Stripper's Guide

Here's all the Fox Features advertising and editorial material that appeared in Editor & Publisher in the first quarter of 1940. No big surprises here except for the article claiming that Dick Briefer's Rex Dexter was being offered as a daily strip. I've never found this running anywhere. Have you?

Fox Names Albright (E&P, 1/27/40)
Victor S. Fox, president, Fox Feature Syndicate, New York, announced this week the appointment of H. W. Albright, formerly mid-Western manager for Western Newspaper Union, as manager of the Western division of FFS, with offices in Kansas City, Mo.

Mr. Albright will handle the sale and production for the Fox process color comic page weekly and all other FFS features, Mr. Fox said. He also announced that Mr. Albright and himself have completed arrangements with Orville S. McPherson, publisher, Kansas City (Mo.) Journal, to print the process color comic section for the Western territory in Kansas City, thus furnishing faster service to newspapers.

New Daily Strip (E&P, 2/3/40)
Fox Feature Syndicate announced this week that one of its Sunday features, "Rex Dexter of Mars," will be offered in daily strip form in five and six column sizes March 4. Author of the feature is Dick Briefer, who studied at the Art Students' League, New York, and who is now an art teacher in the Thomas Jefferson high school, New York.

February 10, 1940

February 24, 1940

March 9, 1940

March 30, 1940

Labels: News of Yore

Two good questions came in that I'd like to answer here. The first is from Charles Brubaker:

Allen, just a question. In your list of comic-strips, do you list comics that only run in alternative newsweeklies? Comics like "This Modern World," "Tom the Dancing Bug," and "Maakies."?

Good question, and one I've wrestled with over the years. The quick answer is no. The Stripper's Guide scope and methodology statement says that I am only indexing comic strips and panels that appear in mainstream daily to weekly newspapers, those seeking a general readership. Alternative papers usually fail that definition on two fronts.

First, many of them report very little news (choosing to focus more on entertainment, reviews, etc) and that, as far as I'm concerned, disqualifies them as newspapers.

Second, many alternative newspapers are designed to serve a very specific segment of the community - gay papers, environmentalist papers, religious papers, and so on. This one's more of a slippery slope situation, because I do list features that run in black papers and the socialist newspaper Daily Worker. These particular papers, in my opinion, were truly newspapers, though, because they did seek to cover general news, though with a particular perspective in mind. Typically, though, your average alternative paper of today doesn't try to report general news but only stories specific to the community they serve.

But when you come right down to it, my reasons for not listing 'alternative' strips is simply that to do so would enlarge the scope of my project to the point where it would be utterly ridiculous. All major cities, and plenty of smaller ones, have alternative newspapers of one sort or another, and many run not just familiar standards like Matt Groening and Ruben Bolling, but also lots of local talent, material cadged from the Internet, and so on. To try to index all this material would be a superhuman task, and of very questionable interest considering that a lot of what would be indexed is very clearly amateur and casual work.

All that being said, I do actually list a few of the most famous 'alternative' comic strips in the index. I make it clear in the accompanying notes that this is to be considered bonus material, and that they really don't qualify. They are there in recognition of the fact that they are the most important of their genre.

Arnold Wagner writes:

I thought Stripper's Guide Index subscriptions were long gone until I stumbled upon a page offering them, which raises the question, are you still offering subscriptions? Since you never mention the subscriptions on the blog I've been hesitant to mention them, which seems a shame since it remains one of the best sources in existence. Let me know the current status so I can quit worrying!

"One of" the best sources? Well, hmmph. I'll just ignore that qualifier. Anywho ... subscriptions haven't been available for a long time, and I swear I've deleted that page off the website before, and it just seems to keep coming back like a bad penny.

The deal was supposed to be that once I got through letter "Z" in the subscriptions, I'd put some finishing touches on the index and then offer it to publishers. Well, those finishing touches turned out to be huge quantities of additional research - comic strip history is like an onion - you can just keep peeling layers off and finding more. Since the subscription phase of the project I've nearly doubled the number of features documented - today the magic number stands at 6527.

So the subscription phase followed quickly by the publishing stage turned out to be a pipe dream, and research continues on today. However, I've made a new year's resolution that the Stripper's Guide index will definitely, positively, absolutely be peddled to publishers this year. And if it turns out that the publishing world has no use for my baby then the index will be self-published, preferably as an online database. You have my promise, then, that the Stripper's Guide Index will become generally available, in some form, before it's time to pop the bubbly to welcome in 2008.

And to D.D. Degg, who wrote with some very interesting data on Van Tine Features ... still looking over the source material you referenced, will respond when I get through it all.

I got back from my travels on December 25th, made the Christmas post below, had a lovely Christmas dinner with my family, and promptly got about the nastiest dose of food poisoning I've ever encountered. Three days later I am now finally mobile (barely) and continent. Yeah, I know, more information than you really wanted.

Anyway, no new post today, just wanted to apologize to all who have sent emails in the last week or so, or otherwise have outstanding business with me, that I haven't been ignoring you by choice but by necessity. I'll try to get back on track here in the next few days as my strength starts to return.

The premise of Ted's Object Spelling Lesson is simplicity itself, and I promise that if you try to read more than a couple at a sitting you'll find your eyes starting to get heavy, but I suppose in weekly doses it doesn't pall. Every strip (or at least everyone I've read) conforms to the exact same rythm of presenting young master Ted trying to learn his spelling, and the two words (always two) come to objective life and pull some sort of prank on him. The story always unfolds exactly the same way, with word #1 introduced in panel 1, coming to life in panel 2, word #2 introduced in panel 4, and so on. The whole thing is so mechanical that I think a decent programmer could write the code to spit out an infinite number of scripts for the strip.

However, it was not a proto-Univac but Fred Nankivel who was the author of this comic strip that appeared in the Philadelphia North American from 8/23/1908 to 5/30/1909. Nankivel kicked around the comic strip biz for about a decade, and this was his longest running feature. He went on to New York in the teens and did a strip each for Hearst and Pulitzer, but he was much more successful in the children's book illustration business, and is well-known in that genre.

Fred is often confused with Frank Nankivell, who is a different guy. I do recall reading somewhere that they were indeed related (brothers?) despite the different spelling of their surnames. Frank also dabbled in strips, but made his mark in newspaper and magazine illustration.

PS: This is my 400th blog post. Pardon me while I pat myself on the back. I hope I haven't been as boring and predictable as ol' Ted up above here. I'm going to be traveling for the next few days, so blog posts will go up if and when I get a chance. Be back for Christmas day for sure.

