A Curious Man: The Strange and Brilliant Life of Robert Believe It or Not! Ripley

by Neal Thompson

  Charles F. Schulz, whose ill-mannered dog became the cartoon legend Snoopy, was just fourteen.

  AFTER NEARLY THIRTY YEARS of cartooning, Ripley’s newspaper panel could feel as constrictive as a cell. He sometimes preferred the excitement of NBC’s radio studios at Rockefeller Center over the solo grind of the drawing table. This was partly thanks to Doug Storer, who by 1937 had begun managing Ripley’s radio career with brio.

  When a successful two-year run with Ozzie and Harriet ended in July of 1937, Storer sought a new sponsor with deeper pockets. He signed with General Foods, which was promoting a new breakfast cereal called Huskies. “Believe It or Not Featuring Robert Ripley” would air over NBC’s Red Network.

  In addition to Ripley’s $3,500 weekly salary, General Foods agreed to fund an annual vacation of eight to thirteen weeks, at $1,500 a week. The thirty-minute show was set to air Friday nights but soon switched to the prime eight p.m. Saturday slot, temporarily easing Ripley’s concerns about upstarts and imitators.

  Ripley felt restricted by his previous show and had urged Storer to find a more progressive sponsor. He’d developed a sense of the growing power of radio and hoped to take his show in a new direction, attempting more groundbreaking broadcasts from remote locations, such as airing from the Cave of the Winds beneath Niagara Falls, where he would interview the man who in 1928 had soared over the falls inside a huge rubber ball.

  Storer encouraged the concept, impressed by Ripley’s enthusiasm for radio adventure. In Ripley’s view, he needed to take risks to keep a step ahead of his rivals. Just before launching his new show, Ripley told a reporter that as a former baseball and handball player, he’d retained a competitive streak. “I take a great delight in competing on the air as a radio artist, not as a cartoonist,” he said. “It makes me very happy to be a success in radio, for it’s the last thing I’d ever imagine I could do.”

  His new shows, beginning in mid-1937, featured two types of segments. The first were interviews with Ripley’s “living Believe-It-or-Nots”—the blind woman whose sight was restored, the woman who had lived for years inside an iron lung, and the story of a man who survived getting blown by pressurized air through a hole in the roof of an underwater tunnel. The other segments were dramatic reenactments of Ripley’s cartoons, including the story of a Mexican man who survived a firing-squad execution and whose scarred flesh still carried the bullets. But Ripley and Storer constantly reached for fresher, weirder ideas, offering to pay the expenses of anyone with a good story who was willing to come to New York and bare their soul on NBC.

  Occasionally, Ripley welcomed celebrity guests—Shirley Temple or Somerset Maugham or Lou Gehrig, whom he interviewed within hours of Gehrig’s record-breaking two thousandth game. Gehrig accidentally veered off script and said his favorite breakfast cereal was “a big bowl of Wheaties”—a competitor of the show’s sponsor. When Ripley invited the mayor of Hell, Norway, onto his show, he proudly persuaded Lorentz Stenvig to state on the air, “It’s hotter than Hell in New York!”

  Toward the end of the first twenty-six-week season, with a hiatus upcoming in early 1938, Storer convinced Ripley to finally allow a dentist to attempt to fix the offensive teeth that had been a lifelong handicap. Public-speaking lessons had greatly improved Ripley’s stuttering, and he rarely went on air anymore without a nerve-calming cup of liquor. But the teeth had continued to mangle certain letters and words.

  His dentist felt it wasn’t possible to corral them with braces, that Ripley’s situation required more drastic measures. He yanked out the front teeth and replanted them at a less disfiguring angle. (Ripley asked not to make them too straight, since the imperfection was part of his brand.) After the procedure, his teeth were held in place for weeks by thin wires, and they slowly settled back into the gums. Ripley was soon back on the air, though not without months of pain and discomfort.

  One columnist wrote that “the sudden oratorical ease of Robert L. Ripley over the radio is the celebrity accomplishment of the hour … He devoted a year to it and now has everything under control.”

  RIPLEY’S MOST POPULAR SHOWS were those in which unknown people shared their most personal stories. He reunited a sister and brother born seventy years earlier, allegedly in a set of sextuplets, who hadn’t seen each other for twenty-five years. Another show reunited twin sisters who had been separated at birth and adopted by different families. “Marjorie, meet your twin sister Shirley,” Ripley said, as the estranged sisters tearfully embraced.

  One show featured a couple who got married forty-four years after their original wedding date. They had fought that day, canceled the wedding, and later married others. When their respective spouses died, they found each other again and wed. Ripley also introduced listeners to “The Modern Adam and Eve,” who married after the woman was injured in a car accident and the man donated a rib to help surgeons repair her injuries.

  It turned out that Ripley was well suited to moderate family reunions and on-air retellings of odd marriages and divorces, of reunited twins and orphans. He was a patient and empathetic interviewer, whether his guests were disfigured or handicapped or from some distant land. As one who had suffered humiliation and loss in his own life, he seemed to understand the discomfort of others. As one who had mingled with all classes, he seemed to possess some reserve of compassion, coming across as gentle and nonjudgmental. Guests responded by speaking honestly and emotionally, as they would decades later with Phil Donahue or Oprah Winfrey.

  IN JULY OF 1938, a pilot named Douglas Corrigan touched down in Ireland after allegedly flying across the Atlantic by accident. Within hours, “Wrong-Way Corrigan,” as the press would soon call him, received a call from Doug Storer, and the next night he was live on NBC discussing the Brooklyn-to-Dublin flight with Ripley.

  “A fellow can’t help it if he gets mixed up, can he?” Corrigan asked Ripley.

  A month later, Ripley hosted an even more memorable show starring an Indian “mystic” named Kuda Bux, known for performing such stunts as firing a gun at targets with his eyes taped shut. Storer invited Bux to attempt a far more impressive stunt: to walk barefoot across a bed of flaming coals.

  Workers dug two ten-foot ditches in a parking lot beside Radio City Music Hall, filling them with bags of charcoal topped by stacks of oak wood. By the next night, the fiery coals had reached 1,400 degrees. Thousands of onlookers crowded around the site as ambulances and fire trucks stood by. From his studio high above the fire pits, Ripley explained to listeners: “In my travels to the Orient, I have always been fascinated by the unexplainable miracles that the holy men of India perform.”

  As Bux removed his shoes and rolled up his pant legs, some in the crowd covered their ears or pinched their noses, afraid to hear or smell burning flesh. Ripley signed off briefly and descended from Rockefeller Center to street level. Announcer Graham McNamee took over the play-by-play, describing “red-hot coals that shine brightly in the night,” and then excitedly announcing Ripley’s approach. “The crowd is milling about now … the cameras are grinding,” he enthused. “And, O-ho! Here comes Bob Ripley. He has a police escort and he’s getting nearer; he’s fighting through the crowd and here he comes!”

  When Ripley took the microphone, he described Bux as “completely cool and unruffled.” A team of doctors—New York’s health commissioner; a skin specialist; and Doug Storer’s father, a doctor—examined Bux’s feet to make sure there were no abnormal calluses or chemical coatings, and pronounced his feet to be normal. Then, before anyone could stop him, the diminutive man in the turban scampered through the smokingred pits, hiking his pant legs and sinking ankle-deep in glowing coals. When the sluggish cameramen realized they’d missed the money shot, they encouraged Bux to “do it again, do it again.” So he did.

  Afterward, doctors found a small burn where a coal had become embedded in his heel, but otherwise no scars. Bux’s body temperature was normal and he seemed pain-free. Ripley called it “the most amazing thing I have ever seen.”<
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  When the crowd and the cameramen settled down, Ripley sat beside Bux and asked the obvious question—How?

  “It is faith, Mr. Ripley,” replied Kuda Bux. “It is faith I have that allows me to do it.”

  “Well, Kuda Bux, it must be faith,” said Ripley. “Because that fire was so hot that none of us here could get within three feet of it.”

  MONTHS LATER, radio listeners tuned in for a Halloween-night drama by Orson Welles on WABC. In a reenactment of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, fake newscasters read mock news flashes about aliens landing in metal cylinders in New Jersey and tentacled Martians killing residents with death rays. Across the New York metropolis, people ran from their homes, fleeing to parks and police stations, believing America was under attack, despite the three (albeit brief) announcements that the performance was fictional.

  Already edgy from a recent hurricane that had ravaged New York and New England, radio listeners were furious, accusing Welles of intentionally causing a panic. Welles weathered the outrage, which helped launch his career. But he’d upped the ante in the game of bold radio achievement.

  Radio had become America’s favorite pastime, the nightly schedule packed with plays and music, comedy and baseball. At the time of Welles’s headline-grabbing feat, however, Ripley was no longer in the game. He had lost his radio show weeks before.

  Two years earlier, Ripley’s Baker’s Broadcast with Ozzie and Harriet had been one of America’s favorite shows, in league with the top-ranked shows of Jack Benny and Bing Crosby. But his Huskies-sponsored program had struggled to find an audience. Its initial Saturday-night success in 1937 slumped when General Foods moved the show to Tuesdays. When the show switched to Mondays, ratings dipped further and his sponsor pulled the plug.

  He was still earning a mid-six-figures income, but he hated to be off the air when John Hix and other cartoonists were on the air. Cartoons and comic strips had continued to infiltrate American culture, becoming what Fortune magazine described as America’s “adult dream life.” Action Comics had debuted in mid-1938, its cover dominated by a flying strongman called “Superman.” Believe It or Not had changed little over the years, and Ripley worried constantly that the whole concept might grow stale. He was desperate to find more stunts like the Kuda Bux show to keep things fresh.

  In December of that year, Ripley celebrated his cartoon’s twentieth anniversary. Though the original hadn’t been called Believe It or Not and was a sporadic feature until the mid-1920s, King Features had established 1918 as its birthday. The syndicate ran commemorative ads, prompting an outpouring of celebrity telegrams. Babe Ruth wrote that he “learned a lot of things from following [Ripley’s] work” and Kate Smith sent congratulations to “my favorite cartoonist.” Rube Goldberg, noting that they had both been Hy Baggerly’s trainees in San Francisco, wrote: “I believe Ripley has done more for the profession of cartooning than any one man in our time. May his great influence for good both in the entertainment and educational worlds continue for many years to come.”

  But his entertaining influence seemed to be waning, and Ripley the pioneer ended the year searching for a new radio sponsor, only to find potential advertisers skittish as Europe edged closer to war. Normally, during times of stress and anxiety, he’d hit the road and attempt to outrun his troubles. But it was not a promising time for world travel. Indeed, America was about to clamp shut, caging Ripley like an animal and separating him from his playground.

  In early 1939, the planet seemed to be at war with itself. Civil war raged in Spain. Thirty thousand were killed in a Chilean earthquake. Ripley’s favorite country, China, was now eighteen months into full-on bloody warfare with Japan. Germany had taken over parts of Czechoslovakia and was planning to invade Poland, while Italy was planning an attack on Albania. These were dark days for world travelers.

  Unable to cross the Atlantic or Pacific, Ripley and Oakie started the New Year in the Caribbean, having sailed there just before the holidays for a month-long escape. Ripley wanted to see the tribe on the San Blas Islands off Panama that celebrated Christmas with cockfights, adding San Blas to the list of countries he’d visited, even though it wasn’t really a country. (San Blas, later renamed Kana Yula, was an autonomous territory and part of Panama.)

  Still, Time magazine dutifully reported that “buck-toothed Ripley” had visited two hundred nations and was now “more widely traveled than Marco Polo, Magellan, and any other human being that ever lived.” By Ripley’s count, he needed to visit thirty more countries to have visited them all.

  After Panama, Ripley and Oakie visited Haiti and Jamaica, where he received an urgent telegram from Doug Storer. By phone, Storer told Ripley that he had finally found a sponsor for a new weekly Believe It or Not program, starting in March 1939. Due to a muffled connection, Ripley thought his sponsor was Coca-Cola, and he and Oakie spent the next few days celebrating with rum and Cokes. Ripley wouldn’t learn until arriving back in New York that his sponsor was actually Nehi Corporation’s Royal Crown Cola. He was hardly disappointed, however, when he learned that he’d be paid $7,500 per show.

  By now, Ripley had entrusted Storer with more duties. In his role as agent, adviser, and personal manager, Storer had negotiated other deals to keep Ripley busy—endorsements and magazine ads in which Ripley (despite Hearst’s earlier warning) would lease his name and drawings to Macmillan Oil Company, Flexo Tray ice-cube trays, Parker Pen Company, Gillette razors, and Realsilk socks. Even better, Storer was in discussions with Twentieth Century Fox, which wanted to produce half a dozen short Movietone films about Ripley’s travels, netting Ripley $3,000 per film.

  Storer even managed to score Ripley a college diploma, convincing his alma mater, Dartmouth College, to give Ripley an honorary degree recognizing his “artistic contributions.” Weeks later, Ripley the high school dropout received an honorary doctorate from Missouri Valley College, and president Thomas Bibb’s proclamation read like a eulogy, touting “Ripley’s contributions to human knowledge; his stimulation of widespread interest in science, history, literature, and the arts … and his own achievements in overcoming personal handicaps to become one of America’s and the world’s best-known and best-liked personalities.”

  After the ceremony, Ripley somberly shared with a reporter his concerns that the world had become “topsy turvy … a very difficult world of depression, millions of unemployed, the outlook is not very encouraging I will admit.”

  When the reporter asked Ripley to describe the most unusual thing he’d ever seen, Ripley said he hadn’t seen it yet: “If I had, I would lose my ambitions and I would not travel any more.”

  WITH THE DOOR closing on overseas travel, Ripley decided a key feature of his new radio show would be “on-the-spot” broadcasts from remote locations, allowing him to explore more of his own country. He was ready, for a change, to see America.

  One of his first See America First with Bob Ripley shows took place deep inside New Mexico’s Carlsbad Caverns in the summer of 1939. Engineers unspooled a thousand feet of electrical and audio cable to allow Ripley to conduct a live interview with Jim White, the man who discovered the caverns in 1901.

  “I am now speaking to you from 750 feet below the surface of the earth, from the most inspiring place of beauty in the world,” Ripley reported. A Fox film crew recorded the event for one of Ripley’s Movietone films, and a Look magazine photographer snapped pictures. Back in New York, B. A. Rolfe called it “one of the most thrilling broadcasts ever heard” and NBC estimated that twenty million listeners tuned in.

  Seeing more of America awakened Ripley’s patriotism and public spirit, and he began donating time and money to an increasing number of charity events and humanitarian organizations, such as the Finnish Relief Fund, established by Herbert Hoover to assist Finland after an attack by Stalin’s Red Army. But his favorite charities remained orphan groups, youth organizations, and scout troops.

  In mid-1939, to raise money for the Boys Club of New York, he co-hosted
a charity softball game at Madison Square Garden, serving as captain of the celebrity-packed “Believe It or Nots” team, which included Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, Rube Goldberg, and Jimmy Durante. The opposing “Nine Old Men” team, captained by writer/broadcaster Lowell Thomas, included Walter Winchell and boxer Gene Tunney. A crowd of fourteen thousand watched Ripley’s team emerge from the dugout wearing comically baggy uniforms of pantaloons and turbans. The New York Times said Ripley and Bugs Baer “looked entirely out of place and most uncomfortable.”

  Ripley, in a reprise of his bush league days, pitched the first two innings. He gave up two runs, but Babe Ruth swatted their team to a 7–2 lead. Frequent interruptions for “refreshments” in the dugout caused the crowd to grow restless, and the umpire, New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia, called the game after four innings. The Times said the event raised $12,000 for the Boys Club and “a grand time was had by all.”

  WHEN IT CAME TO GIRLS, meanwhile, he associated with a very different kind of club—the deformed, the disfigured, the armless and/or legless.

  Ripley’s traveling Odditorium show had visited half a dozen cities in recent years, and in 1939 his cast of entertainers was called upon to appear in two Odditoriums at once. C. C. Pyle put together an exhibition for the upcoming Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco, at the same time organizing an even bigger show for New York’s 1939 World’s Fair. Ripley was looking forward to having Odditoriums on both coasts.

  Two weeks before the San Francisco fair opened, Pyle suffered a stroke at his Los Angeles home. The fifty-six-year-old showman hadn’t finished setting up the two Odditoriums and his partner struggled to launch both shows simultaneously.