A Curious Man

by Neal Thompson

  His work contributed to the Globe’s upticking circulation, now above 130,000. Associated Newspapers acknowledged his contributions by offering a two-year contract and bumping his salary to $60 a week.

  IN EARLY 1914, Santa Rosa’s Press Democrat published a story about the success of its homegrown dropout of an artist. His syndicated cartoons were being published in thirty papers and the Press Democrat boasted that Ripley, a proud “product of Santa Rosa,” had become wildly popular back east. Later that year, just before the holidays, Ripley managed to return home for the first time in nearly three years. He hopscotched by train across to San Francisco, where he visited friends and former coworkers, including E. T. “Scoop” Gleeson, a sportswriter he’d first worked with at the Bulletin.

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  Gleeson is credited with coining the term “jazz.” At the San Francisco Seals ’spring training camp in 1913, players called the bubbly spring water “jazz water.” When a few Seals began playing ragtime-style music with some local musicians, Gleeson said the tunes had “pep” and “jazz.”

  Gleeson decided to interview his former colleague and write a story about Ripley’s blossoming career. Beneath the headline RIPLEY RETURNS TO SCENES OF HIS EARLY TRIUMPH, Gleeson’s story described how his formerly shy friend had matured since leaving San Francisco, how Ripley “dresses quietly but with good taste … and converses with all the freedom of a campaign manager.”

  When Lillie Belle read the story, she felt proud of her son’s surprising success. She’d managed to witness the planting of the seeds, the gestation of his career. But she would not enjoy her son’s achievement for long, or see his burgeoning fame. In mid-1915, Ripley received word that his mother had become gravely ill, suffering from sudden heart failure. He immediately sent a telegraph.

  Dear Mom, Hope you are recovered, Mom. I want you to be well and jolly when I come home. When you are unhappy then I am unhappy. So be of good heart, Mom, is the earnest wish of your loving son, Roy.

  Ripley boarded the first westbound train. During a stopover in Chicago he received a Western Union wire from his sister. “All thought Mamma would die during the night,” she wrote. “Heart stronger today.” Two days later, in Colorado…“Another bad night,” Ethel wired. A similar message reached Ripley in Nevada, and he wired back, urging his sister to “Do all possible” and telling Ethel he was on the “fastest train,” due to arrive in Santa Rosa before noon the next day, a Monday.

  A trackside shed fire near Truckee, California, delayed Ripley’s train just before dawn on Monday. When he reached Sacramento, just hours from home, he learned he was too late. Lillie Belle had died during the night. Just forty-six, she was buried beside Isaac at Odd Fellows Cemetery. The Press Democrat praised her as “a well-known resident” with a “wide circle of friends.” The paper also noted that, due to his train’s delay, “the cartoonist who has made such a success of his profession” had been unable to say good-bye.

  RIPLEY HAD PREVIOUSLY PROMISED his mother that he would always look after Ethel and Doug. Now he faced a difficult decision. Should he bring eleven-year-old Doug back to New York? Or stay in California and go back to the Bulletin or Chronicle? Either way, could he become a substitute dad?

  As a boy, Ripley had always been on the outside, different from the other kids, unhandsome and goofy, picked on and mocked, a fatherless stutterer, a high school dropout. Even now, he often considered himself an overgrown adolescent and “just a boy,” and if he returned to Santa Rosa he’d bear a new label: orphan. Yet, having traveled to Egypt and Europe, having crisscrossed America and made New York City his playground, he knew he had finally outgrown the awkward, solitary kid he’d been in Santa Rosa. Just as his pioneering parents and grandparents had ventured into unknown lands in their day, he too had become a pioneer of a sort.

  His upbringing had somehow instilled in him a desire to travel and explore. He had outgrown his childhood shyness and timidity to become the type of person who could appreciate a baseball game beneath the Egyptian pyramids. But as Doug’s caretaker, further long-distance travels would be harder to come by.

  So, despite the promise to his mother, he made his decision. Uncertain days loomed ahead, with the crescendo of artillery across the Atlantic. New York was no place for Doug. Rather than uproot him, he decided it’d be best for Doug to stay in California. Ethel and her husband, Fred Davis, now lived in Sacramento, where Fred made furniture and Ethel worked as a nurse. But living with his big sister was apparently not an option for Doug—the two were not close. Family friends offered to let Doug live with them in Santa Rosa, and Ripley agreed to send money until Doug was old enough to come to New York.

