I heard the news of Walt Disney's death on the car radio as my family and I were driving home after doing grocery and Christmas shopping. He was only 65 years old but since I was just 9 that seemed pretty old to me. You might think a young child would be disturbed by this news, especially coming so close to Christmas, but I don't recall being upset. Perhaps it was because I was excited by the weather forecast for the next day predicting a snowstorm for the Pittsburgh area. Alas, it didn't materialize but further east the Mid-Atlantic states got a good amount of snow.
3 days after Disney's death my attention shifted to Dr. Seuss whose animated holiday special How the Grinch Stole Christmas aired for the very first time on CBS. Like A Charlie Brown Christmas (which had its first telecast the year before) The Grinch would also become a holiday classic for the ages.
(The book Walt Disney: Triumph of the American Imagination by Neal Gabler is one of a number of in-depth biographies of Disney, but Gabler has the distinction of being the first writer to be given complete access to the Disney archives.)
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