Stripper's Guide

December 16 1908 -- It was a pretty sorry bunch of bouts last night at Jeffries arena. The headliners, Billy Papke and Hugo Kelly fought to a draw, and the other bouts were all 'professional debuts'. Herriman ends up finding more to sketch outside the ring than in it. I imagine most of the attendees last night were most interested in meeting the great Chicago Cub first baseman and manager Frank Chance.

Labels: Herriman's LA Examiner Cartoons

This 1908 divided back postcard by Clare Victor 'Dwig' Dwiggins is copyrighted by R. Kaplan, and on the back it says Germany Serie #49. I believe the caption here is a reference to a popular song or saying of the time, but I'll be darned if I can tease Google into admitting there ever was such a saying. The reference, of course, was to wonder about people who seemed able to live well beyond their means. Can anyone supply the origin of the phrase?

This is one of my favorite postcards, not for the front, but for the message on the back. It was sent by Amelia to Florence Randtke in Rochester New York. Here is the message:

25 15 21 18 16 15 19 20 1 12 9 19 16 18 5 20 20 25 7 15 15 4 2 21 20 15 25 15 21 11 9 4 9 12 12 10 5 20 25 15 21 10 5 20 25 15 21 9 8 15 16 5 25 15 21 3 1 14 13 1 11 5 20 8 9 19 15 21 20

 I'll leave it to you to figure out what that message means. Unfortunately I think Amelia's code broke down slightly in the middle of the message, but the intent is pretty clear.

Labels: Wish You Were Here

Ving Fuller was born Isaac Filler in Kisselynn, Russia, on March 17, 1903, according to the Immigration and Naturalization Service form, Declaration of Intention, which was filed in Los Angeles, California, on August 4, 1941. The form said Fuller was a newspaper cartoonist who had sailed aboard the S.S. Canada from Liverpool, England. He arrived in Portland, Maine, on January 15, 1913.



The passenger list recorded Ving as Isaak (11), his mother, Rebecca (38), and siblings, Ester (12), Taabe (9), Rahmann (6) and Michal (1.5). Written in column twelve, Final Destination, was Worcester, Massachusetts. The family was going to join “B. Filler 45 Providence St. Worcester, Mass.” according to column eighteen. The last column, number twenty-nine, said the entire family was born in “Wladimir, Russia”.


The 1914 Worcester, Massachusetts, city directory listed Ving’s father, Benjamin Filler, as a laborer residing at 90 Water. Benjamin signed his World War I draft card on September 12, 1918. His residence was “21 Waverly St” in Worcester.

The same address was found in a 1919 city directory and the 1920 census. The Filler household included Benjamin, Rebecca, Esther, “Tena”, Thomas, Samuel and Raymond. Ving has not yet been found in the census.

One of Ving’s younger brothers was the screenwriter and film director, Samuel Michael Fuller, who said he was born on August 12, 1912, in Worcester, Massachusetts, according to the book, A Third Face. Samuel identified his parents, Rebecca Baum and Benjamin Rabinovitch, who later changed his surname, and siblings, “my brothers, Ray, Tom and Ving, and my sisters, Evelyn, Tina and Rose”. Evelyn was Esther in the census. Rose was married to William Epstein, a taxicab driver, and had a seven-month-old daughter, Edith. The Epsteins lived in Worcester at 106 Lincoln Street.

The census said the Fillers were born in Russia except Raymond whose birth was in Wisconsin. It’s not clear if the entire family or just the parents were in Wisconsin. Samuel said he requested a copy of his Worcester birth certificate.

Labels: Ink-Slinger Profiles

Leonard T. Holton only contributed a few Hearst magazine cover series, and Sunday Follies was his last that I know of. The series was a loose conglomeration of wordy gags about people's activities on the Day of Rest. Of course, Holton's delicious deco-inspired art makes any gag seem palatable.

Sunday Follies was syndicated by Hearst's Newspaper Feature Service and ran from January 26 to April 13 1930.

Labels: Magazine Cover Comics

Very little biographical information has been found on Dean Miller. An advertisement for the comic strip Vic Flint included a profile of Miller and was published in the Zanesville Signal (Ohio), February 15, 1959.

Dean Miller is one of the youngest artists in the United States to draw a top-flight comic. He illustrates the detective-adventure daily strip and Sunday page, Vic Flint, which appears in more than 500 newspapers.

A native of Springfield, Ill., Dean was born July 7, 1923. His family shortly afterward moved to Houston, Tex. Dean attended high school there and won a scholarship to the Houston Art Institute.

Miller’s baptism of fire in the cartoon world came at the tender age of 16. He landed a job as editorial cartoonist for a Houston weekly newspaper and after six months at the drawing board his salary was the same as when he started—absolute zero. It was guid training, but it bought no groceries, so Miller quit.

