Art for Memorial Day by Franklin Boggs (1914-2009)

William Franklin Boggs was born in Warsaw, Indiana, on July 25, 1914, just a few days before war began in Europe. He made a name for himself a generation later in his depictions of another war half a world away, this one in the Southwest Pacific.

Boggs was a young art student at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts when he got the call to be a war correspondent during World War II. His job was to cover the Medical Corps in Papua New Guinea and the Philippines. Reproductions of some of his paintings appear below.

Franklin Boggs was featured in the PBS documentary They Drew Fire (2000). By that time, he had taught at Beloit College in Wisconsin for several decades. He died in Beloit on November 7, 2009, just four days before Veterans Day. His life, then, was bracketed by war and punctuated by war.

On this day, we remember him and all of the men and women who have fought and died for our country and for the freedoms that we cherish. We also disavow and resist all of those who want to take away our freedoms, to tear down our country, and to destroy everything that America means and stands for. They should know that they will never and can never win, no matter what vaunted position they might hold.

Top to bottom:

[Men Loading Fuel Tanks on a P-38 Lightning.]

End of a Busy Day.

Battalion Aid Station.

Night Duty.

Text copyright 2021, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

George A. Shealy (1910-1988)

George Allyn Shealy was born on March 4, 1910, in Chicago, Illinois, to Otto C. Shealy, a grocer, and Katherine C. Shealy, a music teacher. By the time he was just seven weeks old, Shealy was already a Hoosier, for his family lived in the Whitley County town of Churubusco when the enumerator of the Federal census came around in April 1910.

George Shealy went to Churubusco High School, where he was in the Boys Glee Club and the school orchestra. After graduation, he matriculated at Indiana University under a scholarship (1927-1928) and was a member of the class of 1931 (although I'm not sure that he graduated from that institution). His art education consisted of three years at the Art Institute of Chicago; five summers at the Ox-Bow School of Art in Saugatuck, Michigan; and studies under the muralist John Warner Nolton (1876-1934) of Illinois.

A summary of Shealy's career, from The U.S Air Force: A Pictorial History by James J. Haggerty and Warren Reiland Smith (New York: Spartan Books, 1966):

[George A. Shealy] taught art at Todd School for Boys, Woodstock, Illinois; designed and built sets for summer theater with Orson Welles and Hilton Edwards of the Gate Theatre, Dublin; and taught at St. Ambrose College, Davenport, Iowa. He was in the Army Combat Engineers in World War II and at the request of the Office of War Information he was sent to London to be art director on publications. Shealy set up his own studio in 1950 as a free lance art director and illustrator and later became head of the Department of Art, Queens College, Charlotte, North Carolina. (p. 260; boldface added)

Shealy served two years in the U.S. Army during and after the war, from January 21, 1944, to February 19, 1946. He was married to Dr. Joyce H. Shealy, a psychologist. George A. Shealy died on August 27, 1988, in Charlotte, North Carolina. He was seventy-eight years old.

"K-14 at Kimpo, Korea" by George A. Shealy.

The cover of Print: The Magazine of the Graphic Arts, June 1952 (Vol. 7, No. 3) with a cover design by Shealy, who was also credited as art director.

George Allyn Shealy and his wife, Dr. Joyce H. Shealy, circa 1962. Photo courtesy of Everett Library Special Collections, Queens University of Charlotte, Charlotte, North Carolina.

Original text copyright 2016, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

James M. Triggs (1924-1992)

James Martin Triggs was born on March 2, 1924, in Indianapolis and was educated in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, and Mamaroneck, New York. He served in the U.S. military during World War II and studied at Cornell University and the Pratt Institute. Triggs got his start as a commercial artist working with Stevan Dohanos (1907-1994) and Coby Whitmore (1913-1988). Often working in a trompe l'oeil manner, he did advertising art and painted magazine covers for Argosy and other publications. He was especially interested in airplanes and firearms. Triggs was also an author, with the books The Piper Cub Story (1963) and Used Plane Buying Guide (1962) to his credit. James M. Triggs died on June 26, 1992, in Danbury, Connecticut.

Update (May 27, 2024): There is an article in the April 1985 issue of Southwest Art Magazine on James M. Triggs. It's called "Frontier Mementoes," and its author is Pamela Guthman.

