Toppers: Dinny's Family Album

 

As a kid I was absolutely fascinated with dinosaurs, reading everything I could get my hands on about them. I recall elementary school teachers being gobsmacked when I could properly pronounce their names and reel off all sorts of information about them when other kids were barely past sounding out the adventures of Dick and Jane.  

I guess I was far from the only one, because evidently lots of kids loved Alley Oop, even in its pre-time travel days. Of course there were actually no cavemen in the time of the dinosaurs, but we kids in the know were willing to look the other way about that inconvenient fact, just so long as we could fantasize ourselves meeting up with these amazing monstrosities of prehistory. 

V.T. Hamlin must have understood that fascination, because some of his Sunday toppers were on the subject of real dinosaurs. Dinny's Family Album, the first and longest-running of Alley Oop's toppers, was a panel devoted to actual information about actual dinosaurs, and boy oh boy, I would have eaten it up if I was growing up in the 1930s. 

Dinny's Family Album debuted along with the new Alley Oop Sunday page on September 9 1934*, and ran until February 7 1937**. It was replaced by more prosaic topper fare, perhaps because Hamlin had run out of interesting dinosaurs to cover after two and a half years. 

* Source: Buffalo Times.

* Source: NEA Archives.