His next employer was Uncle Sam. After spending four years in the Air Force, where he was gunnery instructor, Dean landed a job as a cartoonist in Chicago. His work attracted the attention of NEA Service, Inc., and he reported for work in Cleveland early in 1950.

In October of the same year he took over the job of drawing Vic Flint. He is married and has two children.

The Sam Houston High School yearbook, Cosmos 1939, had a student named Dean Miller who was in the class of 1941. Miller has not yet been found in the U.S. Federal Censuses. Miller’s Department of Veterans Affairs record at Ancestry.com said he served from February 2, 1943 to February 11, 1946. His birth date was July 7, 1923 and death date January 1, 1977. The record included his Social Security number. According to the Social Security Death Index, Miller’s birth year was 1924 and the day of death was not mentioned. His benefits had been sent to Feeding Hills, Massachusetts.

Miller drew a 1948 Sunday strip called Mighty O’Malley for the Chicago Tribune.

Labels: Ink-Slinger Profiles

Writer Frank M. Young recently contacted me about a very intriguing mystery. He is engaged in writing a piece on cartoonist Dean Miller, most remembered (to me at least) as the second artist on the detective strip Vic Flint.

Young is in contact with Miller's family, and they told him that Dean Miller was further distinguished as the creator of a 1948 comic strip titled Mighty O'Malley Ex-Marine, which was syndicated by the Chicago Tribune. They produced as proof a photo of a Sunday strip, the only sample they have:


Young diligently searched for more information about this series, and came up with nothing. Which is why he came to me. Unfortunately I'd never heard of it either. But now we were both curious to try to solve the mystery.

The photo the family had originally offered to Young was rather blurry and was taken with the piece matted and framed (the one above is a sharper image out of the frame taken later). This led both Young and I to wonder if Dean Miller might have created a mock-up of the tearsheet for some reason, and that the strip was actually a red herring.  Although it looked genuine enough, how could a strip run in the Chicago Tribune have managed to so thoroughly escape the world's notice?

I asked Young to get the family to take a photo of the back of the sheet. Here's what we got (they took a pair of close-ups that don't quite stitch together):


What at first blush looks like a normal newspaper page is shown to be quite unusual under closer examination. You'll note that the text on this page looks almost like it was created on a typewriter as opposed to professionally typeset. Does that mean it's a fake? Actually, no, it is a proof that the page is genuinely from the Chicago Tribune. In 1948, the Trib was going through a protracted strike by their typesetters, and much of the paper was typeset in exactly this way. Score one for Mr. Miller's veracity as a ChiTrib almunus.

Unfortunately, trying to date this page is troublesome. Since the Chicago Tribune archives on the web have a search engine that is blinder than Mr. Magoo, I was not surprised at my inability to find this page using any of a dozen different search terms. Most of the material here is syndicated 'evergreen' material, making coming up with a publication date troublesome. I checked other papers to see when they ran some of the stories:

Climbing Butch -- 3/9 - 3/21/48
Peg-Leg Coyote -- 3/15 - 4/5/48
Hip Replacement -- 3/11 - 3/26/48
Circus Model Builders -- 3/12 - ad infinitum (popular article!)

That narrows it down nicely, and the one local story, the traffic accident, was reported in a few papers, one on 3/11, the other on 3/13. Since that story came from the Trib, I narrowed down my viewing to the editions of 3/11/1948 and earlier. Immediately I hit paydirt of a sort -- the story and photos appeared in the March 10 edition (http://archives.chicagotribune.com/1948/03/10/page/4/article/driver-hurt-as-auto-hits-trolley-track-depressions-blamed). Unfortunately, the rest of the page doesn't jive with the tearsheet supplied by Miller's family.

As a last ditch effort, I manually reviewed the editions for the rest of the week, especially Sunday which could well have repeated the story for readers who buy only the Sunday edition. No dice though. So how could the comic strip have been printed, yet not printed?


Frank Young offered up a final clue. He points out that the Sunday Tribune in 1948 was 10 cents in Chicago, and 15 cents elsewhere. This copy is plainly offered for 15 cents, with no mention of the in-town price. That means it was clipped from an out of town-only edition. Therefore it could be that Mighty O'Malley was printed only in the out of town edition, which is not the version that survives on microfilm. Although it is unusual for the two versions of a paper to be different in such a major way, it is by no means unknown. In fact, I've heard convincing evidence that the New York Daily News, the Trib's sister paper, had slightly different versions of the Sunday comics line-up at some points in its history.

That is as far as Frank Young and I can trace this mystery. Now we ask you good folks out there -- have you seen any samples of Mighty O'Malley Ex-Marine, and if so, what can you tell us about them? Does anyone know of an archive that has the Tribune's out-of-town edition?

Labels: Mystery Strips