A Curious Man

by Neal Thompson

  “Traveling is easy. Traveling is cheap,” he wrote. “People should travel more, but they put it off. Don’t wait until you are too old … Travel will often show you the faults of our own country, but it will make you love it all the more!”

  As he neared home, Ripley thought about what awaited him in New York. He didn’t own a house or a car. His bank account was under assault by payments to Beatrice, his brother, and his sister. His personal possessions at the NYAC could fit in a steamer trunk. Yet, by traveling so far and wide, he hoped he was gaining something more valuable than material wealth. What he lacked in physical or monetary possessions was offset by what he called “a broader and more tolerant nature.”

  BACK IN NEW YORK, however, Ripley didn’t always display tolerance.

  South American women had large behinds and too many babies, he wrote, and their husbands—“little fellows” who talked too much but spoke no English—beat them weekly to keep them happy. The men were “dirty and coarse” and “sheiks of shirk!” They rarely smiled, he said, because theirs was “a short life and a weary one.”

  He meant for such comments to be taken lightly, but it was hard to disguise the sense that the continent had let him down. Having seen women torch their husbands’ corpses and religious men hanging from trees, it now took a lot to wow Ripley. In the twelve years since his first overseas trip, he had explored more than two dozen countries, and in China and India had dug deep, taken risks, mixed with locals, and explored their politics and history, their gods and idols, their freaks and fanatics.

  In South America, though, instead of aggressively pursuing temples and holy men and cannibals as he had in Asia, Ripley had mostly sought out the company of North Americans or other Westerners. Women and wine had been the journey’s theme. South America, it turned out, simply wasn’t peculiar enough for Ripley.

  The only bit of history that invigorated him was the story of Pizarro, whose mummified body he’d visited in Lima and whose route of plunder he’d followed across the continent. “What a man he must have been!” Ripley wrote. “He destroyed a civilization of a continent and the nation of the Incas; and now he serves as a peep-show.” But Ripley showed little empathy for the conquered, describing Peru’s natives as having “strong backs and weak minds.”

  Some letter writers complained of Ripley’s crass characterizations of Latin Americans, while others defended his casual style of foreign reportage, blaming the critics for having a “woeful lack of sense of humor.” Some said they couldn’t wait to visit the places Ripley so vividly rendered with his pen. “I have read few things that have given me more pleasure,” said a writer named Charles Noonan. “Rip has revealed South America to us so alluringly that we all wish we could go there.”

  Just as Marco Polo’s fantastic tales of Asia had incited awe and disbelief, Ripley’s far-fetched travelogues and bold-ink cartoons, plus his likably odd personality, gave newspaper readers a new way of looking at the world. He was becoming a voice for the people, bringing the world’s weirdness to their doorsteps each morning.

  At the time, anti-immigrant forces were trying to shut America’s doors to outsiders, a movement bolstered by a recent ban on Japanese immigration and by newly elected president Calvin Coolidge’s declaration that “America must be kept American.” Amid such nationalistic fervor, Ripley attempted to dispel misperceptions and suspicions about the strangers beyond America’s borders. With radio still in its infancy, most people learned of other cultures from books or newspapers. Ripley’s conversational reports from far-off lands differed greatly from the textbooks and tabloids. Reading about shrunken heads, señoritas, and strange drinking partners was like sitting barside with an avuncular tippler who slurs, “Let me tell you about the time …”

  He was hardly a Marco Polo, and neither could he put himself in company with real adventurers like polar voyager Roald Amundsen or travel lecturer Burton Holmes. Ripley freely admitted that he liked nice hotel rooms and good bars, that he was terrified of speed and heights. He considered himself an explorer of a particular sort, but far more intrepid than a mere tourist, whom he held in contempt. “Most people I meet should not be allowed by law to travel,” he once said. “They see as much in a subway.”