Text copyright 2016, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Indiana Pioneers-Transportation

Today the Hoosier State of Indiana enters its two-hundreth year, for on December 11, 1816, it was admitted to the Union as the nineteenth state. Of the forty-eight contiguous states, Indiana is the smallest located west of the Appalachians. Nonetheless, it has made outsized contributions to the nation's culture and history, being first, most, and only in many categories, including agriculture, military service, manufacturing, automobiles, aviation, space exploration, education, literature, and art.

Ours is a state of pioneers. Whether in a flatboat, covered wagon, airplane, or spacecraft, Hoosiers have led the way. In observance of Indiana's pioneering efforts in transportation, I offer a number of illustrations by an artist who was herself descended from Indiana pioneers, Clotilde Embree Funk (1893-1991) of Princeton.

Postscript: The New York Times has cited my biographical article on Clotilde Embree Funk. The Times' article is called "Draw, She Said," and the author is David W. Dunlap. Mr. Dunlap's article is dated December 9, 2015, and it includes a photograph of Clotilde. In her hand is what Rooster Cogburn would have called "a big horse pistol." Believe it or not, when the picture was taken in 1926, Clotilde was target shooting in the basement of the Times Tower.

Happy Bison-tennial, Indiana!

Text copyright 2015, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Loren Russell Fisher (1913-1987)

Loren Russell Fisher was born on March 16, 1913, in Needham, Johnson County, Indiana. He was the son of a blacksmith and became a sculptor, combat artist, draftsman, illustrator, photographer, and painter. Fisher attended the Fort Wayne School of Art and the Herron School of Art in Indianapolis under a full scholarship. He graduated from Herron in 1940 with a bachelor of fine arts degree. That same year he was awarded a Jacob H. Lazarus Fellowship in the amount of $4,000 for study at the American Academy in Rome. The prize, provided by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was for sculpture. Unfortunately for the young artist, war was on in Europe, and so travel to Rome was out of the question. Instead, Fisher teamed up with classmates Floyd Hopper and Frank Engle to construct a seven-by-five-foot flatbed trailer with a canvas top, built out of pieces from a junkyard and designed to be towed by Fisher's brand new Chevrolet. The three men set off on an 18,000-mile journey around the North American continent, eventually to Mexico to study art.

Before the two-year term of Fisher's fellowship was up, he was inducted into the U.S. Army. As an officer in the Combat Art Section of the Corps of Engineers, Fisher led a company of mapmakers and topographical engineers in Europe, the Philippines, the East Indies, Southeast Asia, and the China-Burma-India Theater of operations. Fisher was also in Japan after the surrender, which took place seventy years ago this month. Fisher went to work as an illustrator for Boeing after the war, but he also kept up with his interests in sculpture and painting, winning prizes for each from the Brevard (Florida) Art Association in 1949.

Loren R. Fisher moved from Alexandria, Virginia, to Melbourne, Florida, in 1956. In addition to being an artist, he was also a yachtsman. He died on May 17, 1987, presumably in Melbourne. Fisher was seventy-four years old.

Supply Line in Kunming China by Loren Russell Fisher from Joint Force Quarterly, Summer 1996.

Text copyright 2015, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Hoosiers in Art-Aviators

Hoosiers have contributed to aviation in America from the beginnings of powered flight. Although Orville Wright (1871-1948) was a native Ohioan, his older brother Wilbur Wright (1867-1912) was born in Indiana, in the Henry County village of Millville. The Wright Brothers have been commemorated on many postage stamps. Here's one from Romania.

And another from Ivory Coast.

Octave Chanute (1832-1910) corresponded with the Wright Brothers and encouraged them in their efforts. Born in France and a resident of Chicago, Chanute conducted tests of gliders at Miller Beach, Indiana, in the 1890s. The portrait here is by Milton Caniff, famed cartoonist on Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon.

World War I ace Eddie Rickenbacker (1890-1973) was, like Orville Wright, born in Ohio, but from 1927 to 1945, he owned the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. This image is from a series of trading cards called "Sky Birds," from 1933-1934, as are the following five images.

Amelia Earhart (1897-1937?) was born in Atchison, Kansas. In 1935, she joined the faculty of Purdue University as a counselor and adviser. The Purdue Research Foundation paid for the Lockheed Electra in which she was flying when she disappeared over the South Pacific in 1937.

In the category of "Almost a Hoosier" comes Major (later Colonel) Reed Landis (1896-1975), son of Kenesaw Mountain Landis (1866-1944), a commissioner of baseball and federal judge who lived in Indiana and practiced law there as a young man. Reed Landis was born in Ottawa, Illinois, and served in the United States Signal Corps during World War I.

