Walt Disney is a smiling, lovable, soft-natured guy; but if he hadn't been bull-headed enough to cross up a girl In Chicago in 1918, there might not have been any Mickey Mouse or Snow White or "Fantasia."
Walt had saved a little money from postoffice clerking, and he said to this girl:
"What shall I buy, a canoe or a movie camera?"
The girl said, "A canoe." So Walt bought a movie camera. He was 16.
Even with his savings he couldn't buy the camera all at once. He got it on time and gave a chattel mortgage for it. When, war-struck but too young for service, he finally landed with the Red Cross as a chauffeur, he had to work a week extra at the postoffice in order to finish paying off on the camera.
"And even so I had to give it back," he says. "I don't know exactly how it worked, but they took my camera and my money. That was my first movie venture. And " – with an impish chuckle and a glance around his new $2,000,000 plant – "It's the same now."
He just made amateur stuff with his camera, but it got him interested in movies.
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In the first article of this series I called Walt the No. 1 screen personality of the year, arguing that Disney has put his heart and soul and mind on film for years, and now his physical presence will appear in a combination of cartoon and "live action" called "The Reluctant Dragon." Three weeks ago Rob Wagner, in Script, named Walt the Boy of the Year.
Rob wrote that Walt tops both Mickey Rooney, who at 18 is already a mature and distinguished old trouper, and Quiz Kid Gerard Darrow, who at 8 is one of the country's most recondite naturalists. Walt, at 39, has a spirit which "is still that of a little boy of 4 or 5," according to Rob.
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