  While he dressed increasingly like the typical tourist—the Gallagher and Sheans pith helmet he once disparaged, plus khaki shorts, knee socks, and two-toned shoes, were becoming his trademark traveling outfit—Ripley’s off-the-beaten-path approach to foreign travel carried its own brand of risk. He wasn’t looking for new routes to the North Pole but for dark shadows, hidden deformities, and secret rites. He didn’t necessarily seek physical adventure (preferring to keep his hands and shoes clean), but he did confront the people and their cultures. A self-taught ethnographer and anthropologist, what he sought most was information. He asked countries to show him their warts and sores, their maimed and poor, their crazy old uncles, their torture chambers, and their dead.

  “The more I see of the world the more I like it,” he had summed up in his final South American dispatch.

  It’s a pretty good little old place after all, and I have little time for the gloomers who are eternally shrieking that this old mud ball is rolling to the bow wows. I am satisfied to take my chances with this one, thank you, and not worry about the next…

  You must carry along with you a lively imagination and plenty of romance in your soul. Some of the most wonderful things in the world will seem dull and drab unless you view them in the proper light.

  Frank “The Grocer” Munsey died from a ruptured appendix at his New York City home in late 1925. He was a lonely old man with few friends, no heirs, and a legacy as a newspaper killer. Said Baltimore’s curmudgeon columnist H. L. Mencken: “I am glad Munsey is dead and I hope he is in hell!”

  By selling, folding, and merging his newspapers he had personally put thousands out of work. Of the sixteen newspapers he’d bought over the course of twenty-five years, he died owning just two, the Telegram and the Sun. Neither would survive, sealing his legacy.

  BELIEVE IT!

  Munsey’s estimated net worth was $40 million, most of which he left to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

  Munsey had been more than a little responsible for the two recent years Ripley spent in newspaper limbo. Walter Winchell would later describe in his column how Ripley, after the Globe shut down, had “faded from the Metropolitan scene,” unable to find a job because an “army of imitators underbid him … pirating his style so well that editors hired them and told Rip he was too expensive.”

  But Ripley never slowed down or gave up. In fact, after his South American Ramble he dove back into an exhausting schedule of boxing matches, illegal cocktails with Bugs Baer at secret Midtown speakeasies, and daily games of rigorous handball. His NYAC room was often splashed with evidence of the bachelor’s lifestyle: empty bottles, butt-filled ashtrays, scattered newspapers, art supplies, and sweat-stained workout clothes.

  One benefit of his part-time employment was being able to spend more time on the NYAC’s handball courts. A loud and aggressively competitive player, lunging for every shot, Ripley was soon back in peak physical shape, slapping the pink Spalding No. 101 handball better than ever.

  Alone or with a partner, he traveled regularly to tournaments in the Midwest through 1925. In Chicago, he defeated the Chicago Athletic Club’s best player, Avery Brundage, who had been a world champ. At the National Championships in Cleveland, Ripley lost to top-ranked Maynard Laswell, who went on to win the tournament. At the annual NYAC championship, he reached the finals and found himself facing Jim Kelly, an Irishman and former world champion, considered one of the best to play the game. Kelly had won his first world title in 1909 and in recent years had mentored Ripley, who in his handball book called Kelly “a master of the game.”

  Before a stunned and drunken crowd, Ripley upset the master to become the 1925 NYAC singles handball champ.

  While he would continue to play in local and national tournaments over t
he next few years, Ripley’s handball playing would begin tapering off in 1926, squeezed aside by the sudden demands of an unexpected job change. His period of limbo was about to end.

  IN JUNE OF 1926, Ripley traveled to England to cover the prestigious horse race known as the Derby, as well as the Wimbledon tennis tournament and the British Open golf tournament. On that trip, Ripley decided to attempt a stunt: to wirelessly send his Derby cartoon from London to New York.

  When jockey Joe Childs whipped the stallion Coronach to victory, Ripley quickly sketched the horse crossing the finish line. Then he rushed to the Ambassador Hotel, where his sketch paper was wrapped around a cylinder and, using radio facsimile technology—similar to the fax machines of the future—was transmitted line by line across radio waves to the United States. The cartoon was then delivered by airplane to newspapers across the country.

  It was touted as the first transatlantic cartoon transmission, and in a few years the same technology would be used to transmit newspaper photographs by telephone. The feat caught the attention of editors at the creaky old New York Evening Post, who felt they could use a promising brand like Believe It or Not and its innovative creator.

  Alexander Hamilton had founded the Evening Post in 1801 (four years after he’d launched the Globe). A century later, it was being run by Henry Villard and his son, Oswald, who had helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). When pro-German accusations against Oswald Villard during World War I crippled circulation, he sold the Post, which suffered through several halfhearted ownerships.

  The Post was briefly owned by a group of New York business leaders that included Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But the paper hemorrhaged money and circulation until Cyrus Curtis came to the rescue in 1924. Curtis published a handful of magazines, most profitably the Ladies’ Home Journal and the Saturday Evening Post, two of the largest circulating publications in the world. With wealth rivaling J. P. Morgan’s and Henry Ford’s, Curtis had no problem meeting Ripley’s salary request of $200 a week.

  BELIEVE IT!

  When income taxes were first made public in 1925, Curtis reported earning $5 million, putting him fifteenth on the list of America’s wealthiest men, one slot ahead of J. P. Morgan. In terms of relative wealth, he remains one of the richest men in world history.

  The Post introduced Ripley on August 16, 1926: “Believe It or Not, Ripley’s returned!” Days later, a subscriber named M. E. Farrington wrote, “I have been an admirer of Mr. Ripley for many years and have often wondered which of the New York newspapers would again treat the public to his fine work.”

  He’d be making ten times what he’d first earned at the Globe in 1912, but in terms of circulation Ripley was moving backward. The Evening Post’s readership was a measly 33,000—one of the lowest in the city, and laughable in comparison to the top-ranked Daily News, with 633,000 readers.

  At the Evening Post, Ripley would still be affiliated with Associated Newspapers, which meant his syndicated readership would continue to extend far beyond New York City. He would be starting over with new editors and coworkers—the third job shift in three years—but he was relieved to be anchored to a New York paper, even if the Post’s gray and serious pages desperately needed the levity Ripley was hired to bring.

  Ripley introduced himself to readers with a short, enthusiastic article, promising that his Believe It or Not cartoons “are all true.”

  “I have traveled the world over searching for strange and unbelievable things,” he wrote in his Post debut.

  I have seen white negroes, purple white men, and I know a man who was hanged but still lives … Believe me when I tell you about the man who died of old age before he was six years old; the river in Africa that runs backwards; oysters that grow on trees; flowers that eat mice; fish that walk and snakes that fly.

  Ripley’s perseverance during his time in Munsey-inflicted purgatory had finally paid off, as had hiring Norbert Pearlroth, who stuck by Ripley through the recent ups and downs. Ripley now decided to make a salesman’s pitch to his new readership, a new guarantee: “If by chance any reader should doubt any of the facts depicted in my cartoons, I will be glad to explain and prove the truth of them if he will write me.” Slowly, he was learning to be a showman.

  WITH HIS NEW SALARY, Ripley could afford to rent more of Pearlroth’s brain. In the three years since they’d met, Ripley had discovered that Pearlroth was far more useful than a mere translator. An autodidact and a “walking encyclopedia,” as he’d later be described, Pearlroth seemed to possess a bottomless supply of curious and interesting facts, memorized from the books he read constantly. Ripley phoned Pearlroth daily at the bank where he still worked, hungry for more material.

  Soon, with Pearlroth’s help, Ripley was introducing readers to such characters as James Thompson of New Mexico, who crossed America by wheelchair; Mary Rosa, a Nantucket toddler who found her mother’s ring on the beach twenty-one years after it had been lost; two Russian brothers who slapped each other’s faces for thirty-six hours; and Haru Onuki, a Japanese prima donna he’d met (and begun dating), who required a full day to prepare her hair, which then stayed in place for a month.