  Ripley then endured a contemplative train ride east, a somber commute between the two influential cities of his young-adult life. Though it had once loomed as an unthinkable destination, he now considered San Francisco just “a horse town” and would not return to Santa Rosa for fifteen years. Back in Manhattan, he plunged even deeper into the social and sporting circles of the city that was now his true home.

  Gaining confidence as a cartoonist and a New Yorker, Ripley began to dress the part. In a mid-teens photograph, he poses hands on hips beside a stone wall in Central Park, wearing a checked suit whose long-tailed coat is cinched at the breast by a single button. Narrow, cuffed pants terminate a few inches shy of the ankle, accentuating shiny two-tone shoes. His hair is shaved to a stubble on the sides, long and slicked back on top. He looks pleased with himself, smiling his deformed smile.

  Though his misaligned and protruding teeth can’t be ignored, in most photographs from this period Ripley looks somewhat stylish and almost handsome. In a city and a profession full of extroverts, the nerdy introvert was finding a middle place where he could fit in.

  During his first years in New York, he’d stuck cautiously with San Francisco connections, socializing with former Bulletin and Chronicle colleagues Paul Terry and Herb Roth (who was now cartooning for the New York World). Through 1916, Ripley extended his range and befriended other ambitious young transplants, including a pretty young art school grad, Vyvyan Donner. She and Ripley would attend Sunday-night dinners at the Greenwich Village apartment of Helena Smith-Dayton, an ex-reporter turned artist and filmmaker. One magazine called Smith-Dayton’s weekly dinners “a Washington Square institution at which the notables from all the professions gather.” Donner would later recall the cocktails, dancing, and laughter of those “wonderful gatherings at Helena’s.”

  Other nights found him playing pool at Jack Doyle’s Billiards Academy in Times Square or sitting ringside with Tad Dorgan or Damon Runyon at Madison Square Garden, the world’s largest indoor sports arena, which had become like Ripley’s second office. Around this time (and most likely at a barroom), Ripley met the man who would become his closest male companion, a short, balding, crag-faced cartoonist who was as odd-looking as him but funny as hell—a real-life Jeff to Ripley’s Mutt.

  AS A SPORTS CARTOONIST in Philadelphia and Washington, DC, Arthur “Bugs” Baer had drawn insects with baseball bodies, calling his ball-shaped creatures “bugs” and earning himself a nickname. Now writing a humor column at the New York World, Baer was developing a reputation as a master of one-liners, having coined the quip “What this country needs is a good five-cent cigar.” (Comedian Milton Berle would later confess to mimicking Baer’s style.)

  BELIEVE IT!

  Baer would bestow upon George Herman “Babe” Ruth the nickname “Sultan of Swat.”

  This cigar-smoking, whiskey-drinking storyteller was the perfect sidekick for someone as shy and self-conscious as Ripley. A natural showman and entertaining social butterfly, Baer knew the best nightclubs and parties. He schooled Ripley in the subtleties of celebrity and the fine art of self-promotion. Soon after the two became friends, Baer and Ripley approached Jack Curley, the pudgy promoter who had helped broker the 1910 Johnson-Jeffries fight in Reno, with an idea.

  Born and raised in San Francisco, Curley had run away from h
ome to work as a reporter at the Chronicle—it was becoming a theme of Ripley’s life, these links back to San Francisco. Curley was fired for fabricating stories and eventually took up sports promotion, which led to his role brokering the Reno fight. Ripley had gotten to know Curley fairly well since Reno and occasionally caricatured the tubby man in the Globe’s sports pages.

  A likable yet shady character, Curley had recently turned to professional wrestling. The working class and the upper class alike thought it was a hoot to watch costumed men named “Americus” and “The Terrible Turk” scrum with each other. Ripley acknowledged in print that they might be “cheap press agent stunts,” but he felt Curley had revived “a grand old game” and considered the Masked Marvel “one of the best wrestlers in the United States.” Well-dressed and polite, Curley would claim with a straight face, “I have never promoted a wrestling match that was not absolutely honest.”

