Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, May 12, 1993                   TAG: 9305120268
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Ben Beagle
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

IN OUR WELL-I-NEVER DEPARTMENT TODAY WE FIND

A person who could invent all those cute little dwarfs with the cute little names doing something like that? Come on.

Not to mention a loveable elephant that could fly and the always lovely, always dumb Snow White. And that singing cricket and that lying wooden puppet.

The author of a new book also says Old Walt lived in an apartment decorated in red, pink and lavender.

The book by Marc Eliot is titled "Walt Disney: The Dark Prince of Hollywood."

Walt? Old gentle-speaking, loveable, creative Walt, a "dark prince"? I personally am now waiting for the sky to fall.

My gosh, boys, this is like finding out Mr. Rogers is an undercover agent for the federal drug agency.

(No. I don't have any idea of how Mr. Rogers' real apartment is decorated. Just don't get cute with me. OK?)

I think these revelations - including another that Walt drank a lot and worried because he couldn't find his birth certificate - tend to justify me somewhat.

Almost alone, for more than a half-century,I have been anti-Walt Disney. I thought the dwarfs were dweebs, and I didn't think Walt was quite the fatherly figure he always seemed to be.

My own mother and father lived in fear that people would find out their only son didn't like Walt Disney and their lives would be ruined.

They thought my employer might find out, call me in and say, "Bennie, you'll never work in this town again."

I know now they were on the right track. If word had gotten out, some of J. Edgar Hoover's people might have managed my permanent disappearance.

My own children hoped that I wouldn't go to PTA meetings. They were afraid that I might blurt out that I thought Disney had made a fortune by enticing innocent children to pay good parental money to see movies filled with cute animals.

This, of course, allowed me to avoid many PTA meetings, for which I have always been grateful to Old Walt. I did attend those meetings at which parents were bribed to attend so their child's class could get free ice cream for having the most parents present.

I am aware that revealing my feelings about Old Walt will not please a lot of people and they will hate me for it.

I don't care. Now I can write this screenplay I've been thinking about for years - in which Snow White is an undercover agent who shows lots of cleavage and has a .38 pistol taped to her thigh.