He started as assistant animator at the Disney Studios in the mid-1940s. A telephone directory of July 25th 1946 shows that he shared room 1C-14 in the animation building in Burbank with Les Bierbaum and Fred Peters, next door to animators
Tom Massey,
Cliff Nordberg and
George Kreisl. Throughout his later career years, Maxfield's colleagues did not believe he had worked at Disney, as at the time he was not able to prove this.