  The idea Ripley and Baer brought to the savvy promoter was a wrestling match in which the two minor celebrity cartoonists faced each other at the Lexington Opera House, as a warm-up act before the main event. Like George Plimpton would years later, they wanted to perform as athletes instead of journalists for a change, participants instead of spectators. They’d take home $150 apiece and Curley could pocket the rest.

  Ripley and Baer decided they’d give the crowd a good show, then Ripley would flip Baer onto the mat for the win. But after ten minutes of insults and trash talk to amuse the crowd, Baer decided he didn’t want to be the loser, and instead of taking the fall he threw Ripley hard on his back. Ripley squirmed free, but minutes later Baer—only 148 pounds, but squat and athletic—had Ripley on his back again, and kept him there.

  When Ripley later tried to collect his $150 cut, Curley told him he’d given the full $300 to Baer. Curley similarly told Baer that he’d given the money to Ripley, and the two amateur wrestlers seethed for months before realizing Curley had scammed them both.

  The stunt earned some publicity in a few papers, easing Ripley’s disappointment over the lost paycheck. Fortunately, losing $150 would hardly break him. His salary had soared in the past four years to nearly $100 a week.

  RIPLEY COULD FINALLY AFFORD to dress well and eat well—no more cheap Chinatown meals—but he remained thrifty. After paying $35 a month for his first apartment, he moved into a brownstone on Fiftieth Street with Paul Terry, his former San Francisco Bulletin colleague. They split the $40 rent and slept on cots in the small bedroom. Some weeks, the roommates hardly saw each other. Terry had recently left newspapers altogether, convinced that the future of cartoons was on the big screen. He had begun producing animated films and would soon form his own production company, Paul Terry Productions.

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  Terry would eventually produce more than 1,300 “Terry-Toons” cartoons, including Mighty Mouse and Heckle and Jeckle.

  Many of Ripley’s peers were venturing into the uncharted waters of film, and all across New York innovative cartoonists were expanding their craft. Yet, while animated cartoons were making progress, they were still experimental. The public received the bulk of its information and entertainment from newspapers, and newsprint remained the primary medium of the cartoonist. In fact, due to a steep rise in literacy, circulation was flourishing, and some cartoonists were becoming fabulously wealthy. Bud Fisher was earning $78,000 a year from his syndicated Mutt and Jeff cartoons, and boys across the country were enrolling in mail-order art classes, hoping to become the next Tad Dorgan or Rube Goldberg, each making six-figure salaries.

  BELIEVE IT!

  In the late teens, an obsessive childhood doodler named Walt Disney began attending art classes, fascinated by newspaper cartoonists and “hoping that some day I, too, would be on the staff of a big newspaper.” Rejected by the Kansas City Star and other papers, he turned to animation.

  Ripley studied the work of artists who were pushing the boundaries of illustrated entertainment, particularly Tad, who was both artistic and prolific. “He had no restrictions or limitations,” Ripley would later say. Still, Ripley worried that he spent too much time mimicking his heroes.

  The mid-1910s were filled with rags-to-riches stories of cartoonists who toiled through multiple experiments before latching on to a clever concept that separated them from the pack.

  Inside the black-and-white cardboard covers of schoolboy notebooks, Ripley collected articles about peculiar athletic feats and peculiar people. On slow news days, he’d flip through the notebooks and cobble together sketches about such achievements. One cartoon, entitled The Iron Man, featured men who walked or ran long distances, like John Ennis, who crossed America on foot in eighty days. Another, called Some Famous Kicks, profiled the longest field goal and the most kicks in a row. In Some Jumps he featured extreme skiing and ice-skating leaps, and in Some Baseball Records he offered hard-to-believe swings of the bat. Turning to football, Gridiron Oddities included a 105-yard touchdown by a player who hid the ball under his jersey and a game in which Harvard beat Exeter, 158–0.

