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, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Allen Saunders and Chief Wahoo

The World Series begins a week from today, on October 27, 2015. Time was when the Fall Classic would be ending about now. These days it goes on into November unless one team knocks out the other in four games straight. Even if that happens, the baseball season will overlap week eight of the NFL season, which begins on October 29. So there are overlapping seasons in our two biggest sports. There are also overlapping controversies. The controversy over the Washington Redskins' name is the bigger of the two. That's understandable, as the name is troubling to many people. But there is a controversy in baseball, too, and it involves not the name of a team but its logo and mascot. The team is the Cleveland Indians, and the logo and mascot together are called Chief Wahoo. Thereby hangs a tale.

John Allen Saunders was born on March 24, 1899, in Lebanon, a town located in Boone County, northwest of Indianapolis. He graduated from, then taught at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana. In 1927, he moved to Toledo, Ohio, to become a journalist. Saunders was a cartoonist himself, but his real talent was as a writer. In the 1930s, he began working with a stable of cartoonists in Toledo. Eventually his collaborators would include Elmer Woggan (1898-1978) on Big Chief Wahoo, Ken Ernst (1918-1985) on Mary Worth, William Overgard (1926-1990) on Steve Roper and Mike Nomad, and Alfred Andriola (1912-1983) on Kerry Drake. He also advised Nick Dallis (1911-1991), co-creator of Rex Morgan, M.D., Judge Parker, and Apartment 3-G. If there was any one person responsible for the creation of the soap opera comic strip, it was probably Allen Saunders.

In an article called "Changing World of the Comic Page," co-written with Elmer Woggan and published in The Federal Illustrator in Summer 1941, Saunders went into the origins of the comic strip Chief Wahoo. Rather than quote it at length, I'll just show it in its entirety below.

Big Chief Wahoo began in the comics page on November 23, 1936, as The Great Gusto. The name was changed on January 17, 1937. In June 1940, Big Chief Wahoo became just Chief Wahoo. From there, the strip evolved into Chief Wahoo and Steve Roper (1945), then Steve Roper and Wahoo (1946), Steve Roper (1948), and finally Steve Roper and Mike Nomad (1984). Elmer Woggan got credit for drawing Chief Wahoo from its inception until 1954, when William Overgard took over. Allen Saunders was the writer until 1983. He died on January 28, 1986, at age eighty-six.

The Cleveland Indians baseball club was founded in the misty dawn days of the American League and gained its current name in 1915, making this year the team's centennial. (This centennial season didn't turn out very well for the Indians. With a record barely above .500, they finished in the middle of their division.) The logo and mascot of the team are a good deal younger than one hundred years. According to an article called "The Secret History of Chief Wahoo" by Brad Ricca, dated June 19, 2014, the character that became the current logo and mascot first appeared on the front page of the Cleveland Plain Dealer on May 3, 1932. Drawn by Cleveland cartoonist Fred George Leinert (1895-1974), the Plain Dealer's "Little Indian" became wildly popular among fans. The Indian logo didn't become official until 1947 when owner Bill Veeck hired the J.F. Novak Company to come up with something that "would convey a spirit of pure joy and unbridled enthusiasm" in regards to his team. (1, 2) The job of designing the logo fell on seventeen-year-old Walter Goldbach. Through various modifications, the image he created has come down to us as the character we now call Chief Wahoo. However, Mr. Goldbach's new Cleveland Indian wasn't called Chief Wahoo until 1950 or so. There are various theories as to how he acquired that moniker. It could have come from an old cheer. The simplest explanation might be that Cleveland fans took the name right out of the comics page, in which case Allen Saunders, a native of the land of Indians, provided it, though in an indirect way. Whether that's something to be proud of or ashamed of, I can't say.

