Your Inner Mouseketeer
November 2021
by JOHN ROBINSONCould a tiny Midwest town founded with little fanfare by the Santa Fe Railroad have a main street that competes with the bright lights of Broadway, the music on Bourbon Street, the stars along Hollywood Boulevard?
Perhaps the most replicated street in the world runs through the middle of Marceline.
It’s nearly impossible to travel more than one block in Marceline without opening a page in the storybook of young Walt Disney’s life. The icons pop up everywhere, testament to Walt’s influence on the town, and the town’s influence on Walt.
Flash back to 1955: Walt Disney had long since moved away from Marceline and made his mouse tracks in the world. But a half century hadn’t dulled Disney’s memories of the happiest time of his life. That’s why Marceline’s main street inspired Walt’s blueprint for Main Street USA at Disneyland. For sure, the Magic Kingdom’s Main Street was a communal effort among Walt and his art directors, who jazzed it up with bells and whistles and walking photo-ops with life-size cartoon characters. But every element of Disney’s Marceline is represented at the theme parks. The train station. The locomotive. The gazebo. The picture show.
Walt described the essence of his Main Street vision: “Main Street is everyone’s hometown–the heart line of America. To tell the truth, more things of importance happened to me in Marceline than have happened since, or are likely to in the future.”
Marceline is where young Walt first discovered the world. When he wasn’t hanging out downtown in a vacant lot beside a giant wall painted with a Coca-Cola logo, he might be found in his back yard engaged in what he later called “belly botany.” Lying on his stomach in a field, he’d conduct an up-close study of ants and aphids, crickets and critters. Indeed, the descendants of Jiminy Cricket still live here.
Kaye Malins is a walking encyclopedia on Walt’s Marceline years. She literally dreams Disney, living in his boyhood home on the outskirts of town. His home is a Disney tale in itself. Kaye has taken steps to enhance living history at Walt’s boyhood home. The bedroom Walt and brother Roy shared remains unchanged from their childhood.
Behind the house sits the barn.
In typical Disney style, the townspeople raised a new barn in 2001 to replicate the structure where 8-year-old Walt got his showbiz start. It’s a faithful replica, with a swayback roof—like the one Mouseketeers remember on TV—a shrine on the spot where his imagination began.
From all over the world, pilgrims visit the new barn, scribbling thousands of notes, verses, and signatures in every language on the rough-hewn wood walls.
Somewhere, a belly botanist is beaming.
Follow John’s travels at JohnDrakeRobinson.com/blog.