Jerry Stewart (1923-1995)

Gerald W. "Jerry" Stewart was born on May 18, 1923, in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, onetime home of Henry Jackson Lewis, who is considered the first black political cartoonist in American history. As a high school student, Stewart attended Fort Wayne Art Institute. During World War II he was staff artist on the Dalhart Bomber, camp newspaper of Dalhart Army Air Field in Dalhart, Texas. On March 25, 1946, Stewart started work as a copyboy for the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel. He was the newspaper's first black employee. Three months later he was promoted to staff artist. Stewart spent the next forty years with the News-Sentinel working alongside editorial cartoonists Eugene Craig and William Sandeson.

Jerry Stewart was the author of a number of syndicated comic strips and cartoons, most of which ran in black newspapers. Chickie and L'il Brother, both from 1947, were his first. Those features ran in the Washington Afro-American and possibly other papers. Scoopie, syndicated by the Pittsburgh Courier, was in syndication from June 19, 1949, to August 12, 1950. The title character, as his nickname suggests, is a newspaper reporter. Stewart's longest-running feature was Little Moments, also called Life's Little Moments. A single-panel cartoon, it ran from 1963 to 1972. Beginning in 1977, Stewart also wrote and illustrated a weekly column called "Cooking with Jerry" for the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel.

Stewart retired from the News-Sentinel on May 30, 1986. That same year he won the Indiana Journalism Award from Ball State University, calling it "a nice way to cap off my career." Since 1977, Stewart had been teaching art at St. Peter's Catholic Church in Fort Wayne. He continued that work after retirement. On October 29, 1995, Jerry Stewart died in Fort Wayne. He was buried in the Catholic Cemetery of Fort Wayne.

Jerry Stewart illustrated Lines and Angles, a collection of newspaper columns by Cliff Milnor published in 1980. That's the artist in the upper right looking upon the world from his own little corner as artists often do.

And here is a larger self-portrait from the same book. Jerry Stewart made a place for himself in the history of comics by having his work syndicated in the nation's black newspapers. Unfortunately, that's a chapter missing from the story of American journalism, and especially American newspaper cartooning. We very desperately need a history of black comics. If one is to be written, we must begin by gathering sources. Does anyone have information about the newspapers, the publishers and editors, the syndicates, the comics, and the cartoonists?

Text and captions copyright 2015, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Mightier Than the Sword

"No political cartoonist is worth his salt who misuses his valuable space by drawing inoffensive, pretty pictures about the news. A political cartoon is a weapon of attack to be used against the evils and the follies of society. It is potentially the strongest weapon in modern journalism. Often it is drawn in good humor and often it is not. It does not matter how it is drawn if it achieves the purpose of the cartoonist. His purpose is not to be well-liked and popular. It is to reveal injustice and deflate humbug. His purpose is to sting you to awareness of what he regards as a social evil."

--Scott Long 

In his preface to The McDonald Book: A Collection of Editorial Cartoons by the Grand Forks Herald’s Award Winning Cartoonist [Stuart McDonald] (1963)

* * *

"In the long, fierce struggle for freedom of opinion, the press, like the Church, counted its martyrs by thousands."

--James A. Garfield

Quoted in Our American Heritage, Charles L. Wallis, editor (1970)

Thanks to BH for the first quote.

Artists Murdered for Their Art

Today, in Paris, five cartoonists were murdered for their art. Their names 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). One cartoonist, Corinne Rey, escaped with her life. In all likelihood, there have never been so many cartoonists to die in one day, certainly never in a single incident. Those five murdered cartoonists probably outnumber all other murdered cartoonists in history. The men who murdered them subscribe to a belief system that readily and perversely claims martyrdom in murder. The true martyrs today were the cartoonists themselves. Ironically, they worked for a leftist and anti-religious newspaper called Charlie Hebdo, and in consequence might very well decline conventional martyrdom. Perhaps significantly, one of the cartoonists was Jewish.

Like artists everywhere, those five French cartoonists sought to bring new things into creation, to express themselves through their art, and to throw the light of truth upon a benighted earth. And like cartoonists everywhere, they wished to expose the evil, corruption, folly, and oppression that exist among men and their institutions. For that they were murdered by the kind of men who have existed in every time and place, men who seek to deny free expression and to deprive others of their rights, their freedoms, their property, and their lives, men who prefer darkness to light and lies to the truth. These men go by a different name today than they did during much of the twentieth century, yet we have seen their kind before and we have defeated them before. We can defeat them again by recognizing the threat, by taking action against those who threaten us and our way of life, but perhaps most importantly by not sympathizing or collaborating with them, and by not supporting them or excusing their actions in any way, as so many in Europe, Great Britain, and America seem so willing to do. An added irony is that today's murderers did by violence what some Western governments, certain journalists, and various individuals have wished to do by disapprobation, censorship, or force of law--they silenced the voices of dissent.

If we are to survive, we must have the clarity of vision, the uncompromising desire to tell the truth, and the quotidian courage of the artist--the cartoonist--who stands at the barricades against murder, lies, tyranny, and oppression. I have a modest proposal: Let January 7 forever after today be the International Day of the Cartoonist.

Copyright 2015, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

George C. Peed (1913-2002)

George Peed was not well known by name, not like Dr. Seuss or Maurice Sendak, but if you were a child in America in the 1970s, you were probably familiar with his art, for Peed created countless covers for Peter Pan Records of Newark, New Jersey, a place not far from his adopted home. Make no mistake though--George Peed was a Hoosier through and through.

George C. Peed was born on September 27, 1913, in Grandview, Indiana, a place on the Ohio River. A younger brother, William Bartlett Peed, came into the world sixteen months later, on January 29, 1915. When the two boys and their brother were still quite young, they moved with their mother to Indianapolis. Their father had been drafted into the army during World War I, and though he didn't go overseas, he also didn't go back to his family. To those who asked, Mrs. Peed, a teacher, simply said that her husband was a traveling salesman and away on a trip.

The Peed boys grew up on the east side of Indianapolis and attended Arsenal Technical High School. George and Bill, both artists, also attended the Herron School of Art, and both signed on with Walt Disney studios in the 1930s. Bill Peed later changed his name to Bill Peet and went on to a long career with Walt Disney. In the early 1960s, he left Disney and began writing and illustrating children's books. There were three dozen in all, including Bill Peet: An Autobiography (1989), a Caldecott Honor Book and ALA Honor Book. Bill Peet died on May 11, 2002. 

Older brother George enlisted in the U.S. Army in April 1941 and served with a special unit of artists and writers, the Signal Corps Photographic Center, based in Astoria, in Long Island City, New York, and at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. Among the others in the unit were Frank Capra, William Saroyan, Charles Addams, Sam Cobean, Stan Lee, and the writers Ivan Goff, Ben Roberts, and Gerry Davis. After the war, George Peed worked as a commercial artist, apparently in the area of New York and New Jersey. He did the character designs for the animated television series The Mighty Hercules (1963-1964), but it is for his album cover designs for Peter Pan Records that George Peed is known today. It's Christmastime, and so I would like to show some of them. I will close by noting that George Peed's last place of residence was Park Ridge in Bergen County, New Jersey, and that he died on April 18, 2002, less than a month before his brother Bill.

Merry Christmas To All!

Text copyright 2014, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Hoosier Cartoonist Roy Anderson Ketcham in Italy

Italian writer, cartoonist, and illustrator Giancarlo Malagutti has written about Hoosier cartoonist Roy Anderson Ketcham on a blog called afNews.info. Signor Malagutti's article is entitled "Il Caso di Della Street e il Fumetto" ("The Case of Della Street and the Comic") and it is dated December 2, 2014. You can access it by clicking here. Signor Malagutti contacted me recently about Roy A. Ketcham and his newspaper comic strip Bowleg Bill/Ramblin' Bill (1939-1941). It is because of Signor Malagutti that I found out that Ketcham was not only an illustrator but also the cartoonist on a Western comic strip syndicated in papers nationwide. I am much indebted to Giancarlo Malagutti and wish to say to him mille grazie!

Copyright 2014, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Happy Thanksgiving!

"Thanksgiving Day in Old New England" by Johnny Gruelle from Judge, about one hundred years gone.

Terence E. Hanley, 2014, 2024.

Roy Anderson Ketcham (1894-1969)

Few artists are as accomplished in fine art as they are in cartooning and illustration. Roy Anderson Ketcham was one who was. Described as "a strapping big blond--a good cross between an Apollo and a college football center," (1) Ketcham studied in Indianapolis, Paris, and Provincetown, won two prizes for his paintings at the Hoosier Salon and other prizes in New York, exhibited among well-known Chicago artists, and taught at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. He also drew a nationally syndicated comic strip and two comic panels.

Born on November 11, 1894, in Sandborn, Indiana, hardworking Roy Ketcham grew up in Indianapolis, where he attended Shortridge High School and delivered newspapers for the Indianapolis Star. His parents, Lewis (or Louis) M. and Sarah M. Anderson Ketcham, were not well off. If he was going to attend art school, Ketcham would have to earn his own tuition and expenses, so every morning he arose at two o'clock to deliver newspapers on a route just southeast of downtown. "Seems as if I had hundreds of customers," Ketcham recalled, "about three times as many as most of the carriers." (2) Covering his route by bicycle, Ketcham hurried to get his work done before school. By eight o'clock he was in class.

At the same time he was attending Shortridge High School, Ketcham was taking classes at the Herron School of Art under William Forsyth and Clifton Wheeler. He studied at Herron from 1910 to 1913. Among his classmates were Wayman Adams, Minnie Ellsworth Bartlett, Clotilde Embree Funk, Carl C. Graf, Marie Gray, William F. Heitman, Cobb Shinn, and the botanist J.E. Potzger. Another fellow student, Grace Spear, remembered Ketcham as "a popular, likeable [sic] boy. He also was a musician and attended music school along with his art classes. He was a busy lad, also working in his spare moments." (3)

Ketcham's last session at Herron came to an end in June 1913, presumably at about the same time he graduated from high school. A moment of decision seemed upon him, but his uncle came to the rescue by paying for further schooling. In August 1913, eighteen-year-old Roy Ketcham left Indianapolis for New York City, there to embark for France and studies at the Académie Julian under Jean-Paul Laurens (1838-1921). Ketcham was in Paris when war broke out in August 1914. How he returned to the United States is a story known perhaps only to his surviving family members. In 1915 he won the Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney mural prize, presumably in New York. (4) He also won an award from the Art Students League in that city.

Roy Ketcham studied for a season with the portraitist and genre painter Charles Hawthorne (1872-1930) in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and won a prize for his work there. By then, however, exhaustion had set in and the artist began suffering from poor eyesight. Repairing to his father's farm in Loogootee, in Martin County, Indiana, Ketcham spent the next several years in seclusion, pitching hay, working a team of mules, and operating a corn cultivator. "My feeling for painting was gone," he remembered. "It was like being lost."

It wasn't long before Ketcham found himself again. His eyesight improved and he began painting again while on the the farm. Sometime in the early 1920s, he went to Chicago, got a job in a department store, enrolled at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, and soon opened his own studio. The exhaustion and indecision had passed. "I've never been undecided since," Ketcham recalled in 1937. "It was just a matter of making up my mind, and that hard work on the farm helped do it." (5)

Roy Anderson Ketcham was known as a painter of portraits and still-life, but even a fine artist must eat. In the 1920s, Ketcham put food on the table by working as a cartoonist and illustrator for the Chicago Sun-Times and Junior Homes, The Something-to-Do-Magazine for Mothers and Children. (His work was printed in that magazine in 1927 and 1928.) In early 1927 (perhaps a little before), he began drawing the newspaper comic panel Poor Pa. Written by humorist and newspaper columnist Claude Callan (1881-1956), Poor Pa is a single-panel cartoon on the model of Abe Martin by Kin Hubbard. The art is uncredited and has been attributed to John H. Striebel. A newspaper article from April 1927 gives credit to Ketcham. (6) Very likely both men worked on the feature at various times. Poor Pa ran in syndication from 1926 to soon after Callan's death in 1956.

Roy Ketcham and John H. Striebel (1891-1962) may very well have had a working relationship, for Ketcham worked not only on Poor Pa but also on Aunt Het, a very similar single-panel cartoon in syndication from 1921 to 1967. Striebel, who also drew Dixie Dugan, was the credited artist from the inception of Aunt Het until his death in 1962. Ketcham took over then and drew the feature until it came to an end in early 1967. Aunt Het was written by newspaperman and humorist Robert Quillen from 1921 to his death in 1948, whereupon his widow, Marcelle Babb Quillen, took over the writing. It's worth noting that Roy Ketcham painted portraits of both Poor Pa and Aunt Het, both used in promoting the features. For the past thirty years, Quillen's hometown of Fountain Inn, South Carolina, has put on an Aunt Het fall festival. 

In 1931, Ketcham won the Indianapolis Star prize at the annual Hoosier Salon, held at the Marshall Fields and Company Galleries in Chicago. His entry was a portrait of a young boy, entitled "Bob." The artist repeated that win in 1937 with "The Long Grey Line," a portrait of Arthur Meier, Jr., a Chicago army cadet. Ketcham placed two other child portraits, "Sissie" and "Sailor," in the Hoosier Salon that year. In the previous year, his "Still-Life" was hung in the Fortieth Annual Exhibition by Artists of Chicago and Vicinity at the Art Institute of Chicago.

On October 30, 1939, a new Western comic strip made its debut in American newspapers. Called Bowleg Bill, it was based on a book, Bowleg Bill, The Sea-Going Cowboy, written by Jeremiah Digges and illustrated by William Gropper (1938). (7) Bowleg Bill is a tall tale in the tradition of Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill, and Captain Stormalong. Its author, Jeremiah Digges, was the credited writer on the comic strip Bowleg Bill. The artist was Roy A. Ketcham, who signed his name simply "Ketcham." In August 1941, Bowleg Bill became Ramblin' Bill. Three months later it was taken over by Marvin P. Bradley, called "Tex" even though he, like Ketcham, was a Midwesterner. (8) By then the strip had put behind it any telling of tall tales. "So modern was the strip," wrote Ron Goulart, "that Bradley never got around to drawing a horse during his tenure." (9)

