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Page 19 of 28 New Horizons: Walt's New Hobbies

Walt

At long last, Walt could turn his love
of trains into a hobby.

That fall Walt wrote to his sister Ruth to inquire as to whether her son -- named Ted, after his father ? might like a train set for Christmas. According to "Walt Disney's Railroad Story," an absorbing book about Walt's love affair with trains by Michael Broggie, "He made the same offer to his niece Marjorie Davis, for her son Geoffrey, and his brother Herbert's grandson, David Puder. Underscoring this gift suggestion was Walt's desire to create a railroad hobby for himself. If the hobby also provided an opportunity to share trains with kids in the family, so much the better."
     That Christmas he wrote Ruth again. "I bought myself a birthday-Christmas present," he proudly reported, "something I've wanted all my life -- an electric train. Being a girl, you probably can't understand how much I wanted one when I was a kid, but I've got one now, and what fun I'm having. I have it set up in one of the outer rooms adjoining my office, so I can play with it in my spare moments. It's a freight train with a whistle, and real smoke comes out of the smokestack -- there are switches, semaphores, station, and everything. It's just wonderful!" 
Walt had given up on polo a few years before -- after an accident that crushed four of his cervical vertebrae ? so he had time to throw himself into his new hobby. He built miniatures -- many of which complemented his trains ? that required hours of painstaking effort, and took great pride in his handiwork. "He'd come up to the dinner table," recalled Diane, and "bring this little piece of wood he had  [been working on], and sit there all through dinner and be so proud of it. He'd pass it around for inspection." It was a natural hobby for Walt. He had loved trains since his childhood, waiting for his Uncle Mike Martin, a railroad engineer, to emerge with bags of candy from the line that passed by Marceline. As an adult, Lilly remembered, "We'd go over and stand and watch the trains coming in. And after they'd go by he'd watch the vibrations on the tracks . . . that was recreation.". Walt and his miniatures

Walt spent many hours of painstaking
effort to build miniatures.

Walt and Ward

Walt and Ward pose as Wild West-Era train machinists during the Chicago Railroad Fair of 1948

In 1948 he took one of his animators, Ward Kimball, on a trip to the Chicago Railroad Fair. This was an ideal choice; Kimball was a railroad fan too, and he loved toys of all kinds. "In the mornings, we'd go down there and the locomotives would be worked on, getting greased and ready for the first performance," Kimball said. "They let us run them. We were like little kids, running famous locomotives like the Lafayette, the John Bull, and the Tom Thumb." Kimball wanted to go to hear jazz after the fair closed down for the day. But Walt insisted on taking long trips on the elevated trains with him. Kimball: "He'd be looking out the window and reliving his childhood." After they left the fair, the two men visited Greenfield Village in Michigan -- a "museum of buildings" founded by automobile pioneer Henry Ford. Unrecognized by the crowds, Walt and Kimball were happy tourists, taking home movies and enjoying the enormous collection of cottages, barns, and antique buildings that Ford had assembled there. Soon after arriving home, Walt wrote a memo to Dick Kelsey, a production designer at the studio. According to Broggie, "for the first time, Walt described a revolutionary idea he called 'Mickey Mouse Park,'" the first of many concepts that would ultimately lead to Disneyland." 
In the summer of 1949, Walt, Lilly, Diane, and Sharon took a memorable trip to Europe, where he was working on "Treasure Island" -- the studio's first all-live-action film. They enjoyed five weeks in England, three weeks in France and Switzerland, and a few days in Ireland. Diane recalled one afternoon when Walt returned to their Paris hotel room, heavy laden with boxes full of little mechanical toys -- tiny wind-up gadgets of all kinds. He set them going on the hotel room floor and stared with the intensity for which he was famous. "Look at that movement," he said, "with just a simple mechanism. Look at that." Was he beginning to think about Audio-Animatronics? It's impossible to know, of course. But given Walt's famous capacity for storing away information for years, it's not unlikely. The family all had a good time, and Walt particularly enjoyed revisiting some of the locations he had known when he was in the Red Cross. He even tried out his not considerable command of the French language on more than one occasion.
Walt with his daughters, Sharon and Diane, and actor Bobby Driscoll on the set of 'Treasure Island'

Walt with his daughters, Sharon and Diane, and actor Bobby Driscoll on the set of 'Treasure Island'.
 

 
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