Did Walt sell helmets as war souvenirs?

[prberk]

O.K. I am asking my friends (and fellow Disney fan-atics) here to help me verify (or contradict) something a friend heard on a local radio station here. They had a quiz, and this was the question (and answer):

Question: He made money painting helmets with camouflage colors, banging them up to look battle-scarred and then selling them to Americans in search of realistic souvenirs. Who was he?

Answer: Walt Disney

Can anyone verify this claim? I have not ever heard it, although I know that he did lie about his young age to enlist for the first World War.

Thanks,
Paul

 

[Connor002]

Tough one... personally, I've never heard this before, and would question the station's source.

 

[unkadug]

Well after a quick search, I did find this :http://www.ku.edu/carrie/specoll/AFS/library/2-ww1/Disney.html

"Americans continued leaving France in the postwar months, and little work remained for the Red Cross motor pool. Disney was reassigned to a canteen at Neufchateau, near Nancy. During long hours of idleness, Walt got out his pad and pencil and began cartooning. He mailed cartoons to Life and Judge, America's two leading humor magazines; all were returned with polite, printed notes of rejection. Composing a letter to his high school magazine, he illustrated it with a self-portrait and impressions of soldiers and prisoners-of-war he had seen. He drew posters for the canteen and caricatures for the soldiers to send home, and he decorated the canvas top of his ambulance with an alluring female. Borrowing a Croix-de-Guerre from a French officer, he painted a replica of the medal on his jacket; others at the canteen admired it and paid him to do the same on their jackets. he teamed up with an enterprising Georgian who had established a souvenir industry. The Georgian realized the desire of homeward-bound doughboys to collect mementoes of the war-especially those soldiers who had seen no combat. When the troop trains stopped at Neufchateau to change engines, he went down the aisles selling German helmets he had collected on battlefields. One day he noticed that Walt had painted his footlocker in camouflage colors. "Hey, Diz, can you paint me a snipers helmet?" asked the entrepreneur. Walt obliged, and he aged the helmets with quick drying shellac, earning five francs apiece. The Georgian rubbed the helmets in the dirt, shot holes in them, attached hair to the jagged edges, and sold them on the troop trains at inflated prices.

Walt mailed the profits from his enterprise to his mother, along with half of his monthly salary of $52."

 

[Lightyear]

My son just had a Biography report, this interesting fact was in the Walt Bio in the school library.

 

[prberk]

Thanks, Unkadug. That source, the Bob Thomas WD Biography, looks pretty good. It also shows that the idea was really more of his friend's than his own -- but he does seem to have participated.

What an amazing little thing for some radio station to know, but not to be well-known among Disney-o-philes. Anyone else heard this before?

His time is the service really seemed to have shaped him, though, mostly in good and patriotic ways. But maybe also as an entrepreneur! :lookaroun

Paul

 

[Nemo14]

Actually there was a lot of that type of scheming and scamming going on at that time. Kind of surprising that he was a part of it, but considering the times, I guess it's probably understandable. :veryconfu

 

[prberk]

Actually there was a lot of that type of scheming and scamming going on at that time. Kind of surprising that he was a part of it, but considering the times, I guess it's probably understandable. :veryconfu

Yeah, especially at age 17-19. I think I probably might have painted a few helmets myself if asked....

 

[CaliSurfer182]

Actually there was a lot of that type of scheming and scamming going on at that time. Kind of surprising that he was a part of it, but considering the times, I guess it's probably understandable. :veryconfu

I don't know if you can really call it scheming and scamming. I mean these GI's were looking for a product, and Walt's associate supplied them with it. I mean it was a helmet, and the people who bought it obviously thought it to be an authentic battlefield relic. So it served its purpose.
Anyway the people who wanted these helmets weren't being to "real" themselves. I mean they were mostly GI's that hadn't seen battle, and that wanted to take something back home to impress the local folk with. Something that would prove that they were there, and that they had a part in the action.
So I am not quite sure who in this instance is really the scammer........

 

[mandyj85]

Wow, this is something I had never heard. Very interesting indeed...