A fond Walt Disney anecdote

Zorro was wildly popular with children in the 50s. Twenty years after, I had a friend who told me he had actually made a call to Walt Disney himself on his family’s phone and Disney actually took the call from the 8 year-old boy. My friend asked Walt if he could please have an autographed photo of Guy Williams, the actor who played Zorro. Walt asked for his name, so the salutation could be made personal. He asked for my friend’s address. Then he asked, “Do your parents know you are calling me?” They did not; and it was a long-distance weekday call from Massachusetts to California, a very big bill in those days. A few days later, my friend received a delivery addressed to Master Richard [Smith]. Inside was the photo and autograph signed “To my good friend, Richard [Smith].” No charge ever appeared on the family’s phone bill. Walt contacted the phone company and had the charge reversed to him.

I believe Walt Disney was a genius whose guiding light is the fact that “there’s hardly any adult in a child, but there’s a lot of child in every adult.” The reason the Disney empire flourishes is because it essentially OWNS all of our childhoods.

Aside from the reasons I presume obvious, I wanted to post this because it seems now to be popular to besmirch Walt‘s memory, to claim he was a Nazi sympathizer and other vile things. Being human, he was OF COURSE imperfect. He may have dumbed down some of the Classical symphonies in Fantasia, re-ordering the sequence of their movements. We nonetheless got FANTASIA. We got other things, like EPCOT Center and the Mickey Mouse Club. Speaking for myself, I
will take Walt and his legacy, warts and all.