During his run on Bowleg Bill/Ramblin' Bill, Roy Ketcham taught at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. Among his students was a young aspiring actress and artist, Barbara Hale. Born in 1922 in DeKalb, Illinois, Barbara graduated from high school in Rockford, Illinois, in 1940 and set off for art school in Chicago in September of that year. Her plan was to become a commercial illustrator and fashion illustrator. That plan changed while she was studying art, for Barbara began modeling for Roy Ketcham for the comic strip Bowleg Bill/Ramblin' Bill. Within a year or two, she was also modeling for newspaper and magazine fashion advertisements. Hollywood scouts took note, and in early 1943, she signed a contract with RKO Radio Pictures. Barbara Hale went on to a successful career in movies and television. She is best known for her part as Della Street on the television show Perry Mason (1957-1966). (10)

According to Allan Holtz's American Newspaper Comics: An Encyclopedic Reference Guide (2012), Roy Ketcham's last episode of Ramblin' Bill was printed in November 1941. The strip came to an end on August 28, 1943, when "Tex" Bradley sent him off to war. Ketcham continued drawing comics, presumably Poor Pa, Aunt Het, and possibly others. (He had also created illustrations for The Child's Story of Science by Ramon Peyton Coffman, better known as Uncle Ray [1939].) Ketcham lived in Blue Island, Illinois, for many years, then Portage, Michigan, and finally Schoolcraft, Michigan. Roy Anderson Ketcham died in Schoolcraft on November 10, 1969. He was a day short of his seventy-fifth birthday.

Bowleg Bill/Ramblin' Bill by Roy Anderson Ketcham, dated October 25, year unknown, and because the year is unknown, the correct title is unknown. (Bowleg Bill became Ramblin' Bill on August 4, 1941.) If this strip is from 1940 or 1941, Barbara Hale may have been a model for one or both female characters. As you can see, Bill was a modern-day character, at least in the later run of the strip. Image courtesy of Giancarlo Malagutti.

Ramblin' Bill by Marvin P. "Tex" Bradley, dated August 28, 1943, and the last episode of a strip begun by Ketcham.

Caricatures of members of the Chicago Palette and Chisel Club, drawn by Paul Plaschke, date unknown. Big, blond Roy Ketcham is number 18, in the lower center of the picture and smoking a pipe. Plaschke, Ketcham, Bradley, Hubbard, Striebel, and Uncle Ray all had Indiana connections, for all were either born, educated, lived, and/or worked in the Hoosier State.

I would like to say a special thanks to the Italian cartoonist and comics historian Giancarlo Malagutti, who led me to find out more about Roy Anderson Ketcham and who generously provided the first comic strip image shown above. Signor Malagutti's website is called Mathias, and you can reach it by clicking:

http://www.mathias.is.it/mathias/h_o_m_e.html

Thanks also to Carolyn, clerk at the Schoolcraft Community Library in Schoolcraft, Michigan, for Ketcham's obituary.

This article is an update to my original posting on Roy Anderson Ketcham, dated July 15, 2012.

Notes

(1) "Roy Ketcham, Former Star Carrier, Twice Winner of Its Salon Prize," Indianapolis Star, Mar. 7, 1937, part 5, p. 3.

(2) Quoted in ditto.

(3) Quoted in "1937 Hoosier Salon Portraiture Winner Studied at John Herron," Indianapolis News, Feb. 18, 1937, part 2, p. 1.

(4) Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney was Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875-1942), daughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt II, heiress to his fortune, patron (or matron) of the arts, and founder of the Whitney Museum of American Art. 

(5) Quoted in "1937 Hoosier Salon Portraiture Winner Studied at John Herron."

(6) "Poor Pa, Himself!" Sandusky Register (Michigan), Apr. 17, 1927: 3.

(7) Jeremiah Digges was the pen name of journalist, author, editor, speechwriter, and television scenarist Josef (or Joseph) Isadore Berger (1903-1971).

(8) Like Ketcham, Marvin P. Bradley (1913-1986) studied at the Herron School of Art in Indianapolis. He went on to draw Rex Morgan, M.D., among other comic strips.

(9) The Funnies: 100 Years of American Comic Strips by Ron Goulart (1995), pp. 156-157.

(10) In one episode, "The Case of the Absent Artist," Perry Mason clears a cartoonist, played by Wynne Pearce, of murder. In coming full circle, I should note that Barbara Hale's son, William Katt, played television's Greatest American Hero and has written for the comic book version of the show. His character's name in The Greatest American Hero (1981-1983) is Ralph Hinckley, Jr., changed to Hanley after the attempt on Ronald Reagan's life in 1981. As children, we in the Hanley family were thrilled to have a television character--a superhero, even!--with our name.

Text and captions copyright 2014, 2024 Terence E. Hanley