Paul McCarthy (1910-1991)

Like Charles Schulz of Peanuts fame, Paul McCarthy was the son of a barber. He was born on January 20, 1910, probably in Crawfordsville, Indiana, and graduated from Crawfordsville High School in 1928. By being born in the right place at the right time, McCarthy fell into the "Sugar Crick School," a group of cartoonists that included Allen Saunders, Bill Holman, Frank Beaven, Dave Gerard, Bandel Linn (a classmate of McCarthy), and, later, Tom Henderson. Nappanee, Indiana, lays claim to having the most cartoonists per capita of any city in the United States. Crawfordsville might give Nappanee a run for its money.

Paul McCarthy began his career as a commercial artist in Louisville, Kentucky, and Danville, Illinois. Moving to Toledo, Ohio, he joined Allen Saunders and Elmer Woggon on the staff of their syndicated comic strip Big Chief Wahoo, later just Chief Wahoo. Though politically incorrect by today’s standards, Chief Wahoo was a popular strip in its day. In order to house a growing staff of assistants and ghosts, Saunders and Woggon "rented a suite of offices in a decrepit building across the street from the [Toledo] News-Bee." (1) Among the junior artists there were Elmer's brother Bill Woggan, later of Katy Keene comic books, and Don Dean, later of the newspaper strip Cranberry Boggs.

Paul McCarthy didn't stay long in Toledo. Nineteen forty found him in New York City, working in the publicity department of Paramount Pictures. He also drew magazine gag cartoons and his own syndicated comic strip. It was called Gertie O’Grady and it made its debut on the same day--June 30, 1940--and in the same venue--the Chicago Tribune Comic Book Magazine--as Dale Messick's Brenda Starr Reporter. The main characters in McCarthy's Sunday strip are plump, Irish Gertie O'Grady, mad genius Professor Bunson Burner, and Apercott, Professor Burner's gorilla. Although it appeared in big-market newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune, Gertie O'Grady was short-lived and came to an end on November 14, 1943.

During World War II, McCarthy drew educational comics and cartoons for the war effort. He continued doing commercial and advertising work after the war. In 1950, McCarthy went to work for Harvey Comics, drawing such features as "Holly of Hollywood," "Fun at the Zoo," and "Sad Sack." He is supposed to have worked at Harvey from 1950 to 1963 as a writer, penciler, and inker. Harvey Comics historian Mark Arnold called his work "pristine," and a look at the two-page story below shows as much. (2) We need cartoonists like Paul McCarthy again.

In 1959, Paul McCarthy lived in Somerville, New Jersey. He is said to have died an untimely death in the early 1960s. However, what happened to Paul Joseph McCarthy remains a mystery. I would like for it no longer to be a mystery, and I hope someone can help put an end to it. His obituary states that Paul McCarthy lived in Milford, New Jersey, for the thirty-five years preceding his death. He may have been the same Paul McCarthy who taught art in elementary school in the area during the 1960s and '70s. In any case, Paul J. McCarthy died on July 11, 1991, at Hunterdon Convalescent Center in Raritan Township. He was eighty-one years old. His wife, Blanche Horton McCarthy, preceded him in death in March of the same year. And so at last we have a solution to the problem of the missing cartoonist. I wish we could have him back.

Notes

(1) "Playwright for Paper Actors: The Autobiography of Allen Saunders, Chapter 9: The Foot in the Door Wore a Moccasin" by Allen Saunders in Nemo: The Classic Comics Library, Oct. 1984, pp. 48-50.

(2) "A Family Affair: The Harvey Comics Story" by Mark Arnold in Comic Book Artist, June 2002, pp. 18-38.

You can read more about Paul McCarthy in Allan Holtz's blog, Stripper's Guide, here.

Gertie O'Grady by Paul McCarthy, 1941. Scan by Allan Holtz.

"Fun at the Zoo" from Harvey Comics, date unknown.

An advertising cartoon by McCarthy from Coronet, August 1951.

Finally, a two-page Sad Sack story showing Paul McCarthy's "pristine" style. Date unknown.

Revised and updated, January 30, 2020. Thanks to James Stout (his comment appears under my article "Allen Saunders and Chief Wahoo," here) for the information that has led me to finding Paul McCarthy's date and place of death.

