The ambience of small town America and the rural communities that surrounded little towns like Marceline formed a visual equivalent to many of Disney's films, from the early shorts to Mary Poppins (1964); its Kansas Avenue, the high street of the town, formed the basis of Disney's "Main Street USA" in Disneyland. To honor the link, Marceline changed the name Kansas Avenue to Main Street USA at a special ceremony in 1998.

Disney himself returned to Marceline in 1956 -- by train of course -— to dedicate Disney Park and to open the Walt Disney swimming pool. He came back again in 1960 to open the new Walt Disney School, dismissing his staff and telling his host Rush Johnson, the Mayor of Marceline, that he didn't need any retainers. "This is my home," he said. After his death the entire family returned to Marceline in 1968 to dedicate a commemorative stamp issued from the Marceline post office.

It is not surprising, therefore, that Marceline is proud of its boyhood son, and Disney was relaxed and happy on his visits; he was thinking in his last years about a small theme park to be called the Walt Disney Boyhood Farm, but was too ill to elaborate his plans and had to cancel later projected visits (2). Disney was a charismatic personality, grouchy and difficult with staff, defensive when threatened; he never forgot his early struggles and the way he had been betrayed by colleagues and associates on a number of occasions. Away from work he was another man; film and photographs taken at Marceline, and oral histories from those who remember him, portray a man at ease with himself and the world.

Return To Marceline, 1994
My first visit to Marceline was in 1994 after I had been doing some research in California for my book on Walt Disney. As an Englishman my experience of the States had been of her big cities, New York, Washington, Los Angeles. All were different experiences -- the intoxication of nervous, hectic New York, the sunny sprawl of Los Angeles, constipated with traffic, the grandiose opulence of Washington were all exciting cities, but rural America was a new experience. On a hot August day the Amtrak train (at that time it still made a scheduled stop at Marceline) drew up at the little depot. I was the only passenger to get off and the train pulled away, its mournful hooter reminiscent in my mind of so many other trains featured in Hollywood films over the years. Where to go? I knew only that this was Walt's boyhood home, as the depot noticeboard proudly announced:

WALT DISNEY'S
BOYHOOD HOME
MARCELINE
MO.
WELCOMES YOU

And that is what happened to me. In the midday sunshine I walked round the back of the station and found a mechanic who was fixing a car. I asked him if I was near the center of the town and he said, smilingly, that it was one block away. So into the then Kansas Avenue I walked, and felt that I was on the set of a film, a quiet town basking sleepily in the sunshine, with Murray's department store (where Mrs. Disney bought Walt his first farm overalls and where my wife would later buy me two pairs of splendid braces -- or suspenders as they are called in the U.S.). I went first to the newspaper office, and it was like walking into a Norman Rockwell painting -- you know, the one in that series "Norman Rockwell Visits..." The kindly young editor took me to the Disney sites and introduced me to Rush Johnson, who had been Mayor on Disney's visits and who became a great friend of Walt Disney. In turn Rush introduced me to his daughter Kaye Malins who had presented Disney with a bouquet of flowers when she was six, and who now lives in the much altered Disney farmhouse. Kaye, along with her enthusiastic family and colleagues, generated the steam needed to launch the celebrations to honor the 100th anniversary of Walt Disney's birth.

Everywhere I met with courtesy and a sturdy affection for the boyhood home of the town's famous son, and a pride in its own community -- as well as loyalty to Disney himself, for by this time the rebarbative biographies starting with Richard Schickel's were current.

After spending the night at the Lamplighter Motel (the sign displays Mickey tucked up in bed, his shorts hung up beside him, shoes on the floor and the zzz of slumber hovering over him), Kaye took me to the station and warned me that the train might be late. She gave me a bottle of water, and an apple, and supplied me with a chair so "I sat in the shade, listening to the sounds of Marceline around me -- children playing in Ripley park, cars bouncing over the level crossing, the crunch of cyclists' tires on gravel, men calling to each other across their back yards, a woman hanging out washing with the click of clothes pegs, a workman using a drill, bird calls, the wind in the leaves, peaceful until the train arrived an hour late, glittering in the sunshine and bellowing out its plaintiff siren." (3)

Notes

2. For more details about the Disney Boyhood Farm project see the author's Walt Disney and Europe (London: John Libbey, 1999) p. 245. There is also admirable comment on Disney and Marceline in Steven Watts' The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life (NY: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).

3. Author's diary, 27 August, 1994.