Word: walts
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...Walt was in his teens and back in Chicago, where his father had bought a jam factory, when he got the camera bug and bought a $70 movie camera on the installment plan. Girls, he recalls, were a nuisance. "I was normal," he says, "but girls bored me. They still do. Their interests are just different." Besides, Walt was busy. After school he worked as a gateman on the Wilson Avenue elevated line, got a Christmas job in the local post office. During summer vacations he worked as a candy butcher on the Katy Railroad...
...Walt heard of a job in a commercial art shop at the princely salary of $50 a month, and that decided it. Pretty soon he was getting $35 a week from an outfit that produced animated advertisements to run before the feature at local movie houses. In a few months Walt thought he knew enough to start a studio of his own in the family garage. At 19 he had hit the main drag of his career...
...short order Walt turned out four cartoons burlesquing contemporary politics, and sold them to a New York distributor. The distributor went broke before he paid off, and Walt soon did the same. But for six months after that, he tried to keep the business going. Some days he had nothing to do but sit and play with the mice that infested the studio. Walt kept a few in a cage in the office, and some of them became quite tame. One mouse known as Mortimer showed no desire at all to escape, so he was made a trusty, and lived...
Before long Walt ran out of both money and credit. One day he realized that he had missed at least three meals in a row. He borrowed a camera, photographed some babies, took the $40 he earned and headed for Hollywood. Brother Roy, who had just been released from a TB sanatorium in Arizona, met him there, and they set up shop in the $5-a-month corner of a Hollywood real-estate office. In the next four years the Disney studios produced 24 cartoons in a series called Alice in Cartoonland and 52 more about Oswald the Rabbit...
Mickey Is Born. After an argument with his financial backer in 1927, Walt was out of business. On a train trip, he thought and thought about a new cartoon character to market. Cats, dogs, cows, horses, pigs, chickens, ducks, apes, elephants and even dinosaurs-they had all been used before. And then, as the train clacked along somewhere between Toluca, Ill. and La Junta, Colo., Walt suddenly remembered Mortimer...