Obscurity of the Day: Alabama Oddities

 

Robert Ripley didn't know what he was unleashing on the newspaper world when he created his Believe It Or Not series, offering readers entertaining odd and unusual factoids. Not only was he copied whole cloth by a long list of me-too cartoon series, but he was followed also by a whole industry of specialty imitations, where the creators limited themselves to some niche subject. 

The most popular niche, by far, were the Believe It or Not clones which limited their subject to a specific state, region or locality. I admit I'd be hard pressed to prove it, but I feel reasonably confident that there was no point on the U.S. map that was not served by one of these newspaper series at one time or another. 

Today we take a look at one of these series that (at first) covered the state of Alabama. Clint Bonner, a Birmingham artist and sign painter created his first newspaper panel series in 1931 for the Birmingham News. How He Got There was a full pager that ran on Sundays, telling the backgrounds of local politicos, celebrities and businesspeople.

This rather dry feature went on for the better part of three years, but then Bonner decided it was high time to do a cartoon that could sell to more than one paper. Thus he came up with a new weekly panel called Alabama Oddities, which sold to clients including the Birmingham News and Montgomery Advertiser. It debuted on May 12 1935. As the name implies, it offered intersting factoids about the state, its history and its people. 

Bonner proved to have a restless hankering for changing the name and focus of his feature. On March 15 1939 it was rechristed When The Stars Fell, a reference to the book and song When The Stars Fell On Alabama, a tale about a spectacular meteor shower seen throughout the state in 1833. The subjects of the weekly cartoon remained pretty much the same. 

But then on April 14 1940 the title changed again, this time to Debunking The Bunk. Now the feature began to cover historical and scientific fallacies, and the local aspect of the feature was dropped. Presumably Bonner hoped that his new subject would allow him to sell the feature outside Alabama. Evidently that wish did not turn into reality, and may have also annoyed his existing subscribing papers who wanted local content, not this essentially new feature. 

Bowing to client demand, a year later on April 20 the title and subject was changed back to Alabama Oddities. But Bonner was still chafing, hoping to sell the feature outside the state, so on January 4 1942 the title changed to Southern Oddities, taking in all the surrounding states. Apparently this opening of the scope didn't antagonize his Alabama subscribing papers nearly as much. 

On April 26 1942 a very slight title change was enacted, changing it to Oddities of the South. My guess is that someone else owned copyright to the title Southern Oddities and had complained. But Bonner still didn't seem to be gaining the client base he so fervently wanted, so a few months later he rejiggered the weekly page into a set of six separate equally sized panels. This layout allowed him to sell the feature either as a large weekly feature or as a daily panel. 

Another seemingly good idea, but yet another marketing failure. Bonner finally threw in the towel and the feature appears to have ended on January 31 1943, or February 6 for the daily-style version*. By this time Bonner had a new gig as a radio host going in Birmingham and he was running the Gulf States Art Schools; perhaps those proved the more rewarding activities. 

The ever-restless Clint Bonner would come back after the war with several additional newspaper features, but none of them proved to be his pot o' gold, either. One was a revival of this feature, but throwing it open to factoids about the entire country. Titled American Oddities, in the only paper I can find it (Montgomery Advertiser) it ran only January 6 to February 17 1946.

* Source: Tallahassee News-Democrat.