Biography | Walt Disney — The Second Floor on East 31st Where Laugh-O-Gram Went Broke

People talk about Disney as if Hollywood invented him.

The first company that carried his name sat on the second floor of the McConahay Building at 1127 East 31st Street, Kansas City, Missouri.

Nelle E. Peters designed the tapestry-brick block. It opened in 1922.

On 23 May 1922, at twenty, Walt incorporated Laugh-O-Gram Films with leftover assets from Iwerks-Disney Commercial Artists and money from local backers.

The suite ran five rooms on the west end of the second floor.

Ub Iwerks, Hugh Harman, Rudolf Ising and Friz Freleng worked in those rooms.

Pictorial Clubs contracted cartoons and paid little of what the contract promised.

A Kansas City dentist's film, Tommy Tucker's Tooth, brought in $500. That money went into Alice's Wonderland, a live-action and animation reel with four-year-old Virginia Davis.

Rent went unpaid. The studio was evicted and shifted around the corner to the Wirthman Building, which housed the Isis Theatre.

In 1923 the company entered federal bankruptcy. The case file is in the National Archives under Laugh-O-Gram Films.

Late that July Walt boarded the Santa Fe California Limited at Kansas City Union Station with an unfinished Alice reel.

The McConahay Building still stands at 31st and Forest.

Thank You, Walt Disney, Inc. has been restoring the shell as a studio and classroom, not a painted facade.

Photo: Mwkruse, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Portrait: Boy Scouts of America, 1946, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.