Francis "Gabby" Gabreski (1919-2002), the leading American ace of World War II, was born in Pennsylvania, but matriculated at the University of Notre Dame, where he became interested in aviation. The art is once again by Ohioan Milton Caniff.

Unlike his contemporary, Gabby Gabreski, Tom Harmon (1919-1990) was born in Indiana (in Rensselaer) and attended school out of state. He won the Heisman Trophy at the University of Michigan. In 1942, he enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps and served in China. Harmon was awarded the Purple Heart and the Silver Star. The image here is from his NFL rookie card from 1941. 

Captions copyright 2014, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

J. Hugh O'Donnell (1899-1977)

John Hugh O'Donnell, better known to readers of the Indianapolis News as J. Hugh O'Donnell, was born on November 20, 1899, in Indianapolis. He won a scholarship to the Herron School of Art in 1916-1917, studying under Otto Stark, T.C. Steele, and William Forsyth. At Arsenal Technical High School, O'Donnell took evening classes from Elmer Tafflinger and subscribed to C.N. Landon's correspondence course in cartooning. The young artists's earliest cartooning credits may have been for The Arsenal Cannon, his school yearbook.

O'Donnell went right to work out of high school, taking a job at the front counter of the Indianapolis News in 1919. He moved up two notches in pretty short order, first to illustrator in the advertising department, then to staff artist in the editorial department, where he rubbed elbows with Kin Hubbard, Charles Kuhn, and Gaar Williams. O'Donnell worked as a staff artist from 1923 until being drafted in 1942. He served in a military police battalion and illustrated Leo M. Litz's Report from the Pacific, published in 1946. O'Donnell switched to the Indianapolis Times after a big shakeup at the Star-News in 1948. He retired from the Times in 1955.

J. Hugh O'Donnell illustrated Hoosier poet Bill Herschell's versifying for the Indianapolis News. He also created "Lucky Dollar," a character for a Red Cross television program. Named a Sagamore of the Wabash and a Kentucky Colonel in the same year, O'Donnell won a Freedom Foundations Award in 1952 and a Lincoln National Life Foundation Award in 1951. John Hugh O'Donnell died on December 30, 1977, and was buried at Holy Cross Cemetery in Indianapolis.

Note: J. Hugh O'Donnell the artist should not be confused with Rev. J. Hugh O'Donnell, president of the University of Notre Dame in the 1940s.

J. Hugh O'Donnell's depiction of "The City of Indianapolis," a B-29 that completed a bombing run hours before the cessation of  hostilities between the United States and Japan, August 14, 1945. From Report from the Pacific (1946) by Leo M. Litz, war correspondent for the Indianapolis News.

Here's a Navy airplane, a PBY Catalina, nicknamed "Dumbo," picking up Ensign Calvin B. Yoder, then aged twenty-two, of Kokomo, Indiana, after his F6F5 Hellcat had been shot down in the Pacific in July 1945. Again, from Report from the Pacific. (Sorry for the blurred images--I have scanned them directly from the book.)

Another ship named "Indianapolis." This one--the U.S.S. Indianapolis--met an unhappier fate, having been torpedoed by a Japanese submarine on July 30, 1945. Of 1,196 men on board, only 316 survived, making the sinking of the ship the single greatest loss of life in the history of the United States Navy. There is a memorial to the Indianapolis in its namesake city today. Coincidentally, one of the survivors was an Indianapolis man, James E. O'Donnell. I can't say whether he is related to the artist. You can read more about the memorial at its official website, here. I'll wager that the person responsible for the website is not from Indianapolis: only foreigners call the city "Indy."

Text and captions copyright 2011, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Joseph Clemens Gretter (1904-1988)

Joseph Clemens Gretter lived a long and productive life, yet few readers knew him by anything other than his one word signature, "Gretta." The artist behind that signature was born on December 11, 1904, in the prairie country of western Indiana and grew up in Avery, Iowa. His schooling came at the Iowa Academy of Fine Arts, Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, and Art Institute of Chicago. His art career began in earnest in 1926 when he began drawing Hippity Skip Puzzles for the Chicago Tribune. During the lean years of the Great Depression, Gretter stayed busy illustrating series novels including the Ted Scott Flying Stories,  the X Bar X Boys, the Air Combat Stories, and the Hardy Boys. He also made his way into comic books.

