Golf in Art by Indiana Artists

This entry on golf in art made by Indiana artists began when I found this slim paperback, Play It Pro: Golf from Beginner to Winner (1960), at a flea market in southeastern Ohio. The cover illustration is by Bob Abbett (1926-2015) of Hammond, Indiana, whose art is always worth a look.

John H. Striebel (1891-1962) of South Bend is best known for having drawn the comic strip Dixie Dugan, but in the 1910s and '20s, he kept busy with illustrations for magazines and newspapers, mostly for the Chicago Tribune. Here is a cover illustration by him for that newspaper's Sunday "Coloroto Magazine" section of June 17, 1923.

John T. McCutcheon (1870-1949) of South Raub, Indiana, and Purdue University also worked for the Chicago Tribune. Here is an illustration for "New Fables in Slang" by McCutcheon's old Indiana friend, George Ade (1866-1944), published in The Cosmopolitan Magazine in 1912.

Fontaine Fox (1884-1964) was born in Kentucky but attended Indiana University (which now holds a large collection of his cartoons). While working for a Chicago newspaper in the early twentieth century, he began drawing cartoons about the people and events of a place called Toonerville. His Toonerville Folks became a very popular daily comic and Sunday strip, and it stayed that way for decades, until Fox's retirement in 1955. Toonerville is peopled with a large, colorful, and very memorable cast of characters, including the Powerful Katrinka, shown here playing the role of both golf cart and caddie. Fontaine Fox, by the way, was a great fan of golf, and the sport was a recurring subject in his cartoons.

Sidney Smith (1877-1935) was another cartoonist from a state bordering Indiana. His native state was Illinois, but around the turn of the twentieth century, he cartooned for the Indianapolis News. In 1912, he settled in with the Chicago Tribune, where he created first Old Doc Yak, which gave way to a vastly popular story strip called The Gumps. Here are the first few panels of an Old Doc Yak Sunday from May 26, 1912. The slapstick humor is typical for the day and for the strip.

Born in Indianapolis, Chick Evans (1890-1979) wasn't an artist, but he was a golfer. He was also an editor and philanthropist and the author of a short-lived comic feature called Fore, drawn by Dick Calkins, later of Buck Rogers fame. Here is the cover illustration for Golfers Magazine, September 1915, edited by Evans and Crafts W. Higgins. The cover art is by--I believe it says--Bessie Bethey (dates unknown).

Allen Saunders (1899-1986) of Lebanon and Crawfordsville, Indiana, started out as a cartoonist and French teacher but found his true calling by writing comic strip continuities. In 1936, he began as the scriptwriter for The Great Gusto, soon to be retitled Big Chief Wahoo, drawn by Elmer Woggon. Big Chief Wahoo went through more name changes as the years went by. In 1962, when this golf-themed strip appeared in newspapers, it was known as Steve Roper, and the artist was William Overgard.

Dave Gerard (1909-2003) was also from Crawfordsville. In fact he was mayor of that city from 1972 to 1976. Although he drew the syndicated comic strip Will-Yum and the comic panel Citizen Smith, Gerard created hundreds of magazine gag cartoons published from the 1930s onward. Here is one from Golf Digest, from the late 1960s or early 1970s.

Captions copyright 2021 Terence E. Hanley