Jeff Lenburg - Walter Lantz

Copyright 2014 by Jeff Lenburg

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In New York City, the birthplace of American animation, he helped pioneer a fledgling art form from the ground floor up into a booming industry. Before cartoons "talked," he brought favorites from the Sunday comic pages to life on the silver screen and produced some of animation's most memorable silent films. He even created, produced, and directed his own famous characters, establishing him as one of the great animators of his time. Then entering into a partnership that lasted nearly 60 years, one of the longest producer-studio relationships in the annals of show business, he produced and directed one of the earliest and most successful sound cartoon series, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, and created his own stable of stars: the lovable Andy Panda, Chilly Willy, Gabby Gator, and others. His most famous creation would endear him to generations of audiences in every language and around the world: the machine-gun laughing, off-the-charts, feathered friend Woody Woodpecker. That man made famous by a woodpecker was Walter Lantz.

Born on April 27, 1899, in New Rochelle, New York, Walter was the first child of Francesco "Frank" Paolo Lanza (given the surname of Lantz after immigrating to the United States) and the former Mary Gervasi (changed to the homogenized Jarvis to avoid prejudice). Walter's father was a tough-minded and practical man who ran his own butcher shop, and his mother was warm and loving and an accomplished pianist. Walter and his parents all lived under the same roof in his grandfather Michael Jarvis' elegant two-story home-a loud, boisterous, and loving Italian household. There Walter was surrounded by old world values, as well as music and song as his three uncles, his aunt, and his mother held jam sessions every Sunday, with neighbors joining in on the food, music, and free wine. "Sometimes we'd have fifty mothers and fathers and kids, and we'd have a heck of a time," Walter later wrote.

Walter's mother delivered a second son, Alfredo, and later gave birth to Walter's youngest brother, Michael, but she died two weeks after the birth, before Walter reached his teens. Her sudden passing sent shockwaves through the family. Grief-stricken, Frank took his two sons Walter and Alfredo to live with his brother Tony, and left baby Michael in the care of his sister-in-law Carrie. As if Walter's mother's death wasn't enough, after a severe bout of rheumatism caused severe pain and swelling in his knees, Frank was left incapacitated and unable to stand, walk, or move his legs. In 1911, at age 12, Walter learned the principles of business firsthand by working in a commissary with his disabled father as his boss, feeding 50 fellow countrymen who were working at a new stone quarry in Beckley, Connecticut.

Walter never let his boyhood responsibilities get in the way of pursuing his dreams. After hours at night he filled his time doing one of his favorite pastimes: drawing and copying early popular comic strips like The Yellow Kid, The Katzenjammer Kids, and Bringing Up Father. As he once recalled, "Some men never do learn what they want to do. I knew at 12. I wanted to be an artist."

In 1913, Walter took Zimmerman mail-order cartooning courses at the encouragement of his father who paid the hefty $30 course fee, not wanting to see his talented son toil away in a commissary in a stone mine his entire life. Those lessons later proved vital to Walter's success as an animator. After successfully completing Zimmernan's course, he took many others that were offered. As Walter added, "I took all there were."

A year after the stone quarry closed, Frank, Walter, and Alfredo moved back to New Rochelle and boarded with their uncle Tony. In 1914, at 15, Walter landed a job as "grease monkey" at a local garage, and there his months of correspondence art school training eventually paid off. He found much "humor" from working with other mechanics, which inspired him to create many comical doodles that he posted on the shop's bulletin board. His hilarious drawings caught the attention of many customers, including Fred Kafka, a former Yale graduate and ex-athlete-turned-successful contractor who brought his mustard-yellow Stutz Bearcat in to be serviced. Kafka was impressed not only by the diminutive artist's conscientiousness but also by his funny drawings. The goggled and scarf-laden Kafka, who would be responsible for setting young Walter on the path to fulfill his dreams, told him, "Walter, you're wasting your time in this garage. I'd like to pay your tuition to go to Art Students League in New York and get a really good art background."

Thanks to Kafka, every night at five o'clock after finishing work, Walter would quickly clean up, wolf down dinner, and take the commuter train into the city-a 45-minute trip one way-to attend George Bridgeman's anatomy class at the Art Students League on 57th Street six nights a week. His first night of class became a rude awakening as the eager and somewhat sheltered teen and his fellow students were taught how to draw "live nudes" of a "plump model" who sat naked on a stool the entire time as they rendered charcoal drawings of her. As Walter confessed to biographer Joe Adamson, "My charcoal pencil could hardly touch the paper."

After months of balancing such a demanding schedule, Walter almost gave up. Kafka once again intervened. That year, in 1914, he wrote a letter of introduction to an old Yale buddy at the New York American newspaper, then the daily morning edition of the New York Journal and both owned by legendary newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst. Kafka's friend hired Walter as an office boy at a starting salary of $7 a week. Even as young as he was, he had a respect for money and knew how to handle it. "I never had any difficulty getting along on $7 a week," he later said.

Leaving his family behind in New Rochelle, Walter moved to New York City, securing a bedbug-infested room at the YMCA at 125th Street for $2 a week. He made a decent enough wage to buy a delicious seven-course dinner at any number of Jewish, Italian, or Polish restaurants in Harlem for a mere 35 cents and still had ample "pocket change" leftover at the end of the week.

While the work he did wasn't "glamorous," Walter made the most of the opportunity and soon became a jack-of-all-trades. The well-groomed and energetic young teen made a good impression handling every task without fail, whether it was running copy and proofs to editors or cleaning the brushes of artists on staff. (Among his many other duties, Walter claimed he delivered "love letters" from Hearst to actress Marion Davies, the silent screen legend with whom Hearst carried on a romantic relationship for many years but never married.) Consequently he rubbed elbows with many notable artists and comic-strip artisans who worked for the paper: George Kerr and Willy Pogany, who became famous for the exquisite covers on the Sunday American Weekly; George McManus, the creator of Bringing Up Father; James Swinnerton, who fathered the strip Little Jimmy; Frederick Burr Opper, inventor of Happy Hooligan and Maude the Mule; Walter Hoban of