Labels: Obscurities

Labels: Bookshelf

Ed Kuekes main claim to fame is the comic strip Alice In Wonderland, which ran in 1934, and then seems to have been sold in reprints at least through 1938. That classic but short-lived strip was syndicated by United Feature. Kuekes also is credited with a daily panel titled Do You Believe that was syndicated 1955-62 by Lafave Syndicate, but I've never found a sample of that feature. Anyone?

Other than those syndicated titles, Kuekes only other strips were ones that he did for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Here we have Funny Fables, a delightfully drawn Sunday strip that was shoehorned in to a quarter page space in the PD's magazine section. It is known to have run in 1935, but I don't have specific dates yet as I'm still indexing the PD material from this era.

Labels: Obscurities

Here's a really short run strip from the Sunday Philadelphia North American. Polly, the Cap'n's Parrot ran from 3/29 to 5/24 in 1908. The cartoonist was George F. Payne, and he must not have thought much of this effort, because he only signed one or two of the strips -- our sample here is one of those he neglected to sign. This is Payne's only known comic strip credit. Kind of a shame that Payne didn't stick with it; his artwork shows a lot of promise. The gag on the other hand was the sort of thing that already had cobwebs on it in 1908.

I wonder if George was related to Charlie Payne, who had many long-running comic strips in Philadelphia papers before hitting the bigtime in New York with S'Matter, Pop.

Labels: Obscurities

Photo-Model Cartoons First Made in Baltimore (1/27/40)
Jack Lambert Believed to Be First To Practice New Art . . . Appeared in Evening Sun September, 1938
By Harry S. Sherwood (E&P, 1/27/40)

Baltimore, Jan. 22-A Baltimore sculptor's fancy for modelling in clay, for his own amusement, scenes
from the life about him, has developed a new form of newspaper cartoon first used by the Baltimore Evening Sun in September, 1938, and now being used by other newspapers. Jack Lambert, pupil of Herman MacNiel, is the sculptor. While national magazines have occasionally used the method to produce cover designs and for illustration, Mr. Lambert is the first to apply it to cartoons, and it is believed that he was the first to use it in any form.

The new technique involves first the modeling of the figure, or figures, of the cartoon and then the photographing of the figures. Mr. Lambert first used it for a small Baltimore magazine about 12 years ago. In its present form, he says it represents a combining of the sculptor's art with the photographers, the latter being very important.

Picture Has Depth
One of the marks which distinguish the new form is the depth the picture appears to have as contrasted with the flatness of the ordinary newspaper cartoon.

Asked to explain the origin of the form, Mr. Lambert told Editor & Publisher of it as follows:


"For years I have had the habit of modeling scenes suggested by newspaper reading. I did such things in idle moments for my own amusement, usually destroying the thing as soon as it was finished. I remember one of my first was a group representing a Negro youth under arrest and waiting with the policeman at a call box, with the figures of lookers-on about them.

"Another group represented a criminal getting the third degree; the criminal himself with two hard-boiled detectives bending over him.

"For a time I got some fun out of these groups without thinking of putting them to any special use. Of course caricature figures and busts are very old. The French had done some of this work and such figures are exhibited in the Modern Museum in New York.

Magazine Used First
"After awhile it occured to me that such things might be photographed. I did one which was reproduced in a photograph by a small, local magazine. It was a polo player skidding to a quick stop. It seemed to go well. I did another at the time of the repeal of Prohibition, for an advertisement. It represented a man broadcasting the news.

"Then I offered the idea for the newspaper photogravure. I failed to arouse the editors' enthusiasm.

"Finally I submitted the idea to Philip M. Wagner, editor of the Evening Sun, for use in newspaper cartoons He liked it at once. He contributed much to the success of the first we printed and his advice has been very helpful since. The first figures I made to be used in a cartoon concerned the primary fight of United States Senator Millard E. Tydings in Maryland in 1938, when President Roosevelt threw his influence towards Tydings' opponent, David J. Lewis. I tried repeatedly to get a group of several figures and finally threw all my designs away. At the end of the primary, when Tydings was successful, the Evening Sun printed a cartoon from my model showing Tydings saying 'Bring on your purge.' That was the first. Numbers have been printed since.

Photography Important
"Sculpting the figures is only a part of the cartoon. The photographing of the figures after they have been modelled is very important. If the light is not made to fall on the figures exactly as it should, you get a clouded effect lacking the sharpness that is desirable.

"Robert F. Kniesche, a staff photographer of the Evening Sun, has contributed much to this phase of the work. After the use of the cartoons started we at times adapted the modelling to photography, modelling the figures in such a way that they would take the light advantageously. We think we can improve this aspect of the cartoon in the future and are still experimenting with it.

"The figures are usually modelled so that the figure, or the group, is about 18 inches wide by 15 inches high Familiar modelling clay is used. At first we put the modelled work up against a black background. We found that inclined to make the picture as it finally appeared dark and obscure. Often we model the background in clay as a part of the figure or group to get a clearer effect. The figures are modelled only on the side presented to the camera, the back being flat and unfinished. We have found that usually we get our best effects from heavy relief.

Takes About 6 Hours
"It takes me about six hours to model a group when no likeness of an individual is involved, about two hours longer when a well known man, say Chamberlain, the British prime minister, is involved.

"Sometimes an idea occurs to me and I submit it to Mr. Wagner for his suggestions. Sometimes the idea is Mr. Wagner's."

Mr. Lambert has lived and worked in Baltimore for 20 years. He was born in New York and studied at the National Academy of Design and at the Society of Beaux Arts. He has exhibited his work at the National Academy of Design, at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and at the Baltimore Museum of Art.
His friends say he has an extraodin-ary gift for fixing in clay the figures that appear on the streets of every American city, reproducing them with striking fidelity to life.

[Allan's note: actually Mr. Wagner is not the first to use sculpted three-dimensional 'cartoons' in newspapers. Helena Dayton-Smith, for one, was doing this same sort of material in the 1910s.]

Labels: News of Yore

Here's a delightful continuing comic that appeared on the covers of Hearst's American Weekly Sunday magazine section in 1927. The poetry (which for some reason was pretty well the standard storytelling device on magazine covers) is by the ubiquitous Carolyn Wells, and the art is by Nell Brinkley. Brinkley is really at the height of her powers here on this series; her sometimes overly fussy drawing style is restrained and she lets the color do the job it's intended to do. I'm afraid that the scanning and reducing process has washed out the vivid and well-blended colors a bit - the central figure is truly breathtaking on the original.

Labels: Magazine Cover Comics

Here's a World Color Printing strip that ran in their Sunday section from January 1 through April 9 1911. Biograph Bill was one of a legion of strips about the movie-making business, but a pretty early example of the genre. The strip was unsigned throughout its run, as were quite a few World Color strips during this period. I think the reason for much of it is that cartoonists otherwise gainfully employed for major syndicates turned out these strips on the side, perhaps in violation of their contracts. The art on Biograph Bill is profession though unremarkable, and I doubt that anyone could pin down the creator based on the style.

Labels: Obscurities

Here's an early entry into what would become a popular genre for comic strips in the 1920s and 30s. The College Chumps follows the tanglings of a pair of college men who are endlessly competing with each other. The strip ran in the Philadelphia North American's comic section from 3/29 to 10/25/1908. It was signed by one George Henry, a gent with no other comic strip credits, but I suspect this just might have actually been Walter Bradford working under a pseudonym. Bradford was providing a lot of material to the North American, and it wasn't uncommon in those days for a paper to ask the artists to sign only one strip at a time so as not to make them look like a small-time outfit.

Labels: Obscurities

Being a big fan of H.T. Webster, I'm pleased to show off one of his earliest syndicated works. In 1903-04 Webbie contributed to the syndicated daily page of comics produced by the Chicago Daily News; mostly he did one-shots, like this one, but he did log in a few very short-lived series.

Although the gag in this strip is pretty thin, I think you'll agree that the artwork is very impressive for a 19-year old fledgling cartoonist. Who could have doubted his destiny as one of the greats of cartooning when he could produce material like this at such a young age.

According to Ron Goulart in Encyclopedia of American Comics, Webster produced sports cartoons out in Denver Colorado before he came back to Chicago looking for work. Has anyone seen any?

Charles W. Kahles' Foolish Fred was a short-lived series that ran in the C.J. Hirt-copyrighted version of the McClure Syndicate Sunday section. I think this series, which is perfectly serviceable, was a victim of Kahles' overwork. He was producing other Sunday strips for McClure, plus a lot of material for the New York World, and he was even producing yet more material for several of the Philadelphia papers around this time. Something had to give, and Foolish Fred, being a new addition to the Kahles oeuvre, was a logical candidate for being tossed. The series ran 9/25 - 11/6/1904.

Here's a bonus item, a Kahles Clarence The Cop from 1902:

Labels: Obscurities

Hello Americans, this is ersatz Paul Harvey ...

Murat Young was a stenographer and art student in Chicago in 1921 when he heard that the NEA syndicate in Cleveland was looking for a pretty girl strip, a new genre that would take off and practically define the newspaper cartooning of the 1920s. Murat wasted no time in working up The Affairs of Jane, and it was accepted by NEA, which offered Murat the less than princely wage of $22 per week to draw the strip.

Jane was a struggling actress in low-budget pictures, but she dreamed big, imagining herself one of the leading lights of the cinema. Vain, coquettish, and a bit crude, Jane may have been too realistic a flapper for the smalltown audience to which NEA catered. Murat was none too happy with his weekly paycheck, either, so there's no surprise that The Affairs of Jane was a short-lived strip. It began on Halloween in 1921, and ended on March 18 of the next year, a run of less than five months.

But Murat persevered, succeeding in placing another short-lived strip called Beautiful Bab, this one with the Bell Syndicate. That strip caught the eye of William Randolph Hearst, and when his eye is caught careers have a way of taking off. Murat was encouraged to submit a new strip to the Hearst organization, and eventually he succeeded with Dumb Dora. This was yet another flapper strip, and it did quite well in syndication. Perhaps it was helped out just a bit when Murat decided to drop his rather foreign sounding first name, going thereafter by a nickname.

Though Dumb Dora was doing well, Murat was the restless sort, and he developed one more strip. He stuck with his strength, pretty girls, and this strip, launched in 1930, became the most successful strip ever to appear in American newspapers. It was not an immediate success, though, until Murat had his flapper heroine get married to a bumbling fellow and settle down in marital bliss.

The girl's beau was Dagwood, and she, of course, was Blondie. And Murat, under the nickname Chic, became one of the most successful cartoonists of all time.

And that is the rest of the story. This is ersatz Paul Harvey ... good day!

EDIT 1/9/2018: As reported to me by Art Lortie, the actual start date of the strip is a week earlier, 10/24/1921. I had the start date based on the NEA archives at OSU, but apparently the first week of the strip had been pilfered from the books. That was a not too terribly uncommon occurrence with important and interesting strips like this.

I really get a kick out of early comic strips about cars. The cartoonist of 1902 was still coming up with an iconic cartoon image for the new transportation medium -- some cartoonists drew them essentially as cubes with the driver perched precariously on top, others hadn't figured out how to reduce the complexity of the automobile to a cartoon and drew them in almost blueprint detail.

George Herriman, in Professor Otto and his Auto, had the iconic form pretty much down pat here in 1902 -- four giant balloon tires with an inverted bathtub in the middle. This cartoon shorthand would stay pretty much the standard for decades, even though the actual vehicle designs varied widely in that time.

Professor Otto and his Auto roared to life in the New York World on March 30 1902, and lasted at least until December 28 of that year. Ken Barker's World index is spotty on 1903 dates, as the microfilm he was working with failed to include comic sections for a lot of 1903 Sundays. Does anyone know of a 1903 installment of this strip?

Labels: Obscurities

Here's one of those features that causes me fits for the Stripper's Guide index. Is it a cartoon panel, or is it just an illustrated newspaper column?

It's certainly set up like a panel cartoon, and it's hand-lettered like a cartoon panel, but it's a pretty fur stretch to call the illustrations cartoons, and the illustrations are really just that - they are not really an integral part of the storytelling.

My decision was that It's Only a Postage Stamp ... But did not qualify for the Stripper's Guide index. Which is a good thing, because the feature was never advertised in E&P, there's no syndicate credit on my samples, and all I have are a small stack of samples from 1935 which were run on a space available basis by the newspaper. Not exactly what you would call solid ground for an informative index entry.

Labels: Obscurities

Gustave Verbeck's first known comic strip series, pre-dating his classic The Upside-Downs of Little Lady Lovekins and Old Man Muffaroo, was Easy Papa. It was a rather undistinguished effort despite the delightfully kooky art. Easy Papa sported the standard issue pair of noisome kids playing pranks on an unflappable pater familias. (Sorry for the high-falutin' verbiage, but I'm running out of ways to say "Katzies rip-off").

Easy Papa ran 5/25/02 - 2/1/03 in the New York World. Not too curiously, it was missed by no one, including Maurice Horn who fails to list its existence in the World Encyclopedia of Comics, where he claims that Verbeck only penned three comic strip series. The number is actually five, but I'll leave the fifth as a mystery until some later date.

Oh, and if the above strip has you baffled, the dish called Welsh rabbit has nothing to do with our wascally friends of the animal world. It is actually a melted spiced cheese sauce served over toast, more properly called Welsh rarebit. This lower class delicacy was popular back in the day as a very inexpensive meal. The corruption of rarebit into rabbit was meant sardonically as an indicator that if you were eating this goop you probably couldn't afford the price of a proper supper with meat in it.

Labels: Obscurities

The best drawn comic strip of all time had an ignominious coda in 1947, when Winsor McCay's son took a last stab at revitalizing the Little Nemo franchise. In association with the Richardson Feature Service, Junior created 'new' Little Nemo comic strips by reformatting and recaptioning old panels from the original series.

The American comics section in 1947 would devote at best a tabloid page, or a half broadsheet page, to the feature, certainly a slap in the face to McCay's original glorious Sundays. Junior tried to rework his father's masterpieces, using just a few panels to tell a highly curtailed and simplified version of the story in the original strips. The result, while still breathtaking regardless of the maimed artwork, was a mere shadow, and an unfit tribute to the glory that was Little Nemo.

The strip didn't sell well, and it debuted on March 2 1947 in a mere handful of papers. The last known appearance was in the Long Island Press on December 28 of that year.

Labels: Obscurities

Kate Carew was quite the big-time New York celebrity in the first decades of the 20th century. In addition to her cartooning, she did a lot of feature writing for newspapers, and her byline was always displayed prominently (much as today's sample strip does). The multi-talented Carew specialized in feature stories about celebrities and bigwigs, usually accompanied with Art Nouveau-influenced caricatures.

Carew's only continuing comic strip series known to me is The Angel Child, though OSU also credits her with a 1903 strip titled Handy Andy which I've not seen (anyone have a sample or know where it ran?). The Angel Child was a fairly typical mischievous kid strip, with the minor deviation that the little girl always ended up getting praised for the unintended positive consequences of her pranks. The final panel always had the child being offered a treat by her parents, and our sample strip is particularly interesting because the treat tendered is a can of sardines -yum! No chocolate cake for me, thanks, I'd rather have the salted chum.

The Angel Child had a healthy run in the Sunday comic section of the New York World. The feature ran 4/27/1902 - 2/19/1905.

Here's an excellent page that has a capsule bio and interview with Carew.

Labels: Obscurities, Women Cartoonists

Here's another of the back page comics that were a regular feature of the Sunday Minneapolis Journal children's section. Tom Foley wrote and drew Buddy and his Wonderful Lamp October 9 1910 through February 19 1911.

In this first installment of the series, Buddy gets his magical lamp and manages to forget the genie's simple instructions in the space of one panel. I think Buddy may need to get on Ritalin...

Labels: Obscurities

If you can see this post, I guess the transfer to Blogger Beta was successful.

Over the past few months, since Google bought Blogger, there has been a lot of pressure on us Blogger accounts to switch to the new Google Blogger Beta interface. It's looking to me like it will soon become compulsory, so I'm going to go ahead and switch today.

I am assured that switching from Blogger to Blogger Beta will not result in my blog being lost, changed, or moved. But you know how these things go. If the blog disappears, look for me on strippersguide.com to learn where the blog has moved.

Wish me luck!

When George Herriman started working for the New York World, essentially his first steady cartooning job, Acrobatic Archie was the third continuing series that he created. It ran from April 13 1902 to January 25 1903.

I'll be perfectly honest and say that I see no hints of future greatness in this early work; in fact, I'm flabbergasted that the World would let something this badly drawn appear on the front page of their comic section. The drawing is sloppy and amateurish, the lettering is atrocious and the gags are pretty well standard kid strip fodder.

About the only positive I can come up with is that Herriman's early drawings are nothing if not lively. His figures all look like they have no bones -- their limbs twist and curl and stretch like they were made of rubber. This quality disappeared in his later work, replaced with a stiffness in his human bodies that was more acceptable to the cartooning standards of the time, but looks awfully dated today. Not surprising, then, that Herriman's masterpiece Krazy Kat starred animals, while Baron Bean and Us Husbands are interesting more as curiosities than great strips.

A note about the sample. I scanned an absolutely gorgeously preserved 1902 World Sunday section for this post, but for some reason my scanner managed to find every little imperfection and magnify it. Sorry it doesn't look better, folks.

Labels: Obscurities

Here's a real oddball. E.E. Edgar's Famous Fables was a self-syndicated newspaper column on weekdays, and a color comic page on Sundays. The feature tells amusing anecdotes about famous people - both current celebrities and historic personages. The daily version, as far as I can tell, was not illustrated. The Sunday sported cartoons by Homer Provence, whose style owed a lot to George Lichty.

Provence was pretty lazy about his cartoons - they really only relate to the anecdote, not the famous characters involved. I guess he couldn't be bothered to work up caricatures of the subjects, nor illustrate the times being discussed. Thus all of our subjects, be they William McKinley or Samuel Johnson all pretty much look like Senator Snort in variously colored suits.

The feature, at least the Sunday page, seems to have started sometime in 1947. The Chicago Sun-Times provides a likely end date of 9/17/1950; they were probably Mr. Edgar's biggest client, and their cancellation would have been a killing blow to the bottom line.

Labels: Obscurities

Here's a really neat batch of material from late 1939. Victor Fox, grand poobah of the Fox Features comic book company, decided that his comic book material would be an excellent addition to the nation's Sunday newspapers. He staged an extensive marketing campaign in Editor & Publisher, which I have gathered together here, and am presenting in chronological order.

Now as far as I know, all the Fox Features newspaper offerings actually started running in January 1940, but the marketing tries hard to give the impression that it was already in newspapers in 1939. However, a close reading of his impressive circulation claims reveals that he is talking about his comic book sales, not newspaper syndication. If anyone has evidence that any Fox material was running in newspapers prior to January 1940, I'm anxious to hear from you.

By the way, take the list of titles with a healthy dose of salt. The only titles that ended up appearing in newspaper syndication, as far as I have been able to document, are Blue Beetle, Doctor Fung, The Flame, The Green Mask, Patty O'Day, Rex Dexter of Mars, Secret Agent D-13, Spark Stevens of the Navy and Yarko the Great. All were Sunday only features, with the exception of Blue Beetle which also had a daily.

Fox Announces New Strips
10/14/39
Fox Feature Syndicate, New York, will release four daily adventure comic strips this month, all creations of V. S. Fox, editor, the syndicate informed the column this week. Added to the 30 features now distributed by FFS, the features will be called "The Green Mask," "Spark Stevens," "Patty O'Day," and "Secret Agent."




Fox Sees Adventure Comics in Ascendancy
By Stephen J. Monchak, 10/28/39
Comic strips change in style as do many other American newspaper circulation building features and to­day the trend is toward the adventure type of comic because of its wide ap­peal to newspaper readers from six to 60.
That's the firm opinion of Vincent S. Fox, president-editor, Fox Feature Syndicate, New York, who has some strong evidence in the form of circula­tion figures to prove his contention. This column saw some of them this week.

Entered Field Six Months Ago
Without fanfare or any great pub­licity, Mr. Fox, a newcomer to the syndicate field (he started six months ago), organized a group of adventure comic monthly magazines (Wonder-world, Mystery Men, Fantastic), sensed (it appears) what the public wanted, and bringing to play his knowledge of retail and merchandising methods ac­quired in years of bank underwriting on Wall Street, built the group's net circulation where it today stands over a million monthly.

This is a neat 400% increase, using as the base the 190,000 figure chalked up by the first issue (May, 1939) of Wonderworld. Mr. Fox created Mys­tery Men in August and the first issue of Fantastic now is on the stands although it is the December issue. Mr. Fox explained that comic monthlies work two months ahead.

Now, believing that his circulation figures are proof of their popularity, Mr. Fox now is offering the more popular of his features to newspapers.

Strips, Supplements Available
He told the column FFS has pre­pared for release Dec. 3 a four-page, eight-comic ready-print Sunday sup­plement in four colors. The comics include: "The Green Mask," "Patty O'Day," "Dr. Fung," "Yarko the Great," "Rex Dexters of Mars," "The Golden Knight," "Tex Maxon," and "Spark Stevens," all features being polled by FFS for reader popularity. These can be serviced in black-and-white, he added. In addition, Mr. Fox said, FFS will release this month to newspapers four daily comic strips, "The Green Mask," "Spark Stevens," "The Blue Beetle," and "D-13 Secret Agent." These are black-and-white. Of FFS's 70 comic features, the column was told, more than 50 are available to newspapers.

The FFS chief, who entered the publishing business in 1936 with a monthly, World Astrology, worked in Wall Street for 20 years. Born in Not­tingham, England, he came to this country as a child and has always lived in New York. He attended Brown University for one year.

A human dynamo, he supervises all steps in creation, production, market­ing, and distribution of the FFS con­trolled features. He has a unique ability to create strips and sequences. Directly responsible to him are a staff of editors and 40 artists. From child­hood, he always wanted to be a pub­lisher. It appears that he has arrive
d.




Offers Feature to Papers
11/11/39
Fox Feature Syndicate last week announced that "The Blue Beetle" is now available for immediate release in five and six column strips together with a Sunday half-page in four-color and black-and-white. The feature is six months old and is one of FFS's tested strips. It is now being made available for the first time to newspapers.

Servicing New Feature
11/18/39
Fox Feature Syndicate this week announced they are now distributing on exclusive franchises and territorial rights, the new feature in half-pages for Sunday only of "Samson," by Alex Boon. The daily feature, now being produced, will be ready in January 1940., in five and six column strips, it was said by FFS.

Adding "Blue Beetle"
11/25/39
The Fox Feature Syndicate has announced that due to requests from various newspapers throughout the United States, it has agreed to include the Blue Beetle Feature in its comic supplement, Comic Pages Weekly.

Labels: News of Yore

AP Announces New Panel
E&P, 12/23/39

The AP Feature Service will start off the new year with a new comics panel, "The Doolittles," by Quin Hall, M. J. Wing, editor, announced this week. It will make its first appearance in more than 90 newspapers on January 1, he said.

According to the Feature Service, "The Doolittles will be a cartoon history of a typical American family. Rather than a collection of nostalgic tintypes from the old family album, the feature will be a candid cartoon folio of the doings of modern middle-class people."

Hall, creator of the new AP feature, is a native of Lacon, Ill., where, as a youth, he had his first taste of newspapering as junior reporter and typesetter on the local weekly, after high school hours. Following an absence of two years, during which he studied and shoe clerked, he got into the newspaper business again on the Oklahoma City Times. Two years after he joined the paper he was made sports editor.

After further study at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts he joined the art staff of the Chicago Daily News, and thereafter did sports and political cartoons and a wide variety of feature assignments in many parts of the country.


"Tode Tuttle" to Make Debut
E&P, 12/9/39

A new cartoonist, Ralph A. Kemp, Morristown, Ind., free-lance, will be introduced to the national syndicate field Dec. 11 when his daily one-column panel, "Tode Tuttle," lovable old character who will express the homely humor of the Indiana Hoosiers, will be serviced by the Jones Syndicate, New York, Paul Jones, president, told the column this week.

Promoted only with the past fortnight, Mr. Jones said, the feature already has been bought by the Kansas City Star, Detroit News, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Omaha World-Herald, Philadelphia Record, Indianapolis News and Peoria (Ill.) Star, and others. Kemp, Mr. Jones said, has signed a 10-year contract with the Jones Syndicate.

(see a sample of Tode Tuttle at this blog entry)

Pearson-Allen Comic Strip
E&P, 12/30/39

A new daily comic strip based on the adventures of a Washington correspondent, created by the "Washington Merry-Go-Round" columnists, Drew Pearson and Robert S. Allen, was announced this week by United Feature Syndicate. The new feature, bearing the title, "Hap Hazard," is expected to be released Feb. 1. It will be drawn by Jack Sparling, a former staff cartoonist for the Washington (D. C.) Herald, his first comic strip effort.

UFS describes the new feature as a humorous continuity strip about a fictional young newspaperman amid the glamor and comedy of the nation's capital, where he meets real, factual individuals whose names make newspaper headlines. It will be the first comic strip to use the actual names and pictures of famous persons as regular characters, according to UFS.

Pearson and Allen conceived the idea for "Hap Hazard" as an outlet for numerous stories they are unable to get into their daily column of Washington news. In addition, they both have had dramatic careers, and long have felt the itch to fictionize some of their own experiences.

(note from Allan - the title of the strip was changed to Hap Hopper before the initial release, which was on January 29, not February 1)

Bell Acquires "Old Bill"
E&P, 12/9/39

Captain Bruce Bairnsfather, creator of the world-famous comic character, "Old Bill," during the World War, will do a new series of Old Bill and a new character, "Young Bill," his son, Bell Syndicate announced this week. Today, as in 1914, Bell again has acquired the American syndicate rights for the feature. The feature, for release once a week, will be a three-column panel. The locale for its action will be divided between London, where Old Bill is an Air Raid Patrol warden (he's now too old to fight) and "somewhere in France," where Young Bill is with His Majesty's Expeditionary Forces.

Labels: News of Yore

Bell Strip in Sunday Debut
Editor & Publisher, 11/10/39

"Flyin' Jenny," created and drawn for Bell Syndicate by Russell Keaton, made its initial appearance as a Sunday half-page in colors on Nov. 5. The comic had been appearing in newspapers as a daily strip since Oct. 2. The feature is a new type of adventure comic, and centers around a pretty girl pilot. The Sunday continuity, Bell announced, will be different from the strip, its theme being Jenny's adventures in trying to crash the national air races.

Keaton, Jenny's mentor, has been drawing for newspapers for the last 11 years, and formerly did the art work on the "Skyroads" strip, and the "Buck Rogers" page. He is a graduate of the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, and has been drawing since he was 18. A resident of Corinth, Miss., Keaton spends a great deal of his time around airports and pilots and is himself a student pilot, needing but a few more hours of solo flying for his pilot's license.

The column is supplied in five or six columns for daily release. To Keaton's great satisfaction, it is also appearing in his hometown paper, the Corinth Corinthian.

Hayward's Strip to Continue
Editor & Publisher, 8/5/1939

George F. Kearney, president of the Philadelphia Public Ledger, and manager of the Ledger Syndicate, announced this week that the syndicate's comic strip, "Somebody's Stenog," created by Alfred E. Hayward, who died July 25, would be continued, except for the Sunday page. The strip will be drawn by Sam Nichols, who had been doing the strip for daily publication while the late creator had been ill. Mr. Hayward, however, had continued to do a Sunday page during his illness.

Obituaries - George W. Rehse
E&P 12/9/1939

George W. Rehse, 70, retired newspaper cartoonist, was found shot to death in his automobile Dec. 2 at Burbank, Cal. A gun and note telling of ill health and grief over the death of his wife were besides the body. After working in Minneapolis, he became political cartoonist for the old New York Evening Mail. He later joined the Morning World.
(note from Allan - this obit is the only time I ever found a use of Rehse's first name - even his reprint book refers to him only by his surname)

Obituaries - Walter C. Hoban
E&P 12/2/39

Walter C. Hoban, 49, creator of "Jerry on the Job'" and widely known cartoonist, died Nov. 22 in New York. He started on the old Philadelphia North American and had his first cartoon printed when the sports desk accepted a baseball game sketch in lieu 'of a picture. He then joined the New York Journal and then King Features Syndicate. Besides the "Jerry on the Job" cartoon which he created in 1913, Hoban also drew the exploits of "Soldier Speerens U.S.A.," "Jerry McJunk" and a number of other comic characters. He continued his work during the World War in which he served as a second lieutenant, drawing a weekly cartoon. His wife, two children and four sisters survive.

Labels: News of Yore

U.S.M.C. Honors Character
Editor & Publisher, 10/7/39

"Sergeant Stony Craig," the hard-boiled leatherneck of the comics, has been recognized by the U. S. Marine Corps, and is now the proud possessor of a warrant appointing him an honorary Gunnery Sergeant. The appointment was issued to Frank H. Rentfrow, creator of the character, with Don Dickson, for Bell Syndicate.

Cartoon Feature
Editor & Publisher, 11/25/39
A new feature that is winning its spurs in Colorado is "Colorful Colorado," a two-column cartoon about things that make Colorado one of the most colorful states in the Union. It was started last June by Ralph C.Taylor, city editor of the Pueblo Star-Journal, and Jolan Truan, artist on the same newspaper. Now many newspapers of the state are using it regularly. "Colorful Colorado" deals with history, scenery, personalities, incidents - anything interesting and factual that has a Colorado angle. Usually three things are featured in each cartoon.

(From Allan - Has anyone seen this feature, and can supply a sample?)


"Sossages" in the News
Editor & Publisher, 11/4/39

J. N. (Ding) Darling, veteran New York Herald-Tribune syndicate cartoonist, is a rugged individualist, and if he wants to pay $1.50 a pound for sausage that's his inalienable right. So he contends and now the U. S. Department of Agriculture agrees, because Mr. Darling last week had a run-in with the department about the matter and came out a satisfied winner. It happened as follows:

Because of a change in the meat inspection law, the department had revoked the license of Chet Shafer, president of the Big-Link No-Kink Pure Pork Old Fashioned Pennsylvania Dutch-Hickory Smoked Sossage Co., of Three Rivers, Mich. Shafer, correspondent for the Detroit News and other papers, and grand diapason of the Guild of Former Pipe Organ Pumpers, owns a recipe for delicious sausage, which he makes for his friends each winter. He was forbidden to ship his sausage in interstate commerce.

Waymack Also Protested
Deprived of their sausage, an annual winter event, Cartoonist Darling, W. W. Waymack, editor of the editorial page of the Des Moines Register & Tribune, and Paul Hollister, vice-president of R. H. Macy & Co., New York department store, and certain other prominent citizens, protested to the department. Wrote Mr. Darling:

"Wars have been fought and thrones toppled over issues of much less consequence and I am heading an individual rebellion whether anyone joins me or not."

"After all, this isn't regulating commerce; it is regimenting art," Editor Waymack agreed.

The cartoonist wanted to hire Shafer to go into the sausage business, and Mr. Waymack wanted to form a corporation. However, these steps weren't necessary, for Dr. E. C. Joss, of the department, reconsidered, and notified Shafer he could keep his permit, and all concerned are satisfied.

Labels: News of Yore

Here's a sample from one of the many continuing features that ran on the back page of the Minneapolis Journal's children's section. The Journal initially used this section as a substitute for a Sunday comics section, and it was popular enough that it continued running long after a proper Sunday comics section was finally added to the paper in the late oughts.

