On December 5, 1901, a baby named Walter Elias Disney was born in a small wooden house on Tripp Avenue in Chicago. His family soon moved to a farm in Marceline, Missouri, where little Walt sketched the pigs, chickens, and horses with charcoal on toilet paper because his family was too poor to buy drawing paper. He scribbled pictures everywhere - on barn doors, on the sides of buildings, on any scrap he could find.
Walt grew up dreaming in cartoons. After driving an ambulance in France at the end of World War I, he started a tiny animation studio in a garage in Hollywood with his brother Roy. Early bankruptcy and stolen characters nearly crushed him, but in 1928 Walt invented a cheerful little mouse named Mickey, originally called Mortimer until Walt's wife Lillian suggested a friendlier name. Mickey debuted in a cartoon called Steamboat Willie, and audiences howled with delight at a mouse that could whistle in sync with music.
From Mickey came Snow White in 1937, the first full-length animated movie. Then Pinocchio, Bambi, Cinderella, and an entire kingdom of stories. In 1955 Walt opened Disneyland in Anaheim, California, the first theme park where families could actually walk inside the cartoons. By the time Walt died in 1966, he had won 22 Academy Awards, more than anyone in history. Today, every spinning teacup ride, every cartoon castle, and every animated movie traces back to that Missouri farm kid who refused to stop drawing.
