For most people, Walt Disney’s name evokes cartoons, castles and the sprawling theme parks in California and Florida. But for a group of students from Western Michigan University, understanding Disney’s imagination meant starting somewhere much smaller: a town of roughly 2,000 people in north-central Missouri.
Walt Disney spent just four years of his childhood in Marceline, Missouri.
But nearly a century after he left, traces of the small town can still be found in the worlds he created.
This summer, the Western Michigan students traveled across the country as part of “Walt’s Pilgrimage,” a nine-day course that follows the places that shaped Disney’s life. The course, taught by Christopher Tremblay, begins in Chicago and ends at Disneyland in Anaheim, California. Marceline is one of its most important stops.
“The part of the story that people don't know is the story of the man behind all of this,” Tremblay said. “That one creative genius took all of these ideas and made them into something.”
In Marceline, the students walk the same streets Disney once did, visit the buildings he knew and explore the town that would become one of the earliest sources of his creative inspiration.
Parts of the town appear, sometimes subtly, throughout his creations: the famous Main Street in Disneyland reflects Marceline’s very own Main Street U.S.A, the small-town streetscape Disney remembered from his childhood.
Numerous clock towers and storefronts associated with that small-town Disney charm are echoes of the community in Marceline. The town’s name appears on many surfaces throughout the Disney parks, from the title of various books in the Disneyland Starbucks to the Coca-Cola mural that is said to be inspired by a similar mural on the side of Marceline’s famous Zurcher Building.
The references can be easy to miss, but together they reveal how deeply the town stayed with Disney.
At Ma Vic’s Cafe, museum guides Mary Beth Switzer and volunteer Richard Switzer met the students over breakfast before leading them through Marceline. For the Switzers, the town’s connection to Disney is about more than recognizable buildings or attractions.
They say it is the atmosphere of Marceline — its sense of community and optimism — that became part of what Disney carried with him.
“It is a sense of community here that you don’t find everywhere,” Richard Switzer said. “And a lot of it goes right back to that Disney influence, and what we have to share with our own communities, but with also the rest of the people in the world.”
That sense of community has endured in Marceline, even as the town became associated with one of the most recognizable names in the world.
For the Switzers, that connection took on particular meaning after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Ten days before Marceline’s celebration of Disney’s 100th birthday in 2001, on a phone call with the Missouri Highway Patrol, Richard received news that the twin towers in New York City had been attacked.
As Americans searched for a sense of unity and comfort after the tragedy, Marceline’s community began asking what it could offer.
“We sat down as a group and said, ‘What would Walt do in this situation’?” Richard said. “And we decided to put on a show.”
About 30,000 people traveled to Marceline for the celebration that year.
Today, nearly 30,000 visitors still come to the town annually, many of them looking for the beginnings of a story that eventually reached millions of people around the world.
For Tremblay, the appeal of Marceline is not simply that Disney lived there. It is that the town offers a glimpse into the person who existed before the empire.
“Most people can associate Disney with happiness and escape ... and we need that more and more,” Tremblay said. “Just reminding people that this all came from one person's mind and how he was able to leverage his ideas for everyone to benefit for generations.”
The students begin to see that transformation as they walk through Marceline.
Katie Weiss, a sophomore at Western Michigan University, said seeing the town in person made Disney feel less like a cultural icon and more like the child who once lived there.
“He, at the end of the day, is a person just like we are all people,” Weiss said. “And anybody could be something if they really work hard for what they have and follow their passions.”
Mary Beth Switzer said the town did not give Disney a castle or a fantasyland. Instead, it gave him something much more ordinary; a place where streets, storefronts, trains and neighbors could become the raw material for an imagination that would eventually stretch far beyond Missouri.
Mary Beth hopes the students leave Marceline carrying some of that perspective with them.
“I think we hope the students sort of see Main Street and Marceline through Walt’s eyes, you know,” she said, “and see the magic and feel it, you know, and take it with them wherever they go.”
Disney left Marceline as a child. But he carried pieces of it with him, transforming the ordinary sights and feelings of a small Missouri town into worlds where generations of people could find a little magic of their own.
A century from now, perhaps these students will create Magic Kingdoms of their own.
