Charles Alfred Taliaferro was born in Montrose, Colorado on August 29, 1905 and moved with his family to Glendale, California in 1918. "I knew I was going to be a cartoonist," he told interviewer Jim Korkis in 1968. "I've always believed that if you want anything bad enough and you work hard enough for it, eventually you'll get it." In the middle of the Great Depression in 1931 he learned that the Walt Disney Studio had jobs available. "I went in and was hired on the spot: January 5, 1931," he recalled. At first he inked Floyd Gottfredson's Mickey Mouse newspaper strip. He then went on to draw the Silly Symphonies Sunday page, where on September 16, 1934 he first drew Donald Duck, the character with whom he would become forever associated.
