Brother Ernest, C.S.C. (1897-1963) & Nancy Garner (1924-2009)

Several years ago, I was at the Indiana State Library in Indianapolis and they were giving away copies of Indiana Authors and Their Books. Three prized and well-made volumes and they were just giving them away. So I took them home and paged through them, reading entries here and there and cataloguing authors of special interest to me, on aviation or genre fiction such as science fiction, fantasy, Westerns, and so on. These books have a special place on my bookshelf and I prize them still.

One of the things you'll notice in reading about Indiana authors is just how many have written on religious subjects. Native Hoosiers are generally conservative and many are churchgoing. These two attributes have helped to build among us a resistance to nonsense. That resistance breaks down occasionally, but most of the time it serves us pretty well.

For Christians, this is Holy Week, which culminates in the celebration of Easter, the holiest day of the year. Just last week, a couple of days before Palm Sunday in fact, I came upon a book by an Indiana author, probably illustrated by an Indiana artist, and on a Christian subject. My friend Troy plopped this book into my cart at the local secondhand store. It came at just the right time. The book is called The Son of Thunder: A Story of St. John the Apostle, and it was written by Brother Ernest, C.S.C. The illustrator was Nancy Garner. It's a slim book, a biography for children and just thirty-eight pages long. It was published by Dujarie Press of Notre Dame, Indiana, in 1947.

Brother Ernest was born John Dominic Ryan on August 4, 1897, in Elyria, Ohio. In 1918, he entered the Congregation of Holy Cross of Notre Dame and took his vows in 1923. He received his bachelor's degree from the University of Notre Dame in 1925, a degree in library science from Catholic University of America, and a master's degree from the University of Portland. Brother Ernest taught in Evansville, Indiana; New Orleans; Indianapolis; Portland, Oregon; and at Notre Dame. The Dujarie Press of Notre Dame was his creation. He founded it in 1943, but even before then he was an author. His first book listed in Indiana Authors and Their Books is Our Brothers, from 1931, but in his thirty-year career, Brother Ernest wrote scores of books, most of them biographies of saints for young readers. At some point he gave up teaching in order to devote himself to writing and to the operation of the Dujarie Press.

The illustrator of The Son of Thunder was Nancy Garner. She was born on April 3, 1924, in New Albany, Indiana, to Dr. William H. Garner, Sr., a surgeon, and Mary Louise Cavanaugh Garner. Unfortunately I have found nothing on her. I suspect she was a student: her work has the look of a young person learning her art. I suspect also that she was an artist close at hand, perhaps at St. Mary's College of Notre Dame, which was at the time affiliated with the University of Notre Dame. If she was indeed a young artist, She attended St. Mary's College, which was at that time affiliated with Notre Dame University. In 1947, when The Son of Thunder was published, Nancy Garner was a young artist. We can imagine her excitement from that long-ago time in receiving an assignment to illustrate the life of another young person, John the Apostle and Evangelist. In about 1947, she married, eventually to have five children. Nancy Marie Garner died on July 12, 2009, in Toledo, Ohio, at age eighty-five. Brother Ernest, C.S.C. (Congregatio a Sancta Cruce) died on March 4, 1963, in Notre Dame and was buried at Holy Cross Cemetery in the same place.

HAPPY EASTER!

Updated on May 27, 2024. Thanks to Mary Clare Decker for information on Nancy Garner.

Text copyright 2021, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

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

Tom Floyd (1928-2011)

Cartoonist and commercial artist Thomas Wesley Floyd, Sr., was born on July 13, 1928,* in Gary, Indiana, to William Webster Floyd (1894-1936), a laborer in a steel mill, and Alice James Floyd (dates unknown), a housewife. Tom Floyd's parents came from the South, William from Wetumpka, Alabama, Alice from Mississippi. They were married on March 1, 1923, in Crown Point, Indiana.

Tom Floyd was their fourth child, but only three of those four showed up in the census of 1930, Tom, his older sister (Mary) Juanita, and his older brother James Frederick. All three were born in Indiana, and the family lived in Gary, the largest American city founded in the twentieth century and one known for its steel mills. In the census of 1940, Tom and his siblings were living in the household of their maternal grandparents, Walter and Ollie James. Walter James died in 1945.

