One of the things that I love to read is stories of the Disney family. Too often, people look at Walt Disney as some sort of “thing,” an historical figure with no flesh and blood but just an icon.
I know that type of attitude very much bothered his oldest daughter, Diane Disney Miller, who, in the last years of her life, strove to help people realize Walt was a son, a brother, a father and a grandfather and not just an image on a T-shirt or a coffee mug.
So, today, here are a few short stories about the Disney family to remind us all that Walt and his family was as human as we are.
The Disney Family in Florida
I once had a waiter at Walt Disney World, who had worked there for more than 40 years, try to vehemently convince me that the real and only reason Walt picked Central Florida to build WDW was because he had worked as a postman in Kissimmee when he was younger.
That is not true. Walt never worked as a postman in Kissimmee but his father, Elias, briefly did, delivering mail in some rural areas on a buckboard among several other jobs he did in the Central Florida area.
Walt, however, chose the Orlando area for many reasons, including the availability of lots of reasonably inexpensive land, weather conditions, tourist traffic patterns, and more.
The Disney family does have some deep roots in Central Florida, especially on Walt’s mother’s side.
In 1878, Kepple Disney and his family including his two sons Elias (Walt’s father) and Robert (Elias’ younger brother who would temporarily house Walt when he came to California) left Canada to seek their fortune in California. When Kepple passed through Kansas, he ended up buying a large parcel of land and set up a farm. His sons worked on that farm.
During this time, Elias became very fond of Flora Call, the teenaged daughter of a neighbor who lived only two miles from the farm. In 1884, after some very severe winters, the Call family moved to Florida accompanied by Kepple Disney and Elias who both settled in the town of Acron where only seven families were living there at the time. Acron, Florida no longer exists but it is near where Sorrento, Florida is today.
Kepple was not pleased with Florida and almost immediately moved back to Kansas. Primarily because of his interest in Flora, Elias bought a 40-acre farm in Kismet. Elias eventually sold the farm, tried managing the Halifax Hotel in Daytona Beach but left when things slumped after the summer tourist season and got a job as a rural mailman in Kissimmee and saved enough money to buy an orange grove.
Walt Disney's maternal grandparents were Charles and Henrietta Call who acquired eighty acres for a farm about a mile north of the settlement.
The Call children were Flora Call (Walt Disney's mother); Jessie Call, who married Albert Perkins in 1887; Grace Lila Call, who married William Frary in 1890; Julia Call, who married Lawrence Campbell in 1897; and Charles Jr.
The ladies became active in The Ladies Society of Kismet and the family attended church there. Later, they found that they were actually living closer to the town of Acron than Kismet.
Flora worked as a teacher in Acron for the first year and in Paisley her second year there. Mr. Call was also a teacher in neighboring Norristown until he died in 1890 after complications from an accident when he was clearing some pine trees from his property.
Walt Disney's parents married in a Lake County ceremony in the Calls’ home in Kismet on January 1, 1888. Lake County was formed on May 27, 1887, and issued its first marriage license seven months later for the Disney-Call union. Elias was nearly thirty years old and Flora about 19. Their first son, Herbert, was born December 8, 1888 in Kismet.
A frost destroyed Elias’ orange crop and he was stricken with malaria so the Disney family moved back to Chicago in 1889 where Elias found carpentry work building the Columbian Exposition seven days a week at a dollar a day.
Walt Disney's uncle Albert Perkins, who had married his mother's sister Jessie, became the postmaster of Paisley in 1902 and served until 1935. Jessie taught in several Lake County schools and eventually served as principal of Eustis High School. When her husband died, she succeeded him as postmaster and served until 1946. The story goes that the young Walt and Roy Disney sometimes visited Jessie and Albert in Florida during their summer vacations from school and fished and hunted in the Ocala National Forest.
Charles was buried in 1890 in Maple Grove Cemetery, located a short distance northeast of Kismet. When his widow, Henrietta, died in 1910, their daughter Jessie had Mr. Call exhumed and buried beside Mrs. Call in Ponceannah Cemetery. They are buried near the back of the cemetery beneath a stone monument that is carved to resemble a tree stump. It is possible to visit that gravesite today.
Walt's maternal grandparents, Charles and Henrietta Call, are buried in Maple Grove Cemetary in Florida.
