A Biography of One of My Heroes, Part 3
The part of Walt Disney's legacy that means the most to me.
Welcome to Part 3 of my biography of Walt Disney. Part 1 looked at his early life, while Part 2 centered on his career.
In this part, we’ll explore one particular aspect of Walt’s life that has particular importance for me.
We pick up in the aftermath of Walt’s death from cancer in December 1966:
A devastated company struggled to figure out how to operate after the loss of their founder and chief visionary. However, Roy stepped up to lead in his brother’s stead, and the company ushered a landmark bill through the Florida legislature granting Disney quasi-governmental autonomy to manage its own land. Walt Disney World opened October 5, 1971, and Roy passed away the following December.
We cannot talk about the life of Walt Disney without delving into the faith that guided him. Though Walt was not a churchgoing Christian in the sense that we think of them today, he did possess a faith in Jesus that guided him throughout his life and career.
Around the time of Walt’s birth, Elias and Flora Disney maintained a membership in the local Congregational Church in Chicago, which had erected a new building a couple of blocks away from the Disney home. The Disneys were devoted to the church, and Elias occasionally spoke from the pulpit.
Elias and Flora Disney struck up a friendship with the young pastor, Walter Parr, and his family. A longtime, unsubstantiated story goes that Flora Disney and Parr’s wife were pregnant around the same time, and the couples made a deal that, if they had sons, the couples would name each other’s sons after the fathers. Thus, on December 5, 1901, Elias and Flora named their son Walter Elias Disney. The Parrs did not hold up their end of the bargain right away, if such a bargain existed, because the following summer they named their son Charles Alexander Parr. However, they did have another son in May 1904, and they named him Walter Elias Parr.
The churchgoing continued for the Disney family until Elias purchased the paper route in Kansas City. The grueling demands of the route on Sundays precluded Walt and Roy from attending church, though their younger sister Ruth remembers having to attend Sunday School around the same time. This change in routine undoubtedly broke Walt of the habit of going to church regularly, as the demands of fame surely kept him from venturing to a church in his later years.
Nevertheless, Walt kept his faith even when he did not keep the habit of attending church. He once said, “I ask of myself, ‘Live a good Christian life.’ Towards that objective I bend every effort in shaping my personal, domestic, and professional activities and growth.”
He and Lillian made sure their girls grew up with a Christian foundation as well, but they allowed their daughters to find their own way. They made sure Diane and Sharon went to Sunday School and received an education in the Christian faith, but the girls chose which church they wanted to attend.
In the early 1960s, author Roland Gammon sought out various celebrities and dignitaries for their thoughts on prayer, which he compiled in the book Faith Is A Star. One of those famous faithful was Walt Disney, who contributed a short essay on prayer and the importance of religion in the daily life of Americans. Walt wrote:
In these days of world tensions, when the faith of men is being tested as never before, I am personally thankful that my parents taught me at a very early age to have a strong personal belief and reliance in the power of prayer for Divine inspiration. My people were members of the Congregational Church in our home town of Marceline, Missouri. It was there where I was first taught the efficacy of religion ... how it helps us immeasurably to meet the trial and stress of life and keeps us attuned to the Divine inspiration…
A prayer, it seems to me, implies a promise as well as a request; at the highest level, prayer not only is a supplication for strength and guidance, but also becomes an affirmation of life and thus a reverent praise of God.
Deeds rather than words express my concept of the part religion should play in everyday life. I have watched constantly that in our movie work the highest moral and spiritual standards are upheld, whether it deals with fable or with stories of living action…
Thus, whatever success I have had in bringing clean, informative entertainment to people of all ages, I attribute in great part to my Congregational upbringing and my lifelong habit of prayer. To me, today, at age sixty-one, all prayer, by the humble or highly placed, has one thing in common: supplication for strength and inspiration to carry on the best human impulses which should bind us together for a better world. Without such inspiration, we would rapidly deteriorate and finally perish. But in our troubled time, the right of men to think and worship as their conscience dictates is being sorely pressed. We can retain these privileges only by being constantly on guard and fighting off any encroachment on these precepts. To retreat from any of the principles handed down by our forefathers, who shed their blood for the ideals we still embrace, would be a complete victory for those who would destroy liberty and justice for the individual.
Though the films in the Disney canon rarely mention religion outright, Walt made sure from the start that the company’s product upheld Judeo-Christian values – including the concepts of faith and redemption. Walt even included Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish prayers at the dedication of Disneyland.
That’s where I ended the chapter. Who knows? I might pick up this topic again for a book or more articles, but it nice to get to share what I did write. Thanks for reading.
Image credit: Florida Development Commission, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons