Finding Art and Margaret

Arsenal Tech and a Turning Point

At one of the country’s biggest high schools, Arsenal Tech, Bill “didn’t enroll in any art classes” and failed everything but physical education. A chance reunion with a grade-school classmate changed his life: “You’re really good. Art would be a breeze for you.” He added fine-art and commercial-art classes, the teachers were immediately impressed, and the momentum carried him through the rest of school. A football sketch ran in the 1933 yearbook, and he won a scholarship to the John Herron Art Institute.

John Herron Art Institute

Herron was “a wonderful new beginning in more ways than one.” In his very first class he found himself “staring at a girl in the front row,” Margaret Brunst, of Ladoga, Indiana. He kept smuggling “demons and tiny dragons” into his assignments until a mural instructor blew up: “I’ve had enough of your lousy monsters puking all over everything!!” Summers he painted at his Aunt Ella’s Kentucky farm. Among his subjects were old Eli and a mule named Josephine, names that would later headline his books.

Marriage and the Road to Disney

Bill and Margaret married in 1937, the same year he was hired by Disney. She proved to be his steadiest supporter through the long, difficult years of the studio, watching him walk the tightrope of Disney by day and books by night, sustaining the household through creative friction and professional uncertainty. When he finally resigned on his 49th birthday in 1964, she “was not the least bit surprised. After twenty-seven years it was time for a new beginning.”