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• 1 2021-04-16T04:01:26+00:00 Chapter 1 4 plain 2021-04-16T18:06:49+00:00 Newly married, penniless, and childless at the time, Disney created his trademark character, Mickey Mouse, on this trip.  Disney himself would be the first to mythologize his story, telling a detailed story of sketching a mouse: “He popped out of my mind onto a drawing pad 20 years ago on a train ride from Manhattan to Hollywood at a time when the business fortunes of my brother Roy and myself were at lowest ebb, and disaster seemed right around the corner,” Disney wrote in his 1948 essay “What Mickey Means to Me.”[1]  Later interviews further developed this concept of the “birth of Mickey,” describing Disney as “conceiving” and “laboring” the character. Disney’s daughter, Diane, recollects the creation of Mickey Mouse like the birth of an older brother: “It was on that long train ride that dad conceived of a new cartoon subject…and given his name by my mother.”[2] “Twenty years ago a man labored and brought forth a mouse and the civilized world still hasn’t stopped applauding the miracle,” gushed journalist Frank Nugent of the New York Times Magazine in 1947.  “Mickey Mouse is the goshdarndest single act of creation in the history of our civilization…His sovereignty is all but universal, yet he is as American as Kansas City; he was born on a westbound Pullman and his harried parent, Walt Disney, can’t for the life of him remember exactly when or where. It was “somewhere out of Chicago,” and there wasn’t a midwife on a train.”[3]