Biography | Roy O. Disney — The Back Room on Kingswell Where He Left the Hospital for a Studio

On the night of 15 October 1923, Walt Disney walked into a veterans hospital with a telegram. Margaret J. Winkler, a New York distributor, had offered a contract for a series of Alice Comedies. Roy Oliver Disney was there recovering from tuberculosis after Navy service in the First World War. He signed himself out the next morning. 16 October 1923 is the date the Walt Disney Company still treats as its founding day. The work did not start in a purpose-built studio. It started in the back of Holly-Vermont Realty at 4651 Kingswell Avenue, two blocks from their uncle Robert's house, at ten dollars a month. Walt had already moved a camera into the space on 8 October. A curtain separated the brothers from the real-estate desks in front. Roy put in two hundred and fifty dollars. Walt put in forty. An uncle lent five hundred. Roy kept the books and ran the camera while Walt drew. By mid-February 1924 they had taken the storefront next door. The building is still there, on a commercial stretch of Los Feliz, later a copy shop and later still a skate shop with a Mickey poster in the window. Nothing about the facade tells you that a hospital discharge and a one-page distribution deal became an entertainment company. The pin is the lot at 4651, not a later Hyperion soundstage and not the Burbank lot Roy would one day run as chairman. This is the room he chose instead of another winter in a ward. Photo: Florida Development Commission, public domain, State Archives of Florida, via Wikimedia Commons