Stripper's Guide

 

Fame can be fleeting; just ask Herbert Johnson. Or, actually, don't bother because he's quite dead. But if he were alive, he'd no doubt be flabbergasted at the nearly universal response of "Who?" should you ask even dedicated cartooning fans about him. On the other hand, the average reasonably literate man on the street in, say, 1930, would have been able to ID this ink-slinger with no trouble.

Johnsons's cartoons were folksy; the writing calling to mind H.T. Webster while the art resembled that of Clare Briggs. He came onto the cartooning scene out of nowhere, having never taken an art lesson in his life. Yet he was able to bounce around the country in his early years readily finding work on newspapers and having magazine submissions, even cover drawings, accepted on a regular basis. 

His real fame came when he became the in-house cartoonist of the Saturday Evening Post, which is a position he apparently landed in the early 1920s (information is murky). The Post was a nearly universally read magazine, and that made Johnson a household name. For the Post he branched out from his folksy material into editorial cartooning. Johnson was a dyed-in-the-wool Republican and by the time FDR got into office his Post editorial cartoons had lost most of their folksy charm and were stridently anti-Democrat. He seems to have retired by 1942, having perhaps finally gotten fed up with spitting into the wind about FDR as the president's third term was in full swing. 

Here on Stripper's Guide we have commemorated Herbert Johnson once back in 2009 for his only Sunday comic strip, Eph Jackson, which ran in 1905-06. The only other series we can offer up in his memory is his best one, a daily panel series that had a cadre of running titles (I really have to come up with a term for these things). The series was syndicated through the cooperative syndicate Associated Newspapers. It debuted on January 3 1921*, and evidently Johnson's name already had plenty of clout because the series was picked up by an impressive number of papers. 

I really wish I knew when Johnson got his permanent berth at the Saturday Evening Post, because it sort of stands to reason that it was in 1922 but I have no hard evidence, just circumstantial. Johnson's daily newspaper panel seems to have sputtered that year, with it being reduced to a frequency of 2-3 times per week. This would make sense if he was getting busier with Post work. It sure doesn't seem like the problem was lack of newspaper clients. The series becomes so sporadically printed that I can only offer my best guess as to when it was finally cancelled. I think it was in December 1922**, though I have seen a goodly number of his panels printed later, but generally by papers where printing material late was a typical thing.

* Source: Boston Globe

* Source: Boston Globe and Calgary Herald,

Labels: Obscurities

George McManus' juggernaut comic strip Bringing Up Father featured the topper strip Rosie's Beau for many years. But in 1944 after a run of nearly twenty years sitting above Jiggs and Maggie, I guess McManus decided it was time to try something fresh. 

The new strip, Snookums, might have been new as a topper, but it was anything but actually fresh. Snookums the spoiled baby had come onto the comic strip landscape nearly forty years earlier in 1906. 

One of McManus' earliest successes was a strip called The Newlyweds, which was about a pair of lovebirds who are so heady with romance that nothing else matters to them. After a few years of playing with that subject, McManus decided it was time for Mr. and Mrs. Newlywed to take their next step in life. He dropped the strip for a little over nine months, and then brought it back in late 1906 as The Newlyweds and their Baby. 

What had been a popular strip all of a sudden became a hit on the level of the biggest titles of the day. The Newlywed's new baby, Snookums, despite being butt-ugly, was of course the apple of his parents' eyes. Mr. and Mrs. Newlywed took adoration of their baby to off-the-chart levels, producing hilarious strips that made the baby into a pop culture phenomenon. 

This strip ran until 1916 and had the rare honour of running with two syndicates at the same time from 1912 to 1916. McManus had created the strip for the Pulitzer organization, but when he jumped ship for Hearst in 1912 the strip was considered too valuable to lose. Albert Carmichael continued the original version for Pulitzer, while McManus renamed it Their Only Child for the Hearst version. 

In 1944 you would have had to be about forty years old or more to remember the original series, and I have no doubt that the newly minted Snookums topper was a great hit of nostalgia for middle-aged and better newspaper readers. The new topper strip featured a modernized Mr. and Mrs. Newlywed and baby, but otherwise the gags pretty much followed the same pattern. 

Okay, so I told you all that so I could tell you this. In 1951 either McManus, his superb assistant Zeke Zekley (who probably did 90% of the work on the topper), or the syndicate decided that the strip needed a shake-up. It was decided that baby Snookums, who was about 45 years old in reality years, needed to grow up a bit. But how do you do that? You can't very well just have Snookums as a baby one week, and then next week advance his age until he's in elementary school, now can you? Well, I suppose you could, but McManus and Zekley took a sneakier approach. Here is the Snookums topper for May 6 1951 featuring the familiar baby version:

And here is the next Sunday, May 13, and all of a sudden baby Snoiokums is a toddler, looking pretty comfortable in the upright position:

Another week passes, and on May 20 the toddler has advanced to growing a mop of hair:

Things now slow down a bit, letting Snookums settle in a bit at what I guess would be the terrible twos. But he continues to age and by September 16 (below) he's now reading, placing him I guess at the age of six at the least?

By October 21 Snookums miraculous growth spurt finally ends, placing him in elementary school, where he will stay for the rest of the strip's life:

So now that we've had this fun little jaunt through the remaking of a comic strip character, we end with a mystery. According to King Features' internal records, the Snookums topper was dropped at the end of 1956. But that's wrong, because I have found samples as late as 1961. My wild guess based on no evidence is that the King Features date might reflect the end of Snookums being distributed as a topper to Bringing Up Father, and after that perhaps the strip was sold on its own merits as a standalone feature?

But no matter how the marketing went on, the important question is this: When did this important strip end? Can anyone help?