Ye Olde Christmas Shoppe in Liberty Square at the Magic Kingdom is meant to represent three separate stores. The section nearest the Liberty Tree Tavern restaurant resembles the quaint home of a family of Pennsylvanian German folk artists and craftsmen. On the outside wall is a blue heart-shaped plaque with the family’s name, Kepple. It is an intentional hidden reference to Kepple, Walt’s paternal grandfather. It was debated about using the Call family name, especially with their German heritage, but for reasons not known to me the Call name was not chosen.
Disney in Disguise
In the beginning of his career, Walt Disney was not recognized in public if he wanted to visit someplace.
Would someone not in the entertainment business instantly recognize Jack Warner or Samuel Goldwyn or Harry Cohn or some other big Hollywood movie producer? That all changed with the Disneyland television show where every week, people saw Uncle Walt encouraging them to come and visit Disneyland.
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Walt was now instantly recognizable so he tried to disguise himself, sometimes with his hat pulled down obscuring his face.
On one trip, Walt’s barber, in response to Walt wanting to go unnoticed on a trip, suggested snipping off Walt’s mustache.
“I don’t want to look that different” he snorted.
Cast members at Disneyland take particular pride in saying that Disneyland is where “Walt actually walked” but it is also true that Walt walked on the property that would become Walt Disney World.
Walt and his older brother Roy used pseudonyms when they physically visited the Florida area before the official announcement was made that Disney was coming. Walt was “Walt Davis” and Roy was “Roy O. Davis.”
That way they didn’t have to change their initials on luggage or any other monogrammed items.
If they started to write their names by the time they got to the “D” they could make the correction. If someone said their first name, they would respond without having to remember they were someone else.
In addition, Imagineer Marvin Davis who drew the layout for Disneyland and the Magic Kingdom had married Walt’s niece, Marjorie, and he traveled with Walt so he could legally bring out a driver’s license to prove this was the “Davis” group if necessary.
However, there were occasional “close calls” where the ruse might have been revealed.
One night in Orlando, Walt was eating with some associates in a hotel dining room. The waitress kept eyeing him. Finally, she approached and commented, “You know you look a little like Walt Disney.”
Walt, so wrapped up in the conversation and now distracted by this remark, replied indignantly, “What do you mean, I LOOK like Walt Disney? I AM Walt Disney!” and he started to pull out his driver’s license for proof.
Fortunately the rest of the group stopped him, said something to the waitress and the incident never made it to the newspapers. If it had, land prices would have skyrocketed.
Roy would wear dark glasses and a false beard and would claim to be from New York and at a stopover in Miami, he ran into a prominent person he knew and was curious about the disguise. They had dinner together that night and it worked out so that the secret was kept.
A window on Main Street in the Magic Kingdom lists the “Pseudonym Real Estate Development Company” and its president, “Roy Davis”. Another pseudonym on that window is vice president “Bob Price” the false name used by Bob Price Foster to acquire land for Disney.
Walt and Roy were in Tallahassee (the capital of Florida) on November 14, 1965 and had dinner at the governor's mansion.
Governor William Haydon Burns and the Disney group flew by private plane to Orlando on November 15th and proceeded directly to the Cherry Plaza Hotel where they had a small private luncheon before the press conference officially announcing Disney coming to Florida.
During that visit, Walt toured the WDW site with Joe Fowler, Card Walker, Joe Potter, Roy, Irlo Bronson, and a few others, like Bob Foster. It also included a boat tour of Bay Lake and a fried chicken lunch at one of the houses built on property. He flew back to Burbank a couple days later.
Walt’s last trip to the Florida site was for a few days in May 1966.
Roy O. Disney at Disneyland
Frequent readers of this column know that I have the highest respect for Roy O. Disney, Walt’s older brother, and that I feel strongly that he doesn’t get the respect and attention that he rightfully deserves. If not for Roy, there would be no Walt Disney World.
Unlike Walt, Roy was able to sit in Disneyland without being disturbed because no one knew what he looked like. He often visited the park like Walt to check on how things were going.
The designation that alerted cast members when Roy was in the park was “Code R.” One time Disney Legend Dick Nunis was standing on Main Street with Roy and the radio signaled “Code R” and Nunis had to explain to a curious Roy what that call sign meant.
Here is a story told to me by April Jo Rogers in 1998.
“Back in the early days of Disneyland, when I was about 12, I would sit with Roy Disney on the porch of the Town Hall and he would tell me stories about Disneyland and Mickey Mouse. Every time I went there, he was sitting on the porch and I would go up and talk to him. I didn't know who he was until I was about 15, when I saw a picture of him and realized who he was. He was very nice to me and I will always remember how nice it was to talk to him.