The City Fairies series ran July 17 through October 2 1910, with dreadful poetry by Constance Wright accompanying delightful drawings by Tom Foley. This series was the only time that Wright contributed to the page, whereas Tom Foley was the artist on many of their series over the years.

I had to replace the original typefont on the page because for some reason they used a really tiny point size, much too small to have any chance of legibility at screen resolution - sorry but my replacement is not all that much better at low resolution.

Labels: Obscurities

Gould Renews with Tribune-News Syndicate
Editor & Publisher, 11/25/39

Chester Gould, creator of the detective feature strip, "Dick Tracy," the modem Sherlock Holmes, celebrated his eighth
anniversary with the Chicago Tribune - New York News Syndicate by signing a five year renewal contract with the syndicate last week.

Back in 1930, Chet Gould decided there was a field for a hard-hitting, honest police character who "gets his man." His conception of such a character was the outgrowth of the "roaring twenties," during which law and order were at a comparatively low ebb.

Now in More Than 160 Papers
Originally planned as "Plain Clothes Tracy," the strip title was changed to "Dick Tracy" when it was submitted to Capt. Joseph Medill Patterson, publisher, New York News, in 1931. Capt. Patterson, who saw great possibilities in such a strip, liked it and hired Gould. The strip was launched in the Chicago Tribune and New York News as a Sunday color comic on Oct. 4, 1931. A daily continuity was added the following week. Today, "Tracy" appears in more than 160 newspapers in the U. S. and abroad.

Among Tracy's many devoted followers are the country's leading law enforcement agents, including J. Edgar Hoover, head of FBI; Col. Homer Garrison, director of the Texas State Police; and Eugene M. McSweeney, commissioner of public safety for Massachusetts and in charge of state police. The strip has been voted "tops" in several newspaper polls and reader interest surveys and has appeared as a movie serial, along with being dramatized over the air. Dick Tracy is also one of the few cartoon strips ever to appear on exhibition in a major art gallery.

Keeping Tracy a human character, true to his environment, is Cartoonist Gould's chief problem. He has often placed his hero in many a realistic police situation. For this Gould has been severely criticized sometimes by readers who like their heroes meek in muscle but strong in mind. Gould answers his critics by explaining that gun play and brawls are necessary in a police strip. "Few police officers in real life go unarmed or escape physical encounters with criminals in their fight against crime," said Mr. Gould in a recent interview with Editor & Publisher.

As to any unfavorable influence on the juvenile mind, Mr. Gould recalls that kids played "cops and robbers" long before a police cartoon feature was ever thought of. Primarily a symbol of law and order, Dick Tracy is not the type of officer to play ostrich and at the same time help to solve the crime. Every episode is designed to show how the criminal weaves his own web of defeat and eventually shows himself up to the reader for what he really is - a menace to society.

Stresses Action, Pursuit, Deduction
"I try to keep the detective deduction angle the main theme of underlying interest," explained Gould. "Pursuit, deduction and action are the three ingredients that I stress in the various episodes dealing with Tracy's adventures."
From a technical standpoint, Gould endeavors to show by pictures rather than words what actually happens. By keeping his drawings as purely pictorial as possible, Gould is able to reduce the amount of space ordinarily given over to "balloons" in comicstrips.

He is as enthusiastic as ever about Dick Tracy, although he admits that sometimes he has to scratch around considerably for new ideas. Like so many other Tribune-News syndicate cartoonists, Chet Gould credits Captain Patterson as being the guiding genius behind his work. His encouragement and ideas for new situations have helped him tremendously, Gould stated.

Born in Pawnee, Okla.
As for Dick's creator - Chester Gould was bom and schooled in Pawnee, Okla. While attending high school, he took a correspondence course in cartooning and later landed a berth on the old Tulsa Democrat. He quit that job a few months later and spent the next two years at Oklahoma A. & M. College. In 1921, Chet returned to art, becoming sports cartoonist for the Oklahoma City Daily Oklahoman. Another young cartoonist on the same paper at that time was George Clark, creator of "The Neighbors" and "The Ripples." Neither dreamed they would be working for the same syndicate 18 years later.

Gould's next move was to Chicago. After graduating from Northwestern University in 1923, he enrolled for night courses at the Chicago Art Institute. He worked for the Chicago Evening American prior to conceiving his idea for drawing Dick Tracy.

He is married and lives with his family on a farm near Woodstock, Ill. His hobby is criminology. Most of his spare time is spent with Chicago police, touring the FBI offices in Washington, D. C., studying crime detection at Northwestern's crime laboratory, or visiting mid-western penitentiaries.

Labels: News of Yore

While Thornton Burgess was never directly involved in newspaper comic strips, his most famous creation, Peter Rabbit, was a long-running comic strip. His own fame came from writing newspaper text stories about his woodland characters. These daily newspaper columns were illustrated by Harrison Cady, who was also responsible for drawing the Sunday strip version until 1948.


Nature Stories Won Fame and Fortune for Thornton Burgess

Creator of Peter Rabbit and Farmer Brown's Boy Has Entertained Millions of Children ... Writing Career Covers 27 Years

By Marlen E. Pew, Jr.
Editor & Publisher, 12/2/1939

The newspaper business has a way of producing specialists, those experts on politics, medicine, science, music and the arts, but among all of them there is none more valuable than the champion of entertaining children. Perhaps the greatest journalistic exponent of this specialty is Thornton Waldo Burgess whose daily writings appear in more than 40 newspapers through the New York Herald Tribune Syndicate. When he finishes his 10,000th story, he says, he will retire.

For the last 27 years he has been pounding out dramatized facts of nature for the enjoyment and education of children. In all he has written 8,725 stories for his newspapers and has had 80 books published which together have sold more than 5,000,000 copies.

Makes Home in Springfield, Mass.
Needless to say his prolific production has brought him fame and fortune. He is unparalleled as a writer of nature stories for children. Yet, Thornton Burgess is a quiet and unpretentious man, living comfortably in a modest, typically New England home in the park section of Springfield, Mass.

