HECKBERT: Reflecting on ‘Uncle Walt’

Fruits of animation pioneer’s labour continue to influence generations of kids

Walt Disney (SUBMITTED PHOTO)

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We recently dropped into our favourite bookstore. Neil Gabler’s hefty Walt Disney biography caught my eye, then lightened my wallet. The next morning, I tied into it.

The animation guru who became known as “Uncle Walt” was a formative influence in my boyhood in Miramichi.

The Disneys of America descended from the d’Isignys of Normandy, France. Successive generations moved to England, then Ireland, then Ontario, before heading south to the United States.

Walt Disney was born into a hardscrabble family in Chicago in 1901. Four years later, they moved to a small whistle-stop on the railroad between Chicago and Kansas City, a small midwest town called Marceline, Kan.

Young Walt was a dreamer, and Marceline was the small town where his dreams began, as much as 1950s Chatham was for me. In grade school, he wasn’t much of a student, paying little mind to his teachers and propping up books on his desk (as a blind spot) to do what he loved most – draw.