Biography | Card Walker — The Westwood Hall He Left for a Disney Mailroom

People assume a Disney chief arrives already inside the studio gates.

Esmond Cardon Walker did not.

He was born in Rexburg, Idaho, on 9 January 1916, to Esmond and Violet Walker.

The family left Idaho for Los Angeles in 1924, when he was eight.

By 1938 he had finished at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Royce Hall, completed in 1929, was already the building that stood for the Westwood campus.

A senior walked its brick face on the way to a diploma.

Walker did not stay for a graduate year.

He went straight to Walt Disney's studio on Hyperion Avenue as a traffic boy.

The mailroom was the post Walt used to teach a new hire every department.

That choice looks romantic only in hindsight.

In 1938 it was a job carrying drawings from room to room.

The campus behind him was less than ten years old in Westwood.

The twin towers of Royce still face the quad a visitor can stand in today.

What changed is the other end of the 1938 walk.

The Hyperion lot is a supermarket.

The company Walker later ran sits in Burbank.

He would come back to this city as president, then chief executive, then chairman.

The diploma was the last ordinary credential in a career that then ran on studio corridors.

Rexburg is still the birthplace on the record.

Los Angeles is where the life bent.

Royce Hall is the pin because it is the building that marked the end of school and the start of the lot.

Photo: Beyond My Ken, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons