Stripper's Guide

Hershfield was born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, but soon moved to Chicago, where he attended school. A few months’ study at the Chicago School of Illustration provided him with all the art training he ever had.

…After completing high school, he went to work for The Chicago Daily News for $2.50 a week to draw pictures of news events. 

In 1902, when he graduated to being a cartoonist, he presided at a farewell banquet for another newspaper artist. From that point on he had a steadily growing diet of chicken and a widening audience to go with his developing repertory of jokes.

…[he] progressed from copy boy to cameraman, reporter, and finally sports cartoonist. During that time the comic artist began to experiment with a strip called Homeless Hector, telling of the difficulties of a lost dog.

In 1902 the belltower in the Piazza San Marco in Venice collapsed. For a cover story featuring other imperiled structures, young Hershfield retouched what he took to be an off-angle photograph of a tower. The first edition of the morning paper showed the Tower of Pisa miraculously straightened. As Hershfield recalls, “I was given two weeks to complete my education.” He also made line drawings from photographs and covered breaking stories with on-the-spot sketches, including the famous Iroquois Hotel fire in 1903. At the time, most staff artists did both cartoons and illustrations and their efforts were considered “fillers.”

San Francisco Chronicle 11/10/1908

San Francisco Chronicle 5/10/1909

Luck began to shoot at him [Ripley] as soon as he got to the Bulletin office. He lost his job. That was the lucky part of it—because he immediately got a better job across the street with The Chronicle. Harry Hershfield was the star cartoonist of that paper and was busy illustrating a series [probably The Piker’s Rubaiyat] for W.O. McGeehan. Mr. Hershfield preferred to do sporting pictures and persuaded Harry B. Smith, the sports editor, to put the newcomer on trial doing McGeehan’s stuff.

“The boy’s good,” said the wily Hershfield, enthusiastically. “It’s only fair you give him a chance.”

Hershfield once asked Brisbane if he considered a cartoonist a newspaperman. “Would you call a barnacle a ship?” was the reply. Brisbane, however, aware of cartoonists’ ability to attract readers, once cut off their signatures in order to reduce their personal following and thereby their salary demands. Hershfield took the issue directly to Hearst, who not only restored the signatures but ordered bylines as well. This credit has become standard practice since.

Abie Kabibble was a middle-class businessman and paterfamilias, a role with which more and more Americans could identify. Although minorities had been fair game for satire in the past, a cast of Jewish characters using dialect was a touchy endeavor. That Hershfield was able to make their qualities and traits universal is a tribute to his skill, gentle wit, and humanity.

Harry Hershfield has escaped being a ham. Mr. Armour and Mr. Swift, there is just so much less pork for you to sell. Why? Read on. Harry is known by his cartoons, accompanied by the nom-de-plume Abie, the Agent, throughout Manhattan and the provincial press. He has attempted and succeeded as a monologist.

It was at the 305th Infantry benefit held at the Hudson Theater. In the language of the Drama League he nearly busted everybody’s sides. It was rumored that one old maid, going through such contortions, cracked her glass leg to such fine atoms that sliding feet caused a whisper to circulate that Mr. Hoover be sent for at once because some one had hoarded so much sugar in her stocking that it had burst. Strange to say, Harry, up to the last second’s shaving before he was introduced by Louis Mann, had planned a revival service. No, don’t call for the hook. Nothing so dreary as hitting the sawdust trail. Drawing one or two of Abie the Agent’s carryings-on, was the blue print he had handed to Tom Oliphant of The Evening Mail, who carpentered the benefit together—and a job of mortising he did, too. But genius zigzags like lightning. Hastily he scribbled twenty of his own jokes on a slip of paper and stepped forth before a Sunday evening audience. He crossed out each joke with a lead pencil, padding the intermissions with impromptu lines. The real joke was that the audience thought it was rehearsal routine. The next morning Park Row was what Broadway is on the day after a footlight explosion—and such things do not happen to “hams.”

…Hershfield quickly developed a marked reputation as a humorous writer and raconteur quite apart from his repute as a strip artist. For a number of years in the late 1910’s, Hershfield wrote weekly short comic pieces presumably narrated by Abie, under such titles as “Abie on Conversation,” “Abie on Summer Snapshots,” etc., which ran on the editorial and feature pages of newspapers, many of which did not carry the Abie strip at all. In 1932, he became a columnist (“My Week”) for the N.Y. Daily Mirror, and, later in the 1930's, began to broadcast theatrical criticism, scripted for Hollywood studios, and joined the radio cast of Can You Top This? a 1940’s show tailored for comic raconteurs. His ethnic dialect stories, largely about Irish, Jewish, and German types, were marked by wit and good taste. A toastmaster who was always in great demand, Hershfield has also authored such books as Laugh Louder, Live Longer (Grayson, 1959): a title which seems to have been happily prophetic in his case....