Remembering a Veteran: Driver Walter Elias Disney, American Red Cross Ambulance Service

Walt Disney was born on 5 December 1901, at 1249 Tripp Avenue, in Chicago’s Hermosa neighborhood. He was the fourth son of Elias Disney‍—‌born in the Province of Canada, to Irish parents‍—‌and Flora (née Call), an American of German and English descent. In 1917, Elias bought stock in a Chicago jelly producer, the O-Zell Company, and moved back to the city from Kansas City with his family. Son Walt enrolled at McKinley High School and became the cartoonist of the school newspaper, drawing patriotic pictures about World War I.

In 1918, when the George M. Cohan song “Over There” entreated young men to “grab your gun, on the run…do your bit, show your grit…make your Daddy glad …make your Mother proud,” thousands heeded this call. Four years into World War I, a young Walt Disney was one of them. Filled with patriotic enthusiasm and captivated by recruitment ads like “The Red Cross versus the Iron Cross,” young men barely past boyhood signed up to travel overseas and fight in The Great War. As Walt reflected much later, “The things I did during those ten months I was overseas added up to a lifetime of experience…I know being on my own at an early age… made me more self reliant.” Exactly how he got there, however, is a story unto itself.

Cartoon from Walt’s Notebook

Although World War I began for Europeans in 1914, America initially took little notice of it. In fact, the prewar U.S. Army was composed of a scattered handful of small regiments and the state-controlled National Guard militia. When the U.S. finally declared war on Germany in 1917, General John J. Pershing was given command of the American Expeditionary Force to fight overseas.

By the summer of 1918, the Germans were on every American’s mind, including Walt Disney’s. Living in Chicago where his father was involved with the O-Zell Jelly Company, Walt did not want to return to McKinley High School. He even had written to the principal, Mr. Cottingham, that he had been “disgusted” by his previous year there. Starting to dabble in the entertainment industry, Walt and his friend Russell Maas put a down payment on a movie camera and intended to begin making children’s films.

The war bug, however, had also taken hold of Walt. Two of his older brothers were already in the armed forces; Ray had been drafted into the army, and Roy was an enlistee in the navy. During one of Roy’s visits to Chicago from his Great Lakes posting, Walt met him at the train station and remarked later that his brother “looked swell in that sailor’s uniform.” This was very appealing to young Walt, who loved costumes his entire life and had already been in uniform himself as a high school cadet, postman, gateman, and train “butcher.” Furthermore, Roy’s letters were full of “blowing bugles and…patriotism,” Walt remembered. “I just had to get in there.” But Walt was only 16, and 17 was the minimum age for enlistment.

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