Probably most people in Kansas City are aware that one of America’s best loved film makers spent much of his youth here in the city. What is probably less well known is the fact that one of his boyhood homes and the school he attended for six years before World War I are still standing although much altered.

Walter Elias Disney turns out to have been a Chicago native however. When he was four years old, the family moved to rural Marceline, Missouri, on the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad. In 1909, when he was seven, they moved into Kansas City. That fall Walt was enrolled at Thomas Hart Benton School located at 30th & Benton Boulevard, just over a block from the family home on 31st Street.

Walt’s father, Elias Disney, from whom the future animator received his middle name, brought the family to the big city because he had contracted for a paper route with the Kansas City Star. This newspaper included the Kansas City Times as the “Morning Kansas City Star,” according to its masthead. Elias’s contract called for six morning deliveries of the Times each week, six evening deliveries of the Star and, then, the Sunday morning edition of the Kansas City Star as well.

More to the point from Walt’s perspective, this meant that seven mornings a week he had to be out of bed at 3 a.m., and each weekday afternoon, he had to leave Benton School early in order to pick up papers with his father and brother Roy at the Star building at 18th & Grand. Because they did “hand” deliveries, the Disneys used pushcarts to carry the papers from the newspaper distribution center back to the upper middle class Santa Fe neighborhood they serviced with their deliveries. Elias insisted that papers had to be placed inside door openings or screens in order to prevent paper loss. It was drudgery beyond belief, at least in Walt’s mind.

The imaginative young man’s only respite were his hours at school each day where he loved to act and please his teachers. One, Miss Daisy Beck, made a lasting impression on him. Even though Walt was never much of an athlete, she insisted that he run in a track meet. The team won a medal which Walt treasured the rest of his days. When he returned in later years to Benton School after becoming a national figure in the movie business, he always recalled his admiration for “Miss Beck” and her insistence on his running even though he wasn’t very good.

On one occasion at the school, Walt was cast as a young Peter Pan [the English play had just been produced in England a few years earlier]. He recalled that his older brother Roy handled the ropes that permitted him to fly out over the audience. This worked well enough in rehearsal, but on the day the play was presented, Roy seems to have lost control of the ropes and Walt wound up in the third row. Instead of being mad, Walt reveled in the attention the flying stunt brought him among his fellow students.

The two Disney homes in Kansas City were both easily within walking distance of the school and of the entire Santa Fe neighborhood that served as the primary service area of Elias’s paper route. The Santa Fe neighborhood leapt into existence right at the turn of the century as a very comfortable set of houses on relatively sizeable lots located between Prospect and Indiana and from 27th to 31st Streets. Santa Fe is different from the surrounding neighborhoods in that its blocks run longways east and west rather than north and south in most of the rest of Kansas City.

Victor Bell and his wife Nannie Lockridge Bell had owned the land before it was subdivided to build these homes. Bell was an original partner with R. A. Long in the Long-Bell Lumber Company that once operated as the largest lumber company in the United States. By the time of the Disney’s presence in the area, the Bells were out of the lumber business and strictly engaged in land speculation and other investments. They did name two of the east-west streets in the neighborhood after themselves—Victor and Lockridge. The Disney homes were just south of the main part of Santa Fe Place. Their residences were much smaller and less pretentious.

Today, Benton School exists as D. A. Holmes Senior Residential Center after having been converted to D. A. Holmes School for African American children in 1953. The little house on Bellefontaine is much altered and in private hands. Current owners do, however, quietly acknowledge the history of their house with a small piece of Mickey Mouse yard art in the small fenced-in front lawn.

Walt Disney’s school days in Kansas City had a definite impact on his later life, if only because they provided him with a life experience that he long to escape. And oh, what an escape it was—Mickey Mouse, Snow White, Disneyland and World, and on, and on!

Dr. Bill Worley, Instructor in History, MCC-Blue River and Missouri Humanities Council Chautauqua portrayer of Walt Disney