Friday, September 30, 2022
Obscurity of the Day: Our Own Oddities
Among the hundreds of those 'neat stuff that happened here' features, it's surprising how many of them ran in color in the comics section. That was pretty darn valuable space, and I guarantee every syndicate salesman who came to your town would gladly waste the feature editor's day with all the reasons that he would be better off with his syndicate's latest Sunday strip. Most features editors are of the superstitious, cowardly type who would break down under that sort of cross-examination by the third or fourth salesman.
The features editors at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch get a tip of my hat for resisting all the naysayers who must have driven them nearly batty for over fifty years -- yes I said five-oh. But maybe their spines were stiffened some by the fact that they were being told to dump a feature that was originally suggested by Joseph Pulitzer II, and you don't need to get in trouble with people of that surname at the P-D.
Our Own Oddities, which was first titled St. Louis Oddities, debuted on September 1 1940, drawn by Ralph Graczak, and was written mostly from reader submissions of odd and amazing facts about the area. Graczak had been a staff artist with the P-D since 1933, and had previously done another reader-submission feature, the pun based Dijever. Graczak's new feature made him by far the receiver of the most mail of any P-D staffer, and the popularity of the feature seldom seemed to wane. Graczak took it upon himself to investigate each item submitted, often lugging a press camera out to people's homes in order for them to provide him with photographic proof of their reported oddities.
Graczak remained on staff with the P-D until 1980. At age 70, he was ready to leave his other newspaper work. But Our Own Oddities, that he could not leave. He continued working on that feature as a freelancer until he was 81 and the feature was 51 years old. The feature last ran on February 24 1991. Most likely the death of his wife in 1990 finally took the last of the wind out of his sails. Graczak died in 1997.
Labels: Obscurities
It's amazing how a comic that run for literal decades can flow under the radar like that, although this comic at least has an excuse that it's a local feature, rather than nationally syndicated (I imagine there are people in St. Louis who remember this fondly).
I'm wondering what's the most "recent" obscure strip you've featured. I know you included a few that came out post-2000.
I've been mulling starting a new category of blogpost for strips that ran a long time under the radar. They're not really obscure, they're just sort of unmemorable, and certainly neglected by fans and collectors. Amy would have fit, and I also think of things like Morty Meekle, Trudy, Winky Ryatt, The Smith Family, etc. Strips like this ran in a decent number of papers, but they inspired no real fan following. Why did they run so long? What did their creators think of doing them? What kept them in a decent list of papers? Looking for a snappy category name for these things and I can't some up with anything I like.
Oh, and newest obscurity. I think that might be held by Penn's Place, a local Philly strip.
--Allan
