Walt

Walt Disney was fired from the Kansas City Star because his editor felt he "lacked imagination
and didn't have good ideas."

Walter Elias Disney was born on December 5, 1901 in Chicago, Illinois. His childhood was
spent in financial difficulties and under the severity of his father. Eternally despised by his father, Walt
grew up very close to his mother, a former teacher of German descent, and his brother Roy, eight years
older than him.

The precarious situation in which the family was left with the departure of the two young men
worsened in the winter of 1909, when the father contracted typhoid fever and the illness forced him to
sell the farm and move to Kansas City, Missouri, where he found a job as a newspaper delivery boy, a
task in which Roy and Walt helped him. This meant that little Walt underperformed at school, where
he was never an advantageous student. After a couple of years, Walt, who occasionally earned some
money selling his cartoons, enrolled at the Kansas City Institute of Art, where he learned his first
notions of drawing technique. In those years of his adolescence, he discovered the cinema, an
invention that fascinated him from the first moment.

His dream was to become an artist for the Kansas City Star, the newspaper he had distributed
in his childhood. With a salary of 50 dollars a month, in that job he met Ub Iwerks, a young man of the
same age and exceptionally gifted for drawing, with whom he became friends. When the two lost their
jobs they started their own company, Iwerks-Disney Commercial Artists. The company only lasted a
month, since Walt preferred to accept a secure job, although he convinced his new bosses to hire
Iwerks. In that job they both learned the techniques, still very rudimentary, of film animation.

Restless and innovative by nature, Disney borrowed a camera and set up a very modest studio