Corrected on March 30, 2025.
Text and captions copyright 2015, 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

A Cartoon for Harvest Time

Eugene Zimmerman, who signed his work "Zim," was one of the most well-known of American cartoonists of the nineteenth century. Born in Basel, Switzerland, on May 26, 1862, Zimmerman came to the United States in 1868. In 1883, he landed a job at Puck, the top humor magazine of its day. In late 1885 or early 1886, he moved over to Judge, where he spent the remainder of his career. Zim died on March 26, 1935, at his home in Horseheads, New York.

Eugene Zimmerman was not a Hoosier, but he drew a cartoon (above) about Hoosiers called "When We Git Dollar Wheat in Injiana." It was published in the February 1897 issue of Judge at a time when racial, regional, ethnic, and dialect humor was one of seemingly only a few types of popular humor, the others including tall tales, hoaxes, pranks, pratfalls, and other buffoonery. Zimmerman's first employer, Joseph Keppler (1838-1894) of Puck, seems to have had an Indiana connection. He may have lived in Indianapolis very briefly before going to New York City. According to Wikipedia, William Merritt Chase (1849-1916) visited the offices of Judge in the year this cartoon was published, there to praise Zim for his artistry. Chase was a born-and-bred Hoosier, probably the most accomplished fine artist to come from Indiana.

So here's a cartoon for harvest time in Indiana.

Caption 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

James Oliver Curwood and the Indiana Connection

I was at PulpFest, the annual pulp magazine convention held in Columbus, Ohio, earlier this month and found a copy of The Flaming Forest by James Oliver Curwood. The art on the dust jacket was by the indispensable Walt Louderback (1887-1941) of Valparaiso, Indiana.

James Oliver Curwood (1878-1927) was one of the most popular authors of his day. His stories of the outdoors, the Great Lakes, and the Far North earned him enough to finance the construction of a Norman-style chateau near his home town of Owosso, Michigan. Called Curwood Castle, it now houses a museum dedicated to his life and works.

Walt Louderback created the dust jacket illustrations for at least four books by Curwood, The Flaming Forest: A Novel of the Canadian Northwest (1921), The Country Beyond: A Romance of the Wilderness (1922), The Alaskan: A Novel of the North (1923), and The Ancient Highway: A Novel of High Hearts and Open Woods (1925). Their titles alone invite you to read them.

Curwood's Indiana connections extended to the publisher of some of his books, Bobbs-Merrill of Indianapolis, and to at least two other illustrators, Gayle Porter Hoskins (1887-1962) of Brazil and Hoskins' instructor Frank Schoonover (1877-1972), who taught at the Herron School of Art in Indianapolis in 1927 and possibly later. Hoskins illustrated Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police (1911) and Kazan (1914), while Schoonover provided the illustrations for The Courage of Captain Plum (1908).

Owosso now holds an annual Curwood Festival in honor of its favorite son. The festival takes place in June. You can find the website of the festival by clicking here.

Text copyright 2015, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Circus Art by John Dukes McKee

It's circus time again in Peru, Indiana, Circus Capital of the World. In celebration, I would like to show some of the circus artwork of Indiana illustrator John Dukes McKee. Born just down the road from Peru in Kokomo, Indiana, Mr. McKee worked as an illustrator of children's books and magazines. The illustrations shown here are from the book The Big Show by Mary Baskerville, published by Rand McNally of Chicago in 1932. So, Step Right This Way Everybody!

Caption copyright 2015, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

James Forbes (1797-1881)

Jonathan Jennings (1784-1834)

First governor of Indiana, painted by Scottish-American portraitist James Forbes (1797-1881).

The president of the first Indiana constitutional convention and the first governor of the State of Indiana was Jonathan Jennings (1784-1834), a man described as "gentle and kind" and one "of polished manners." (1) Jennings, staunch in his opposition to slavery, served two terms as governor and nine terms in the U.S. House of Representatives. Despite all that, he died in poverty, and his body laid in an unmarked grave for fifty-seven years after his death. Jennings County, Indiana, the only Jennings County in America, is named in his honor. It is the birthplace of Jessamyn West (1902-1984) and her cousin, Hannah Milhous Nixon (1885-1967), mother of the president. Jessamyn West's book and the movie made from it, The Friendly Persuasion, are set in the county of her birth.

