, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. It’s a celebration of his vision and the team’s implementation. Diane described this museum as Walt’s biography.

Gallery 1: In the Beginning

Born in Chicago to Elias and Flora Disney on December 5, 1901, Walter Elias Disney spent his childhood on a family farm in Marceline, Missouri, honing his drawing skills in art class and watching editorial cartoonists at the local newspaper. His only formal art training appears to be those and classes he subsequently took in high school upon the family’s return to Chicago.

World War I rages when Walt is just a teen and, anxious to take part, he volunteers for the ambulance corps with the American Red Cross. He spent 11 months driving ambulances in France, drawing, in his spare time, on available paper, soldier’s clothes and even the ambulance canvas. He’s encouraged to work as an artist upon his return to the U.S. and learns to make animated cartoons at his first job back in Kansas City, Missouri with the Pesmen Rubin Commercial Art Company.

As the wall on the second room states, “We both got so intrigued with it … we got books on animation and started to study.”

He formed his own studio, Laugh-O-grams Film, with a company called Pictorial Clubs, and agreed to create six cartoons, each based on a fairy tale but updated with jazz age gags.

When Pictoral Clubs goes bankrupt, Laugh-O-grams falls into financial peril. Walt tries to save his company, imagining a girl who dreams her way into a cartoon world. He calls it “Alice’s Wonderland,” inspired by the Lewis Carroll story. It’s inventive, but not enough to save Laugh-O-gram films.

In 1923, with his brother Roy’s encouragement, Walt leaves Kansas City and makes a new start saying, “I think it’s important to have a good, hard failure when you’re young.”