In 1935, a former cavalryman and pulp fiction writer named Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson put together a 36-page, black-and-white, tabloid-sized comic book called New Fun Comics, the first comic book made up of all original material and the second newsstand comic book ever published. New Fun Comics #1 (Feb. 1935) marked several other firsts as well, including the first original science fiction feature for a comic book, "Don Drake on the Planet Saro." The author was Ken Fitch, the artist, Clemens Gretter. "Don Drake," probably inspired by Flash Gordon and Brick Bradford, ran in seventeen issues of New Fun and its successor, More Fun Comics, and even made the cover spot in April 1935. Gretter worked in comic books for many more years. His last known credited work showed up in Fatman, The Human Flying Saucer in 1967.

By the early 1940s, Weird Tales magazine had moved to New York City. A change in editorial personnel, writers, and artists accompanied that move. The art of Margaret Brundage, Virgil Finlay, and others was increasingly rare on the cover of "The Unique Magazine." Other artists had been brought in to take their place, including A.R. Tilburne (another Hoosier) and Clemens Gretter. Tilburne produced ten covers in as many years between 1938 and 1947. Gretter on the other hand drew just one, for the January 1942 issue, an illustration unrelated to the stories inside.

Clemens Gretter continued as a cartoonist and illustrator after 1940. Between 1941 and 1948, he ghosted Ripley's Believe It or Not! He drew his own fact-based features, In This World and In Our Time, syndicated between 1953 and 1988. In semi-retirement, Gretter painted portraits and wrote two books, The Genius of Man and Chain of Reasoning (1978). He also invented a building panel and was granted a patent for it in 1976. Gretter died on April 8, 1988, in Wilton, Connecticut, at age eighty-three.

An exciting and colorful cover by Joseph Clemens Gretter for Eustace L. Adams' War Wings (1937), typical work from the artist for series novels of that era.

"Don Drake on the Planet Saro" by Gretter and Ken Fitch, the first original science fiction story for a comic book. This is the cover of New Fun for April 1935. Don Drake could easily be the pilot on the cover of War Wings: their outfits are identical.

A cover by Gretter for Short Stories, August 25, 1940, illustrating a tale by H. Bedford-Jones, a prolific pulpster and a teller of weird tales.

Finally, Gretter's only cover for Weird Tales, from January 1942.

Note: This posting also appears on my blog Tellers of Weird Tales at www.tellersofweirdtales.blogspot.com.

Text and captions copyright 2011, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Thomas R. Funderburk (1928-1999)

Thomas Ray Funderburk was born on November 8, 1928, in Hammond, Indiana. He served in the Marine Corps from 1946 to 1948 and graduated from Indiana University in 1952. Funderburk was assistant art director for Bantam Books from 1961 to 1966, when he went off on his own as a freelance artist, writer, and designer. He wrote two well-regarded books on airplanes, The Fighters: The Men and Machines of the First Air War (1965) and The Early Birds of War: The Daring Pilots and Fighter Aeroplanes of World War I (1968). Funderburk also illustrated several books, including Stormy Voyager: The Story of Charles Wilkes by Robert Silverberg (1968), The Nature of Animals by Lorus and Margery Milne (1969), and Whales: A First Book by Helen Hoke and Valerie Pitt (1981). Funderburk died on December 30, 1999, at age seventy-one.

Thomas Funderburk (left) from his days at Indiana University, from The Arbutus.

The Nature of Animals by Lorus and Margery Milne (1969), illustrated by Thomas R. Funderburk.

Funderburk's own Early Birds of War from 1968.

Updated December 6, 2019.
Text and captions copyright 2011, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Reed Kinert (1911-1976)

In the early 1900s, airplanes were not just a novelty. They were a marvel, almost a miracle, and flying in one was the dream of every American boy and girl. Hoosiers figured prominently in those pioneering years of aviation. Not least among Indiana pilots of course was Wilbur Wright, born in 1867 near Millville, Indiana. Before the turn of the century, Wilbur and his Ohio-born brother Orville set up a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio. In 1903, they flew an airplane of their own design and manufacture at Kill Devils Hill in North Carolina, thus launching not only their small Flyer, but also the Age of Aviation. The story of the brothers' success and their proximity to Richmond, Indiana, must have been a powerful draw for a young boy growing up there. At age twelve, future pilot and artist Reed Kinert began collecting material on aircraft and aviation, thus beginning a life devoted to things with wings.