The controversy and the cartoonist connection continue. An article called "Cartoon Predicted Encounter Between Indians Fan and Chief Wahoo Protester" by Mike Oz (Yahoo Sports, Apr. 7, 2014) shows a photographic image of a Cleveland Indians fan in full regalia facing Robert Roche, executive director of the American Indian Education Center in Parma, Ohio, on opening day in Cleveland. Below that is a cartoon of the same situation, drawn by Lalo Alcaraz twelve years before. The juxtaposition of these two images--the photograph and the cartoon--is a good example of how the cartoonist functions as a canary in the coal mine of society.

Notes

(1) Quoted in "The Curse of Chief Wahoo" by Peter Pattakos from the website Scene, April 25, 2012, here.

(2) Also in 1947, Veeck hired Larry Doby for his club. Doby was the first black player in the American League.

Original text copyright 2015, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Bob Parker (1915-1998)

Robert D. "Bob" Parker was born on August 8, 1915, in Indiana and lived in Fort Wayne as a boy and for most if not all his life. He worked as a photographer and commercial artist, but Bob Parker gained his fame by drawing baseball cards. Unfortunately, I know little else about his life or work. Bob Parker died on May 3, 1998.

Text copyright 2014, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Robert J. Wildhack (1881-1940)

Illustrator, poster artist, and comedian Robert J. Wildhack was born on August 27, 1881, in the central Illinois town of Pekin and attended high school in Indianapolis, where he studied under Otto Stark. After graduating from Manual Training High School in 1899, Wildhack worked as an illustrator for the Indianapolis Sentinel before moving to New York City in 1901. With a year's study under Robert Henri at the Chase School of Art (where his classmates included Glenn O. Coleman, Walter Jack Duncan, Rockwell Kent, Coles Phillips, Edward Hopper, and Guy Pene du Bois), Wildhack began his art career in New York with a sign painting firm. He mixed pigments for ten months before moving on to work as a designer with an advertising agency. Before long, Wildhack's drawing and design work had caught the editor's eye at McClure's magazine, and by the 1910s, Wildhack had become one of the top cover artists and poster artists in America. Among his clients were The Century, Collier's, Life, The Reader, Scribner's, and Success.

Shortly before America's entry into World War I, Wildhack joined Charles Dana Gibson, Henry Reuterdahl, and others in the establishment of the Division of Pictorial Publicity of the Committee on Public Information. Between April 1917 and November 1918, the division provided both government and non-government agencies (such as the Red Cross) with hundreds of posters, cards, and cartoons in support of the war effort. The most famous of these works was undoubtedly James Montgomery Flagg's iconic "Uncle Sam Wants You!" poster.

As a boy in Indianapolis, Wildhack sang in a quartet and developed a talent for mimicry. His talents carried him into the vaudeville theater, his most memorable routine being a catalogue of "Snores and Sneezes," recorded by Victor Records around 1915.  His other recorded routines included "Unnatural History" and "Unnatural History II." After the war ended, Americans began turning away from magazines and towards the silver screen for their entertainment. Wildhack followed the trend by relocating to southern California in 1920. During the thirties, he hosted his own radio show and reprised his early routines on stage and in the movies. In Life Begins at 8:40, a Broadway hit during 1934-1935, Wildhack gave a comic lecture on "Sound Phenomena," scientifically classifying snores such as 2d, "The Westinghouse Airbrake," and 2f, "The Troubled Conscious." As Professor Hornblow, he repeated the routine in Broadway Melody of 1936 (1935), starring Jack Benny and Eleanor Powell.  In Broadway Melody of 1938 (1937), Wildhack went from snorer to sneezer. He played a somewhat less comic role as Rudolph Herzing in Back Door to Heaven in 1939.

A modest career in the movies came to an unfortunate end with Wildhack's death on June 19, 1940, in Montrose, California. Coincidentally, another, more notable screen comedian, Charlie Chase, died on the same day.

A cover by Robert Wildhack for Scribner's magazine, 1910.

And another for Life, 1912. Wildhack was also known as a poster artist, but as his designs show, there wasn't much difference between a poster and the near poster-sized magazine covers of his day.

Text and captions copyright 2011, 2024 by Terence E. Hanley