  With America growing more urban and urbane, newspaper readers had developed Jazz Age tastes in new forms of journalism, and publishers were tripping over themselves to accommodate. Cartoons, photographs, and color printing were more popular than ever, as were sexy, gossipy stories. Leading the way (up or down was a matter of debate) were the half-sized papers called tabloids. The Daily News, created in 1919 as the nation’s first true tabloid, was followed in 1924 by the Evening Graphic, founded by Bernarr Macfadden, the fabulously wealthy health guru whose magazines Ripley had read as a boy and whose athletic lifestyle he’d emulated.

  Macfadden’s credo—“sex on every front page, big gobs of it”—had prompted Hearst in 1924 to enter the tabloid game by creating the New York Daily Mirror, which Hearst described as “90 percent entertainment, 10 percent information.”

  Critics likened tabloids to addictive drugs, fretting that they’d precipitate the demise of American culture. They quickly became the highest-circulation publications in New York, boosted by their pictures and the everyman reportage of gossip writers like Walter Winchell, the Graphic’s Broadway columnist. As Winchell’s biographer later put it, readers had grown tired of dreary stories about “mice in China” and would rather read of celebrity indiscretions and peccadilloes.

  Ripley wanted to give readers all if it—the mice in China, the pictures, the gossip and innuendo, the slang and the sex, the information and the entertainment. Ripley the salesman was finally ready to invest the bulk of his artistic talent, his peculiar personality, and his relentless energy solely in Believe It or Not.

  He was finally ready for his high-wire act.

  ON MAY 20, 1927, Charles Lindbergh departed from muddy Roosevelt Field on Long Island and aimed his fuel-stuffed Spirit of St. Louis eastward. Thirty-three treacherous hours later, the lanky aviator touched down at an airfield outside Paris and was swarmed by 150,000 spectators cheering his non-stop flight across the Atlantic. Only two dozen years past the Wright brothers’ first flight, he had achieved the unachievable, the unbelievable—crossing an ocean in a day and a half, flying more than three thousand miles, alone through the night, through storms and without sleep. It was the most daring and astounding achievement of its day.

  The feat captivated the world and made Lindbergh an instant international hero. He began touring the world in a relentless series of appearances and lectures.

  Months later, Pearlroth was at the New York Public Library, conducting research for Ripley, when he picked up a British newspaper someone had left on a table. It carried a story about one of Lindbergh’s speeches, in Liverpool, where he explained that a number of other aviators had previously flown across the Atlantic, though none had flown solo. Pearlroth felt “electrified” to discover how many others had cro
ssed the Atlantic before Lindbergh. He dug up more details and consulted with Ripley, who crafted a risky Believe It or Not shocker.

  Ripley’s sketch showed Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis flying through dark clouds, beneath which read this heretical caption: “Lindbergh Was the 67th Man to Make a Non-Stop Flight over the Atlantic Ocean!” The cartoon appeared on February 14, 1928, just one day after Lindbergh was feared to have been lost at sea during a flight from Cuba to St. Louis. Ripley’s cartoon declared that not only was the famed aviator not the first to successfully cross the Atlantic, he wasn’t even in the top fifty.

  It sounded absurd, even anti-American, as some angrily claimed. It was as if someone recklessly asserted that George Washington wasn’t the first president, that New Jersey wasn’t really a state, that Pluto wasn’t a planet. The reaction startled even Ripley, who was assailed by telegrams, phone calls, and many thousands of letters—some containing unprintable language. Three days after his Lindbergh cartoon, during a lecture to the Corps of Cadets at West Point, Ripley defended his statement, explaining how two English aviators, John Alcock and A. Whitton Brown, had flown nonstop from Newfoundland to Ireland in 1919, and that two dirigibles later made transatlantic crossings, carrying thirty-one and thirty-three men, respectively. By omitting the word “solo” from his statement, Ripley was able to justify ranking Lindbergh as sixty-seventh.

  “His almost incredible statements are very often challenged by skeptical readers,” reported West Point’s newspaper. “And his remarks sometimes need a substantial argument to verify their truth.”