Thornton Burgess was born in the little Cape Cod town of Sandwich, in Barn Stable county, Mass., on Jan. 14, 1874. He was still a baby in his mother's arms when his father died. Consequently, when he was old enough he had to go to work. Because he could not afford to join in with the other boys at their games, he spent what little idle time he had walking through the woods and fields. He became so fascinated by nature that he decided to make it his life's study. On Dec. 1, 1895, he heard that the Phelps Publishing Company in Springfield needed an office boy and he took the job. In the 12 years that followed, he worked hard and made rapid progress. He learned how to write and how to edit copy. He finally became an editor of Good Housekeeping Magazine. Meanwhile, he had not given up his interest in nature, but continued it with ever increasing eagerness.

Eventually the inevitable happened; he merged his two strongest interests and he was successful almost overnight.

Told Stories to Son
Like so many things which prove to be the most important, the writing of nature stories just came to Burgess naturally, unconsciously, like flying to a bird. He had married in 1905 and was the father of a son. In the evenings he held his son on his lap and told him of the fascinations and mysteries of nature. When the boy went to Chicago to visit his grandmother, each night after work Burgess would sit down and write one of these stories to be mailed to his child. All the stories were based on "what Old Mother West Wind had told him."Fortunately, the boy's mother kept the stories and later returned them in a batch to Mr. Burgess.

One day he showed them to a friend in the advertising business who read them with great interest and asked if he could borrow them for a few days. In less than a week, Mr. Burgess received a letter from Little, Brown & Co., publishers, asking for all the stories he had written on nature, with a view toward making them into a book.

With a feeling of skepticism, he mailed the 14 stories he had written. These, too, were accepted and the publisher asked for two more to complete the volume. "I went up to my room," he recalls, "and wrote the remaining stories that evening and sent them off. I felt as though I owned the world."

The book, "Old Mother West Wind," hit the bookstores in 1910 and was an immediate success. The publisher clamored for material for another book. But Mr. Burgess' answer was, "I am sorry, but I have written myself out. I have not another nature story in me." But somehow the ideas which Mr. Burgess thought he had exhausted continued to shape themselves and before long, less than a year, parents were scrambling for a copy of "Mother West Wind's Children." The ideas have continued to come so fast that his publishers have been printing his books at the rate of more than two a year.

In 1912, an important event for the future of the young writer happened. He lost his job through the sale of Good Housekeeping. Since that day he has devoted himself to his nature stories and has never worked for anyone but Thornton Waldo Burgess.

Competes with Own Early Work
However, as a business man, Mr. Burgess is and never has been an Andrew Carnegie. Just after he found himself without a job, he went to New York where he signed a contract with the now defunct American Newspaper Syndicate, an organization then owned by New York Globe, Boston Globe, Philadelphia Bulletin, Kansas City
Star and Chicago Daily News. When he affixed his name to the document, he failed to notice the omission of one word and, consequently, for the last 20 years he has been his own strongest competitor. He says that when he signed the contract he thought he was giving the syndicate the right only to first prints of his writings. The word "first," however, did not appear in the agreement. He did not discover the omission until he left that service to become associated with the Herald Tribune Syndicate in 1919. Since that time, he says, some newspapers have been buying stories which he wrote when he first was syndicated.

Can't Compete with Self
"Those early stories are still being printed in some newspapers, he says, "and at a rate so low that I cannot even compete with myself. At one time my stories were appearing in more than 80 newspapers but because of my rivalry with myself, that list has been reduced to 40 papers." He said that the Springfield Republican.and the Montreal 5tar have been printing his stories (the currently written ones) for 20 years.

Since signing with the Herald Tribune syndicate he has turned out stories at the rate of from none to 12 a day, according to his frame of mind. He has never rewritten a story in his life, he says, nor has he failed to complete one.

"Some have taken longer than others, that is true, "he says, "but they all are finished. I never labor on a story. If the idea doesn't come, then I forget the whole thing. I try something else, anything else, and presently I will return to a half-written story, run it back into the typewriter and finish it in a jiffy."

Stories Built Around Facts
But there is far more to the method of Mr. Burgess' writing, which has singled him out of the thousands who have tried to write similar stories, far more than the intangible genius of the man. He has a basic policy, one which holds true to everything he has written.

"Each story I write," he says, "is built around a fact. There are stories on the appearance of animals and on their habits. I also draw on the mystery of animal life, a mystery which we will probably never penetrate. When I write a story about the white tail on a rabbit, it is more or less meaningless to little children. But when I say that Peter Rabbit has a white patch on his trousers, then they remember." Simple, certainly, but educational too.

It is Mr. Burgess' particular ability, his thought and simple kindness which have made him the nature champion he is. It was this combination of ideals which caused Dr. William T. Homaday, director of the New York Zoological Society, to say, "Any man who can find his way into the hearts of a million children is a genius. If he carries a message of truth he is a benefactor. Thornton W. Burgess is both."

Through his writings, Mr. Burgess has become an expert in the study of zoology. He has learned the color of a herring's eyes. He has learned that deer eat trout, and thousands of other facts which have 'built up his knowledge of his subject. As a boy he wanted to be a naturalist. Today he is vice-president of the Massachusetts A.S.P.C.A., vice-president of the Massachusetts Audubon Society and a trustee of the Boston Society of Natural History. Through his Green Meadows Club, which was built up through his newspaper stories, he has established bird sanctuaries covering more than 8,000,000 acres. He is recognized throughout the entire zoological profession as a writer of fact.

As a boy he wanted to go to college. Today he holds a degree of doctor of literature from Northeastern University. But all these honors have come to Mr. Burgess as he worked over his daily stories. He wanted them, true, but he did not consciously pursue them. They came to him as pleasant surprises. There has always been, in addition to his respect for fact, one motivating power behind his writing, one which more than any other took him over the top. It has been his love for children. Everything he has written, he says, has been directed toward their pleasure.

Most of his mail is from youngsters. Many of the letters are simple and immature, but they tell a child's story and Mr. Burgess reads them with keen interest. Most of them are addressed to him in care of the syndicate or the particular paper in which his stories are read, but many others to "Peter Rabbit's Godfather, U. S. A.," or to "Farmer Brown's Boy, Green Meadow." His telephone rings on an average of six times a day with calls for help for a sick animal. He answers them all.

Last week in the middle of the night, he was aroused by an excited man who wanted to know how to remove a skunk from his cellar. The next day a woman called to find out what she should do to cure her parrot of a cold. Mr. Burgess does not have to advertise; he tells people that he will help just by the way he writes.

His whole philosophy on writing can be summed up in one simple thought:
"I write for the education and entertainment of young people; tragedy comes soon enough into the life of a child." With such an ideal, Thornton Waldo Burgess was not made to fail.

Labels: News of Yore