The official portrait of Jonathan Jennings was painted by James Forbes. In all, Forbes painted six official portraits of Indiana's governors, yet little is--or was--known of him or his career. That has changed a little in this Internet age. The website AskArt lists four artists named James Forbes. Three of those four may very well have been the same man discussed by art historian Wilbur D. Peat in Pioneer Painters of Indiana (1954) and Portraits and Painters of the Governors of Indiana, 1800-1978 (revised edition, 1978). Archivists and genealogists Sandy Stamm and Lynda Hawley of Plainwell, Michigan, have done as much as anyone in uncovering information about James Forbes. I would like to acknowledge and thank them for their work.

James Forbes (Wilbur Peat called him James G. Forbes) was born on October 1, 1797, in Peterhead, Aberdeenshire, Scotland, to William Forbes and Mary (Walker) Forbes. James Forbes painted in Aberdeen and also taught painting there. John Phillip (1817-1867) was one of his students. "During the 1850s," wrote Wilbur Peat, "[Forbes] exhibited his work at the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, and at the Royal Academy and the British Institute, London." (2) He immigrated to the United States in 1859 and by September of that year was in Chicago, where he "conducted an oil painting studio at Washington and Dearborn streets. He had some beautiful specimens of art in his collection." (3) In 1860, Forbes had a studio at 88 LaSalle Street. Wilbur Peat suggested that Forbes was gone from Chicago by 1868, but Lynda Hawley has found information that his studio and many of his paintings were destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.

No one knows how James Forbes came to Indiana. Wilbur Peat speculated that Forbes' acquaintance with H.F. Blount of Evansville "induced him to seek commissions here." (4) According to Peat, Forbes spent several winters in Evansville, a city in the the far southern part of the state and one known for its comparatively mild winters. Evansville may very well have offered a haven to an artist from cold and windy Chicago.

Forbes painted a portrait of Evansville mayor John B. Baker in 1868 or 1869. "Through this commission," related Peat, "Forbes was introduced to Governor Conrad Baker, brother of the mayor, a meeting that resulted in his being asked to paint a number of the governors of Indiana for the Statehouse collection at Indianapolis." (5) The idea of commissioning and collecting portraits of the state's governors was conceived by Governor Baker, who asked that the legislature set aside $200 apiece for the canvases. Thus about ten portraits were completed in 1869-1870, including the six painted by James Forbes in his temporary quarters in Evansville and in Indianapolis. In addition to the portrait of Jonathan Jennings, Forbes created likenesses of governors Ratliff Boon, James Whitcomb, Paris Chipman Dunning, Oliver Perry Morton, and Conrad Baker himself. The first three are copies from other sources, the last three from life.

As for James Forbes' personal life, on May 15, 1824, he married Mary Waters (1797-1853) in Peterhead, Aberdeenshire, Scotland. The couple had eight children, two boys and six girls. Two of the girls died in infancy. Forbes' oldest daughter, Mary Forbes Forbes (she married her cousin William Forbes) was a dressmaker and also a portraitist. Jane Forbes Gamack taught music, while the youngest Forbes girl, Elizabeth or Lizzie Forbes Forbes (she married her cousin John), taught art. Both Mary and Lizzie taught in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

According to archivist Sandy Stamm, the Forbeses and other Scottish families settled in the area of Plainwell, in Allegan County, Michigan, north of Kalamazoo. As evidence, a community called New Aberdeen still exists northwest of Plainwell. Ms. Stamm's associate, Lynda Hawley, writes that James Forbes bought a farm from his brother John Forbes. I assume it to have been in the Plainwell area. In the Federal census of 1880, Forbes was living with his daughter Mary and her husband (his nephew) William Forbes in the village of Plainwell. James Forbes died the following year, on March 25, 1881, in Plainwell. He was eighty-three years old. In the coming bicentennial of the first Indiana constitutional convention, I would like to remember the president of that convention, Jonathan Jennings, and the artist who painted his official portrait, James Forbes.

Notes

(1) Quoted in Portraits and Painters of the Governors of Indiana, 1800-1978 by Wilbur Peat, Diane Gail Lazarus, and Lana Ruegamer (Indiana Historical Society and Indianapolis Museum of Art, 1978), p. 16.

(2) Pioneer Painters of Indiana by Wilbur D. Peat (Indianapolis: Art Association of Indianapolis, 1954), p. 49.

(3) History of Cook County, Illinois, Vol. 1 (1909), p. 587.

(4) Pioneer Painters, p. 49.

(5) Ditto, p. 50.

Thanks to Sandy Stamm, Lynda Hawley, and Ransom District Library, Plainwell, Michigan, for further information on James Forbes.

Text copyright 2015, 2024 Terence E. Hanley