Tom Floyd graduated from the University of Illinois in 1953 with a bachelor's degree in commercial art. He ran his own advertising business in Gary and worked as a designer of visual aids in the training department of Inland Steel Company, also in Gary. By 1971, he was vice president of W.V. Rouse & Associates of Chicago, a management consulting firm engaged in minority relations. Over the course of his career, Floyd also worked as an editorial cartoonist, single-panel cartoonist, comic strip artist, and comic book scriptwriter.

Race and minority relations were a continuing theme and interest in his life and work. He is best known for his cartoon collection Integration Is a Bitch! (1969), subtitled "An Assessment by a Black-White Collar Worker," but he also wrote and drew the cartoons for a second book, The Hook Book . . . The ABC's of Drug Abuse . . ., which he self-published in 1973 under his own firm, Tom Floyd Visuals of Gary, Indiana. It's a cute book on a serious and deadly subject. I stand with the late Mr. Floyd in his opposition to drugs and drug abuse, which has helped to ruin not just black people but all kinds of people in America and the world over. Integration Is a Bitch! won the Book of the Year Award from the National Conference of Christians and Jews in 1971.

In 2012, comics historian Allan Holtz published a monumental work, American Newspaper Comics: An Encyclopedic Reference Guide. In the index of authors and cartoonists, there is a single-name credit, "Floyd," for a person who created three comic features for the Chicago Defender during the 1960s. I don't think there can be any doubt that the artist in question was Tom Floyd. The three features credited to "Floyd" are:

• At the Brink with J.J., which ran from December 11, 1965, to February 3, 1968 (It was renamed King Freedom. I don't have dates for that title.)
• Color Cuties, which ran from December 11, 1965, to March 30, 1968
• Integration Chuckles, which ran from December 11, 1965, to March 23, 1968

I have a sample only of the first title (shown below). Comparing a sample of Integration Chuckles with the cartoons in Integration Is a Bitch! might be all the evidence we need to show that "Floyd" and Tom Floyd were the same person. (A comparison of signatures, also shown below, makes pretty good evidence, too.)

Beginning in the 1960s, Floyd was involved in a project for which every comic book fan, especially every Hoosier comic book fan, can shout Yay! The project was a comic book about a black superhero called Blackman, who flies by pulling on his own bootstraps and who likes to eat peanuts. (We should remember that Floyd's parents were both Southerners.) Blackman finally made it into print in 1981 as a one-shot comic book pencilled by Eric O'Kelley and inked by Danny Loggins working from Floyd's script. It was published by Leader Comics Group, which is supposed to have been based in Indiana. I would like to think that that makes Eric O'Kelley and Danny Loggins Hoosier cartoonists, as well. By the way, Tom Floyd developed a supergroup that included Blackwoman, The Brotherhood, and The Big Dunker. 

In the 1980s, Floyd drew editorial cartoons for the Gary Post-Tribune. One of his drawings was included in the 1984 edition of Best Editorial Cartoons of the Year, edited by Charles Brooks. (See below.) Tom Floyd married Wynona Marie Gibson, a native Illinoisan, on February 25, 1956, in Cook County, Illinois, presumably in Chicago. They had three children. Thomas W. Floyd, Sr., died on September 22, 2011, in Gary, Indiana. He was eighty-three years old.

*Although his year of birth is everywhere given as 1929, Tom Floyd's birth certificate states clearly that he was born in 1928.

A cartoon from Integration Is a Bitch! by Tom Floyd. Floyd's book was published more than half a century ago, yet many--if not all--of his cartoons are still pertinent. This is one of my favorites--". . . And this is our Negro!"--an outright acknowledgment of a kind of tokenism that is never supposed to be spoken of or noticed. Note that one of the people applauding is a clergyman. I take that to be a poke at the virtue-signaling liberalism of mainstream religion in America.

At the Brink with J.J. by "Floyd" from the comics page of the Tri-State Defender, Memphis, Tennessee, July 9, 1966.

The cover of Blackman #1, a one-shot comic book written by Tom Floyd, penciled by Eric O'Kelley, and inked by Danny Loggins.

