So today, let's start here with a young Walt Disney.

As a boy from a relatively poor family in Kansas City,

Walt longed to connect with the larger cultural life of the United States.

He was drawn to movies, loved working as a news butch on passenger trains,

and frequented the local amusement park with his childhood friend,

William Rast. Years later, as an adult, Disney would recount the afternoons that he and Rast

ventured into Electric Park, an amusement area owned by a local brewery. When we first moved to Kansas

City, Walt told the reporter around 1910 and lived a

block and a half from the amusement park, I loved it and could get in for 10 cents. This statement was

mostly true, at least the part about going to Electric Park. But after Walt's death, Rast stepped forward

with a slightly different story, a story that Walt had asked him not to tell while he was alive.

True Rast admitted they frequented the local amusement park. Only as boys with limited funds, they never

had pocket change for admission. The first time when Disney asked Rast if he wanted to spend the

day at Electric Park, Rass told him, I have no money. After making sure the two boys were alone, Disney leaned close, his voice soft and

conspiratorial. We don't need money, he whispered. Together they walked to the park,

but Walt veered from the main gate toward a boulevard entrance around back where a fence enclosed the property.

They examined the area closely, wary of security guards, before Walt signaled for Rass

to follow him down a slope graded for runoff. At the bottom, Walt entered a drainage pipe that

ran beneath the street. On the other side, Rast recalled,

there was this big screen which some other kids had already opened. We just pushed it over and snuck in.

From there, the two boys spent the entire day in the park, neither of them paying so much as a cent for admission. Walt's sister Ruth

would later confirm this story in an interview with Disney archivist Dave Smith. Has Bill Rass told you,

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