Masters of Enterprise by H. W. Brands

Author:H. W. Brands
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press

14

FANTASY INC.

Walt Disney

• • •

ONE REASON DAVID SARNOFF HAD SUCH TROUBLE BEING TAKEN seriously with his “Radio Music Box” proposal in 1915 was that the paradigm for industrial success remained rooted in the Carnegie-Rockefeller-Ford mode of producing material objects that could support a skyscraper, fill a pipeline or bend a guardrail. The evanescence of radio waves made them seem an uncertain foundation for building a business.

Walt Disney didn’t know the first thing about either Sarnoff’s vision for radio or the skepticism that greeted it. In Kansas City in the years before America entered World War I, Disney had no idea that his path would cross Sarnoff’s half a century later. But if he had known about radio he wouldn’t have considered it a long shot at all. Sarnoff’s radio waves had scientific substance, even if they couldn’t be seen or heard by the unaided human eye and ear; this was much more than could be said for the medium in which Disney was just beginning to work. Sarnoff dealt in electromagnetism; Disney dealt in dreams.

The first dream Disney dealt in was one of his own: of being an artist. He started drawing as a boy in Marceline, Missouri; after the family moved to Kansas City his parents enrolled him in art classes for promising youth. But his precociousness stalled short of genius, and his aptitude with a pencil evolved into an after-school knack for making pocket money. He drew cartoons for the corner barber and advertisements for local merchants. Upon the American entry into the war he joined the Red Cross, being too young for the army; he sketched posters for the international relief agency between shifts driving ambulances in France.

Disney survived France, but his desire for formal education didn’t. He never returned to high school, nor art school, instead taking a job with a commercial shop designing stationery for office suppliers, drawing ads for small businesses and making program covers for movie houses. The experience proved educational in its own way. “When you go to art school you work for perfection,” he explained afterward. “But in a commercial art shop you cut things out, and paste things over, and scratch around with a razor blade. I’d never done any of those things in art school. Those are time-saving tricks.”

In the art shop Disney encountered a young man of similar aptitude and interests although somewhat less ambition. Disney talked Ubbe Iwerks into forming a partnership for commercial artwork. They called their enterprise Iwerks–Disney, after trying Disney–Iwerks but deciding it sounded too much like an optical company. Even renamed, the business folded within a month.

Disney went back to work for a wage, this time with the Kansas City Film Ad Company. The firm’s principal product was animated shorts that played before the feature films at movie theaters and hawked various products. Without quite realizing it at first, Disney had found his calling. He loved to bring his drawings to life through the magic of animation, and before long he began improving on the methods of his employer.

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