Acquired
00:07:44 · Ben Gilbert
[00:07:44] S0: And Elias moved the family because it was kinda like, let's get out of the dangerous city of Chicago and raise the kids right. So sort of somewhere small town. I think Marceline was actually created because they needed somewhere for the Santa Fe Railroad's division point. Yes. Yes. Like, when it was going to maybe Chicago and Kansas City, and they were like, and this place on the map looks good, and they started the town of Marceline. Exactly.
00:08:09 · David Rosenthal
[00:08:09] S1: Exactly. And Robert, the uncle, had bought real estate there kinda speculating again that this Marceline is gonna grow. So Marceline was, like, basically a Disney movie. There's orchards and ponds and animals and farm houses. There's also this charming little town that the railroad had created with a main street, a main street USA, you might say. But that's getting out of ourselves. So while the family's living there, uncle Robert's wife, Walt's aunt Maggie, every time that they would come visit Marceline to check up on their real estate investments, she would bring Walt gifts. And one year, when Walt is probably six or seven years old, aunt Maggie brings him a big chief drawing tablet and pencil set, and Walt is enraptured. He starts sketching all the time, drawing, sketching everything he can see. And as the legend goes, one day, Walt's retired neighbor asked the young boy to draw him a picture of his favorite horse. And the neighbor loves what Walt draws so much that he pays him a nickel for it, and he hangs it in a frame in his house. And Walt, his mind is blown, young Walt. He's like, my my hobby, my my art, it can make me money. Now whatever the exact truth of that story is, there is no doubt that somewhere in Marceline, in prepubescent Walt's mind, a connection is forged between these two great forces, art and commerce. And that would go on to drive not only the rest of his life, but the company, the studio, the movies, I mean, changed America.
00:09:54 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[00:09:54] S0: Absolutely. The thing about Marceline, though, you said it's idyllic and, like, it's out of a Disney movie. The reality of living in Marceline and life on the farm is that it was very hard. All the kids are involved. There's not, you know, magical economic prosperity everywhere. It's sort of a tough life even though he can sort of remember it as an idyllic childhood, which I also think is quite the foreshadow of kind of the Disney versionification of things in the future. It is both remembered as idyllic, but also was hard as the real world is. Yes. And I [00:10:29] S1: think it's because of the age Walt was when he was there. So they lived in Marceline only from when he was, like, four to eight or nine years old before he gets really put to work. So he gets to just enjoy all this bliss around him. Yeah. The reality is it's pretty tough for the family to make a living, and in fact, they can't. So Elias adds farming to his list of entrepreneurial failures. And when Walt is nine years old, they have to move the family again out of Marceline to Kansas City, where Elias decides he's gonna purchase a paper delivery route for the Kansas City Star newspaper, and he's gonna put the family to work delivering papers. [00:11:14] S0: There are so many protagonists that we study on acquired who started their career as newspaper boys.
00:11:14 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[00:11:14] S0: There are so many protagonists that we study on acquired who started their career as newspaper boys. [00:11:20] S1: I was gonna say, just like Jack Bogle from Vanguard delivering papers in his youth and having to get up at four in the morning and falling asleep at school because he has to work so hard, like, this is quite the reversal here for Walt Yep. From Marceline. But he never stops drawing, and he never stops making money from it. In Kansas City, he would draw frames for the local barbershop who would pay him either a nickel or a free haircut for each. And that would, you know, be Walt's spending money growing up that he would earn from his art. Yep. So later, when Walt enters high school, Elias moves the family back to Chicago again, this time for the jelly factory, which ends up failing, where Walt becomes the cartoonist for his high school newspaper. But he's not there long before he leaves high school to go join the Red Cross and get shipped off to France as an ambulance driver during World War one, where unfortunately, he would acquire a chain smoking habit that he would keep up for the rest of his life and eventually would kill him way too young. Yep. But Walt's not in France for long before the war ends. And in the fall of nineteen nineteen, he lands back in Kansas City where Roy Disney, his older brother who is, I think, eight years his senior? [00:12:34] S0: Nine years maybe? [00:12:35] S1: Eight, nine years older. [00:12:36] S0: Yeah. Much older.
00:12:36 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[00:12:36] S0: Yeah. Much older. [00:12:37] S1: Yep. Is living. And Walt has a plan that he's gonna seek his fortune finally as a true professional cartoonist. So through Roy, he gets introduced to an advertising art shop that's looking for apprentices to help draw, like, flyers for the upcoming holiday rush. And Walt works there for six weeks through Christmas time and then gets unceremoniously laid off. But he gets two things out of this brief experience as an employee. One, he gets a credential. He can now say that he is a professional artist. [00:13:10] S0: All you have to do is get paid to do something, and then you become a professional. [00:13:13] S1: Exactly. Exactly. And you get something else, a cofounder, another young apprentice from the art shop named Ub Eyeworks. [00:13:25] S0: I sort of think of Ub as the Steve Wozniak of Disney. [00:13:29] S1: Yes. Absolutely. Walt is like the original Steve Jobs, and I think you can definitely make the case that Ub is the Steve Wozniak. [00:13:37] S0: Although I think Walt was more hands on. Yes. Walt was also an animator. Ub was just a better animator, and Walt was a camera operator. And Walt was building stuff, doing things with his hand, and he was in the primary technology and artistic trade that his business was in. After the two of them
00:13:37 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[00:13:37] S0: Although I think Walt was more hands on. Yes. Walt was also an animator. Ub was just a better animator, and Walt was a camera operator. And Walt was building stuff, doing things with his hand, and he was in the primary technology and artistic trade that his business was in. After the two of them [00:13:58] S1: get laid off, Walt suggests that rather than go look for jobs again, they should just start their own studio together. I mean, hey. They're professional artists. Like, why not? So they create iWorks Disney Commercial Artists Incorporated, supposedly in that naming order so that it didn't sound like a optometrist shop like Disney iWorks. How [00:14:19] S0: amazing is this? In the first iWorks and Disney partnership, in Walt Disney's first business, he was not the main name on the door, or at least he was not the first one.