FROM: Squeak of the Week Published Fridays

Is a Senseless Census Sketch a Disney Discovery?

Has John Donaldson discovered the earliest example of Walt Disney artwork? Circa 1910? When Walt was merely eight? Possibly! Someone doodled on a page of the 1910 census, and doodled near Disney's entry in that census. Was it Walt, wonders John?

- John Stanley Donaldson, May 13, 2011

The family of Elias Disney would certainly have known Ray Bigger, given that he was a salesman at the Marceline Mercantile & Supply.

But now, as he stepped foot on their forty-five acre farm, it was not to show the latest thing in some sawing or sowing machine.

He was there to take the United States Federal 1910 Census.

Now, it would seem, in a small Missouri town, this would be a simple ciphering; only an add and subtract accounting, by aid of an old county cracker.

But, as the census need be serious, Ray Bigger sits, and sets to take his seventeenth survey; leather satchel searched, by an inquisitive eight year old.

A child known by the name of Walter.

The Disney family has practically needed to put little Walter on halter to keep him from drawing on everything. An enamored aunt has supplied him with plenty of cheap, Big Chief, pulp-paper pads; but those tablets are apparently not enough.

He had even stuck a stick into a barrel of fresh tar pitch to dribble a scribble to a whitewashed wall.

His parents were not early patrons of art.

Now, I have seen many census pages of record down through the ages; but never anything like this. A doodle is found near the Disney name; a male portrait, perhaps a city-slicker enumerator, of straw boater and celluloid collar, secreted underside.

Who else but the eight-year-old to have such a mischievous, talented hand?

What is, quite possibly, an example of early ability, by Walt, would make, for other reasons, a microfilm roll; and then wait.

Right from the get-go, his work would be preserved.

Sitting for centuries.

Is a senseless census sketch a Disney discovery?

So, what became of Ray Bigger whom, we will say, was the artist's subject?

Well, he never left Marceline, but turned from selling tillers to Ford Model Ts.

He died in November of 1928.

Just as, in New York City, Steamboat Willie was about to be screened.

John Stanley Donaldson, once the protege of Disney Legend Herb Ryman, is the author of Mr. Ryman's biography, Warp and Weft: Life Canvas of Herbert Ryman, which you can purchase directly from the author's site.

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