June 24 - Roy Oliver Disney

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On this day, in 1893, Roy Oliver Disney was born in Chicago, Illinois. The third son (behind Herb and Ray) of Elias and Flora Disney, Roy experienced much of the same childhood his younger brother Walt did, just as someone eight years older. After Walt was also born in Chicago, the family moved to a farm in Marceline, Missouri, where they welcomed the only sister in the bunch, Ruth. After struggling with farm life for a while (though the impact those years would have on Walt were incalculable), Elias moved the family again, this time to Kansas City, and started his two younger sons on the journey of a lifetime.

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One of the shared experiences Roy and Walt got to have together was providing the labor on a paper route their father managed to buy for the Kansas City Star in 1911. Roy was eighteen at the time and, twice a day, he and his ten year old brother delivered papers to nearly 2000 customers. Two hours in the morning, two more in the evening, no matter the season, no matter the weather. The work was miserably tiresome for the brothers, although it did seem to create a work ethic within them and a bond between them that lasted for the rest of their lives. Needless to say, once Roy graduated from Manual Training High School in 1912, he stopped slinging papers for a living and joined his older brother Ray at the First National Bank of Kansas City as a clerk.

 In 1917, when the United States was finally pulled into World War I, Roy signed up for the Navy and shipped out to win one for democracy. Unfortunately, he caught tuberculosis along the way and was discharged in 1919 to come home and recuperate. For health reasons, Roy relocated to a hospital in Los Angeles, California. He was now in the perfect place to help his little brother pick up the pieces when his bottom fell out just a few years later.

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When Laugh-O-Gram Studios, Walt's first business in Kansas City, went bankrupt in 1923, he took all his worldly possessions with him to live with an uncle in Southern California to regroup. After making a few brash claims, he was able to sell his idea for a series mixing animation and live action to an actual distributor, but he had a problem. Walt knew that he didn't have much of a head (or interest) in the day to day running of a business, hence having to declare bankruptcy. He also knew someone who did. With his new contract in hand, Walt visited Roy in the hospital and convinced him to become the money man in a new joint venture between the brothers. Still fairly weak, Roy checked himself out of the hospital the very next day and the Walt Disney Studio was born.

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It truly was the partnership of Roy and Walt that turned the studio from a dream into a multi-million dollar company. The two brothers were each other's opposite and compliment at the same time. Over the decades, a pattern formed. Walt would get some crazy idea in his head, like a feature length animated movie or a theme park, and dive headlong into it. Roy would try to reign Walt in, actually discourage him from following some scheme, do a lot of yelling and ultimately find a way to pay for everything. The arguments between them sometimes reached legendary proportions. But, in the end, they wholly trusted each other.

Not that there weren't a lot of really great times. In 1928, they bought adjacent lots and built houses together. They witnessed each other's weddings, went on vacation together, celebrated the birth of children (Roy E. Disney came along in 1930) and grieved together (like when their mother, Flora, passed away in 1938). By 1929, Walt had bought out Roy's share in the studio, so while they weren't technically partners anymore, they were lifelong equals. Roy was the company's first CEO, long before he was officially given that title in 1968. And when Walt passed away in December 1966, Roy was left to grieve alone for the first time in six and a half decades.

The irony of the last several years of Roy's life, is that he meant to spend them enjoying retirement. After all the hard work he'd put in keeping the Walt Disney Company financially solvent, he certainly deserved it. But after Walt's death, Roy felt an obligation to finish what the brothers had started in Florida. Roy had been there for the big press conference announcing Disney World just a few months earlier after all.  So he delayed his retirement and oversaw the biggest building project the company had ever undertaken. He insisted on one seemingly small change however. The Florida Project would officially be called Walt Disney World, a final tribute to his younger sibling. 

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When the dust had finally settled and the Magic Kingdom, complete with a handful of hotels, opened on October 1, 1971, Roy was on hand to officially dedicate everything, just as Walt had done at Disneyland sixteen years before. When all the pomp and ceremony was over, he quietly retired, handing the reigns of the company he'd help found over to the next generation of leadership. Unfortunately, he didn't get to enjoy his twilight years for very long. Whether the stress of building another theme park used up the last bit of life in him, or just the fact that he was eight years older than his little brother and had outlived him by several years, Roy passed away from an intracranial  hemorrhage on December 20, 1971. He was 78.

Roy is enshrined on windows on Main Street USA in both Disneyland and Walt Disney World for obvious reasons. A less well known tribute to him comes in the form of a stone lantern, currently part of the Japan pavilion at Epcot. When Walt Disney World opened, the company was starting negotiations to build a park in Japan. Emperor Hirohito personally presented Roy with the lantern as a symbol of future prosperity. It was on display at the Polynesian Resort for a decade before being relocated when Epcot opened. There isn't a plaque commemorating it that I know of, you just have to know what it is (and now you do). You can also find a life size statue of him, sitting on a bench with Minnie Mouse, in the Magic Kingdom's Town Square, at the opposite end of Main Street from the statue of Walt. Both men were responsible for making the magic happen. Without either one, the studio would have failed. Thankfully, they had each other and it didn't have to.