We all have roots in a 'dreaming tree'
Going back to where it all started for creative genius Walt Disney
My favorite Super Bowl commercial was Disney’s “You Made This Dream Come True.’’ It gave me chill bumps.
Disney is celebrating 100 years, and I’ve been around for two-thirds of that century. Watching the “Wonderful World of Disney” – second longest-running prime-time TV show in history – on Sunday nights was a staple of my childhood. There are six decades of personal memories packed in the 90-second celebration of storytelling.
Eight years ago, my son, Jake and I were traveling along Highway 36 in Missouri. We stopped at the Walt Disney Hometown Museum, located in an old railroad depot in the tiny town of Marceline (population 2,100).
Although Disney was born in Chicago, he considered Marceline his home. His family moved there when he was 4 years old, and the folks of Marceline raised and nurtured him during his formative boyhood years. He might not have been a native son, but he became the town’s favorite son.
(Hannibal, the hometown of Mark Twain, is 92 miles to the east on that same road, Highway 36. And the “Show Me” state has also given the world author Laura Ingles Wilder, playwright Tennessee Williams and poets T.S. Eliot, Maya Angelou and Sara Teasdale.)
In a letter Disney wrote in 1938 to the town’s newspaper, The Marceline News, he claimed, “More things of importance happened to me in Marceline than have happened since—or are likely to in the future.”
The town’s footprints followed him and its fingerprints guided him along his persevering path to becoming one of the 20th Century’s most important thinkers.
The town’s motto is “Where Walt Found the Magic.’’