  Ripley’s knack for locating and depicting odd facts proved especially useful during the winter lull, a dry period for athletes and the men employed to draw them. On one of those slow days in December 1916, the enterprising cartoonist skimmed through his scrapbook, pulled together a few notable feats of athletic endurance, and drew a sketch for each. One man had stayed under water for six minutes, another skipped rope 11,810 times, while another ran 623 miles in 142 hours, and two men once boxed to a draw after seven and a half hours. He called this cartoon UNUSUAL RECORDS—a harbinger of his eventual “big idea.”

  Other slack days, he’d whip up another sketch of Demon Dug, who ached all winter for baseball season. Globe readers would see Dug in bed, sulking: “No Baseball, an’ no football, a-a-aw! Woe is me—I’m a woe!” Dug and his ragamuffin friends reflected Ripley’s admiration for the outcast and the underdog. The cartoons featuring endurance and achievement, meanwhile, showed Ripley’s appreciation for winners, people who were the best at something.

  Readers seemed to appreciate the mix, especially this emerging focus on the off-the-wall accomplishments by those striving to be fastest, longest, farthest, and best. Said the Globe in a promotional ad: “If you really appreciate art and literature combined, you can’t afford to miss Ripley.”

  He was onto something, but his progress—and the good-time New York parties—were soon interrupted by war.

  WHEN THE FIGHTING in Europe first began, Ripley joked in print about America’s apathy, possibly conveying his own. One cartoon showed a man at a ball game holding a newspaper covered with headlines about war. “War?” says the sports fan. “Who cares?” But as the United States committed itself to battle in the spring of 1917, World War I became the dominant theme of Ripley’s cartoons, especially after he was exempted from military service.

  The recently passed Selective Service Act required Ripley to fill out a draft registration card, on which he listed his age as twenty-five (he was really twenty-seven) and his occupation as “artist, writer, cartoonist.” Asked whether he had any family members dependent on him for support, Ripley wrote that he was responsible for “two dependents,” including a “brother under 12.” (Doug was still living with family friends in Santa Rosa, and Ripley had continued to send money.) Ripley’s request for an exemption was granted that summer of 1917, and his status as Doug’s financial caregiver kept him stateside during the final sixteen months of the brutal conflict.

  Though he never discussed his apparent willingness to avoid military service, it seems Ripley preferred being a fan rather than a participant. Intrigued by the idea of battle but not inclined to fight, he seemed content to cheer from the sidelines.

  He tried to play his own wartime role, profiling athletes at the Annapolis and West Point military academies. He visited military training bases, spent time aboard the USS Texas, promoted Liberty Loans and Red Cross donations. He turned sketches of sports contests into battlefield skirmishes, aerial dogfights, torpe
do launches, and hand-to-hand combat. Team managers became “generals,” players “soldiers.” He even got Demon Dug and friends into the act, playing “war” instead of baseball or getting chased by a truant officer in a sketch titled “The Retreat of the Allies.”

  His patriotism was unabashed, as he doggedly portrayed American athletes as the best: “Englishmen are boxers; Americans are fighters.” When a US athlete/soldier died, he gave them a sober sendoff. The death of a Yale track star resulted in a dramatic half-page sketch of Johnny Overton running on the track and, beneath that, being killed midstride on the battlefield. The title: “Johnny Overton’s Greatest Race.”

  In Ripley’s reverent view, which he repeated over and over, American soldiers were the best “in the world” because many of them were athletes. He frequently depicted Uncle Sam as a muscle-bound ballplayer or boxer. “Remember,” he wrote at the time, “WAR is merely athletics.” American ballplayers “make excellent grenade tossers,” he said, while the throwing ability of the Germans was “on par with our schoolgirls.”

  Some of Ripley’s wartime sketches were used as recruitment posters, as was James Montgomery Flagg’s drawing of a finger-pointing Uncle Sam—“I Want You for U.S. Army”—which was reprinted millions of times during the war. Such posters were part of a massive domestic propaganda campaign run by the Committee on Public Information, which promoted patriotic newsreels, photos, and magazine and newspaper articles. The committee’s Bureau of Cartoons supplied the nation’s top cartoonists with suggestions and news tips via the weekly Bulletin for Cartoonists. George Creel, head of the Committee on Public Information, viewed the work of Ripley and other cartoonists as a “constructive force for shaping public opinion and winning the war.”