Born on August 31, 1911, Reed Charles Kinert attended schools in his hometown before setting off for studies at the College of Los Angeles. In 1932, Kinert learned to fly in Richmond by taking lessons from a barnstorming pilot.  He operated the airport in Richmond and worked as a weather observer at the nearby Centerville Airport before becoming a barnstorming pilot of the 1930s. He also began creating illustrations for collectors and for the Vought and Aeronca aircraft companies. Between 1933 and 1947, Kinert was a flight instructor and test pilot. As an artist, Kinert designed insignia for two Navy bomber squadrons and worked as an illustrator and cartoonist for United Aircraft Corporation of America, and Beechcraft Aircraft. He also served as art director for the Aerospace Division of Librascope, Inc.

Kinert attended nearly every National Air Race beginning in 1929 and put his experiences to good use in his book, American Racing Planes and Historic Air Races (1952). He was an air racer himself for some time. Kinert wrote and illustrated books on aviation for much of his career, including his four-volume Racing Planes and Air Races: A Complete History (1967-1969). Other titles included America’s Fighting Planes in Action (1943), Our Fighting Planes: The Story of U.S. Military Aircraft of World War II (1946), and Little Helicopter (1947). His Early American Steam Locomotives: First Seven Decades, 1830-1900 (1962) was awarded a non-fiction prize by Indiana University in 1963.

In his author's note for Our Fighting Planes, published immediately after World War II, Kinert expressed feelings about flight that justify a long quotation:

Flight is the expression of spiritual achievement, the antithesis of the worn shoe and the weary foot. Flight is the opposite course to the rocky road, the long climb and the dusty plain and is the answer to an ageless human longing to see what is over the hill. In religion, they call it the instinct to immortality. With flight, peoples can battle loneliness and separation and isolation and bigotry and prejudice. With flight, free men will become more free. . . . In these pages I have made no attempt to glorify war, only flight itself, for war is hell.

Reed Kinert died on September 9, 1976, in San Diego, California. This year marks his centennial, observed here if nowhere else.

It's hard to choose just one or two pictures from Reed Kinert's book, Our Fighting Planes (1946), for display here, for there are so many beautifully done pictures among its pages. But I have always liked airplanes with an unusual configuration, so I have chosen Northrop's P-61 Black Widow, America's first airplane designed specifically for nighttime operations. 

From the same book, Boeing's workhorse, the famed B-17 Flying Fortress. The American fighter is the Republic P-47 Thunderbolt, the largest and heaviest single-engine fighter of the war. (The "P" designation by the way is for "pursuit," which gave way to our current "F," for "fighter," after the war.) The airplane going down in flames is the Nazi jet, the Messerschmitt Me 262 Schwalbe. No matter whether Kinert's illustration shows a real or fanciful event, it's still cool. And that's what this book is like. Even though Kinert was in his mid-thirties when Our Fighting Planes was published, his drawings convey all the feeling of a schoolboy's drawings of imagined heroism and adventure against the forces of evil.

Pilot, aviation enthusiast, and artist Reed Kinert of Richmond, Indiana.

Captions and text copyright 2011, 2024 by Terence E. Hanley

Airplanes

At the fin de siècle, artists in popular magazines tried to visualize life in the twentieth century. Albert Levering (1869-1929), trained as an architect but with the mind of a cartoonist, excelled at humorous depictions of the future. This drawing appeared on the back cover of Puck, the humor magazine, on October 7, 1908.

Lucille Webster Holling (1900-1989) may not have been as well known as her husband (children's book author and illustrator Holling Clancy Holling), but as this travel poster shows, she was a talented artist in her own right. (Update, June 11, 2014: This image is not in fact a travel poster but an illustration from Kimo: The Whistling Boy by Alice Cooper Bailey (1928). You can read more about the artist here.)

Frederick Coffay Yohn (1875-1933) began his career as an illustrator of historical scenes for slick magazines such as Scribner's. Near the end, he painted pictures like this one for pulp magazines.

"Gretta" was Joseph Clemens Gretter (1904-1988), an illustrator of children's books, including Wing for Wing by Thomas Burtis (1932). Here are the endpapers for the book.

The cover of Adventure magazine from November 1911, created by Charles Buckles Falls (1874-1960?).

Justin Gruelle (1889-1978) painted his "Early Birds Mural" in the early 1940s. After many travels and travails, the mural has finally come to rest at the Indiana Historical Society in the artist's birthplace of Indianapolis.

Captions copyright 2010 Terence E. Hanley