“As a child I was handicapped, I wore a tracheotomy tube for 12 years, and when I first met Roy Disney, he asked me about my health and he told me to be strong. I told him how the other kids tormented me and I had no friends and he told me that I was very pretty and that the other kids were just very jealous of me. He said that I was very lucky to have such a special condition and that made me a special person. He would always ask me about my school and how my grades were.
“I always got very good grades and that made him very happy. One time, he asked me where I lived. I told him I lived in San Clemente and he said it was so nice there. One time, as I was walking down Main Street, the Phantom of the Opera jumped out from the cinema entrance and scared the living daylights out of me and I ran over to the steps of Town Hall and found Mr. Disney laughing. He saw what happened and it made him laugh, and then I started laughing. He had a great laugh. Roy Disney made a very difficult childhood bearable just by knowing I would see him when I would go to Disneyland.”
Those Disney Boys
Besides Roy, Walt had two other older brothers. Herbert spent his entire life working for the U.S. Post Office and retired with a nice pension. Walt used say, “I had a brother I really envied because he was a mailman. But he was the one who had all the fun. He had himself a trailer and he used to go out and go fishing and he didn’t worry about payrolls and stories and picture grosses or anything. He was the happy one. I always said, ‘He’s the smart Disney’.”
Raymond was an insurance salesman and many Disney animators including Ward Kimball claim that he was the inspiration for Honest John Worthington Foulfellow, the fox in the animated feature Pinocchio (1940). Raymond had worked as a bank teller along side his brother Roy at the First National Bank in Kansas City, Missouri.
Raymond lived just a few blocks from the Disney Studio in Burbank. He would drop by the studio frequently to try and sell insurance, intimating that it would help people get in good with Walt. That was not the case. Walt couldn’t have cared less and so many quickly cancelled their policies because Raymond’s fees were pretty steep and he was slow to pay off claims according to Kimball. He sold insurance for 35 years.
To save gas, Ray would ride his bicycle to the studio but his kickstand was loose so people could hear the clackety racket from quite a distance.
Ray bequeathed a very considerable amount of his large estate to the Shriner's Hospital for Crippled Children in Los Angeles and the Shriner's Children's Burn Hospital in Galveston, Texas.
Just as the Kennedy brothers would gather to play football on the lawn, it seems that the Disney brothers would gather together to engage in a sport themselves.
Here is a story told to me by the late Roy E. Disney, the son of Roy O. Disney.
“They would get together to play croquet of all things. I guess it was popular or considered ‘high class’ or the thing to do. I didn’t have any interest in the game. None of them were athletes but they all tried hard. They would have killed the other team to win.
“The croquet games were something to behold. We had a pretty big back yard that was flat and enclosed by hedges that was, probably, I don't think it was ever conceived as a croquet court but became one pretty quickly. They would come over, the four (brothers) and they'd pair up into two teams.
“The four brothers would get out there and start playing, all four with cigars sticking out of their mouths, in bathing trunks, in those old fashioned bathing trunks with the white belt around here.
“And the women kind of tended to stay out of the way because croquet balls would actually fly out of the court every now and then, you know. They would take all kinds of revenge on one another.
“Those games would end up and everybody would jump in the pool and the women would have made fried chicken and during summer we'd always go out somewhere and get fresh corn out of a field, and potato salad. Fried chicken, fresh corn, potato salad. The best food I remember from my childhood, ever.
“My mother made the best fried chicken. She’d make it when dad invited over Disney executives who were visiting from overseas and it was always funny seeing them experience their first bite of it.
“I think all of them would have done anything to win. They were all terrible about it. I don't know who was the champion as a matter of fact. They used to let me into the game once in a while and once in a while I'd get ahead and they'd really get sore at me and throw me out of the game. It was just fun to watch.”
Lillian Disney Remembers
Here’s one loose quote I’ve had in my files and wanted to use it somewhere. Walt’s wife, Lillian, recalling her meeting Walt’s parents for the very first time in Oregon where Herbert and his wife lived as well as Walt’s sister, Ruth.
“Well, we went up to Lewiston, Idaho, to be married. And on our way back on the train we stopped off in Portland, Oregon. That's where his parents lived at the time, and I met them there. I hadn't met them before that. They were just ordinary people. Very warm and very friendly and they loved him very much. And they wanted him to be happy, so they were happy with me for that reason.”