An editorial cartoon by Tom Floyd from the Gary Post-Tribune from 1984. Note the signature on the upper right and its resemblance to the signature in the comic strip At the Brink with J.J. from 1966. The same signature is on the cartoons for Integration Is a Bitch!

A photograph of Tom Floyd with his comic-book superhero, Blackman, in an article from 1995. Photograph by Milbert Orlando Brown.

Text copyright 2021, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

The International Day of the Cartoonist 2021

Since 2015, I have here observed the International Day of the Cartoonist in honor and memory of five French cartoonists murdered for their art. They were Wolinski, Cabu, Honoré, Tignous, and Charb, respectively, George David Wolinski (1934-2015), Jean Cabut (1938-2015), Philippe Honoré (1941-2015), Bernard Verlhac (1957-2015), and Stéphane Charbonnier (1967-2015). They were killed on this day in 2015 by Islamist terrorists in the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris.

The same kind of terrorist infamously killed another Frenchman in 2020 because he showed some cartoons to his students. He was Samuel Paty (1973-2020), and he was a middle school teacher in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, a suburb of Paris. Every year since the Charlie Hebdo massacre, M. Paty showed his students cartoons drawn by its cartoonists depicting a person revered by Muslims. When he did the same thing in October 2020, a young Muslim man took offense, and on October 16, 2020, he killed and beheaded Samuel Paty in the street near his school. A few minutes later, police tried to arrest the killer. When he resisted, they shot him dead. The French government was strong in its response to the murder. Some Western media, including in the United States, were characteristically weak. The French showed strength and resolve. Some Americans, Canadians, and Europeans showed their bellies.

The French president awarded M. Paty the Légion d'honneur posthumously. I think we can honor him, too, for his courage and for his devotion to the principles of freedom of thought and expression and of resistance to tyranny and oppression. There are cartoonists all over the world currently engaged in the same kinds of things. We should honor and remember them, too.

Postdated to January 7, 2021.

Copyright 2021, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Pictures for a Year's End-No. 5

I'll close this series and the year with two illustrations for children's books, plus a magazine gag cartoon.

Kokomo native Norman Bridwell (1928-2014) may be renowned for his many books about Clifford the Big Red Dog, but he also illustrated this one featuring a small brown dog. The book is How to Care for Your Dog (1964), and the author is Jean Bethell. 

Jared Lee (b. 1943) is another well-loved children's book illustrator. He was born in Van Buren, Indiana, and now lives in Ohio. The picture shown here is from Monster Manners by Joanna Cole. It was published in 1985.

Finally, a drawing by Clyde Lamb (1913-1966) from the cartoon collection The Jokeswagon Book (1966), published during the Volkswagon craze of the 1960s. Lamb wasn't born in Indiana, nor did he go to school here or teach here or work here. Instead he was incarcerated in the Hoosier State in the 1930s and '40s. After gaining his freedom, he drew gag cartoons and created full-color illustrations for calendars published by Brown and Bigelow of St. Paul, Minnesota.

Text copyright 2020, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Pictures for a Year's End-No. 4

I was happy to find this book recently at a secondhand store in Indianapolis. It's called The Hook Book . . . The ABC's of Drug Abuse (1973), and it's by Tom Floyd. A native of Gary, Thomas W. Floyd, Sr. (1928-2011) was a newspaper cartoonist and commercial artist who ran his own firm called Tom Floyd Visuals. He also contributed cartoons to Jet magazine. I hate drugs and drug use and am happy to have shared those feelings with the late Mr. Floyd, who wrote in his introduction, addressed to young people: "Don't ever start. Don't let anyone, under any circumstances, 'con' you into trying something that is so life destroying as drugs and the abuse of alcohol." By the way, The ABC's of Drug Abuse was printed by Cornelius Printing Company of Indianapolis, at one time the printer of Weird Tales magazine.

Original text copyright 2020, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Pictures for a Year's End-No. 3

Rob Day of Indianapolis provided the cover illustration for Maphead By Lesley Howarth (1994). You can find Mr. Day's website by clicking here.

Text copyright 2020, 2024 Terence E. Hanley