Labels: Topper Features

 

The A. Blue "Help Wanted Series 500" was quite extensive and popular, but this is only our second card from the series to show up on Wish You Were Here. Many more to come should we be granted decades of blog publishing in out future. 

Thanks to Mark Johnson, who scanned this card from his collection.

Labels: Wish You Were Here

 

An array of single panel gag cartoons was a familiar sight in 1900s papers, especially evening editions. Here's one such grouping from a 1904 edition of the New York Evening Journal, featuring four cartoons by William F. Marriner (first and third columns) and two by Harry B. Martin in the middle. 

A few explanatory notes:

* "Beautiful Snow" was a poem written in 1869 by John Whittaker Watson. It seems to be the only poem of his that really outlived him in the public consciousness. 

* I can find no evidence that there was a revolutionary named Bustaments in South America in 1904, but there are a few by the name Bustamente in decades long past by then. I imagine Martin is using it as a sort of generic Latino name.

Labels: One-Shot Wonders

I didn’t take high school seriously, and by the time I graduated, I doubt if I could have gotten into a college. I started at Parsons School of Design in New York City. I went there for a year, but I found it to be superficial in terms of learning how to draw. We had life drawing once or twice a week, and the rest was all about technique and an overview of the different commercial fields. I felt I wasn’t learning anything that I needed to learn, so I switched to the New York Art Students League. I could never have been an interior decorator or a fashion artist anyway. I was drawn to the League because it was totally unstructured. You had to provide your own motivation. There were no tests, no grades, no diploma, no nothing. You just went there, and if you wanted to learn, you could learn, and that appealed to me. And we drew from a model every single day. …

… I studied Fine Art at the Art Students League and wasn’t very good at it. I had absolutely no ambition, but I found myself doing it anyway. And then I met Dana Fradon there [around 1946], who was an aspiring cartoonist. His goal was to get into The New Yorker, and he encouraged me to try cartooning, which I thought was a total fall into degradation. People are very snotty in art school, so it just seemed like the most degrading thing in the world. But I had a talent for it. We were broke when we got married, so Dana and a friend of ours encouraged me to make some comic book samples. I did and that’s how it started. …

Mrs. Irma H. Dom, of 51 Parkway Road, Bronxville, died today in Lawrence Hospital after a short illness at the age of fifty-three.

Born in Chicago, daughter of Louise Tute Haefeli and the late John Haefeli, Mrs. Dom had resided in Bronxville for 14 years.

In addition to her mother, she leaves a son, Jay R. Dom of Bronxville and a daughter, Mrs. Ramona Fradon of New York City.

Yes, he [Gill Fox] called me up one day out of the blue and asked me if I wanted to draw it. He told me what they were offering, which was more than I was making in comics, but I didn’t tell him right away that I wanted to do it. I wanted to think about it, because I never liked Brenda Starr very much, and yet it seemed like an opportunity to me.

Friends of mine who did strips warned me prophetically, that I would be on a treadmill, and I’d never get off of it, and that it was a grind. But I decided I’d give it a try. By the way, Gill had been looking—they’d been beating the bushes, trying to find somebody for about a year, because they wanted a woman to do it, and they finally bumped into me ...

Labels: Ink-Slinger Profiles

 

Sally's So Sentimental ran as the Newspaper Feature Service magazine cover series from March 22 to June 6 1931. The art is credited to Philip Loring, who I believe is in actuality Paul Robinson, and it is a lovely art deco gem. The story, on the other hand, is even more gossamer-thin than usual. In fact in this case there is really no continuing story at all, despite the "To Be Continued" tagline at the end of each installment. Each week Sally gets dressed up in her best duds, attends some event and bewitches the most attractive man in attendance. End of installment, reload and repeat next week.

This series does the almost unthinkable when in the final installment Sally stands by as her sister gets wed. Did Loring not read the magazine cover writer's manual? The heroine ALWAYS gets married in the final installment. Sheesh.

Oh, and why is the word 'sentimental' used in the title? I have no idea. Sally exhibits no particular sentimentality all through the series. I get the funny feeling that Loring/Robinson didn't quite have a grasp of the word's meaning, and the editors at NFS couldn't be bothered to educate him.

Labels: Magazine Cover Comics

 

As we've discussed many times before, TV listing pages, with their acres of boring tables, were ripe targets for a cartoon series to brighten things up. By the 1980s, though, the TV-centric gag panels (they were almost all panels) were very much on the wane. Why that is I cannot figure, because this was the decade in which cable TV blossomed, making those listings take up far more room than in the old days of three networks and a local station or two. Apparently the equation that more boring type implies more need for brighteners does not actually compute, though. 

Into this bear market came Ken Bowser, who was at the time working on staff at the Orlando Sentinel-Star. He created The Vidiots for his paper, debuting there as a daily on August 13 1981*.  Bowser's work was familiar to Orlandoans and he was already well-known for his repulsive toad-like characters, now institutionalized in The Vidiots. 

Because the Sentinel-Star was owned by the Chicago Tribune, Bowser had a well-oiled pipeline for submitting to their syndicate. About a year and a half after the feature started as a local feature it was picked up for syndication, first appearing with a syndicate stamp on January 3 1983. 

The Vidiots never had more than a modest list of clients, and I think most of them were probably likewise Chicago Tribune owned papers. It was a pretty funny panel, but newspapers generally just didn't seem interested in TV page brighteners anymore. Bowser stuck with the feature for four years, finally giving it up on February 14 1987.

*Source: All dates from Orlando Sentinel-Star.

Labels: Obscurities

 

Outcault produced many of these calendar advertising postcards, some for specific advertisers, like this one, some more generic. 

The Rockford Watch Company was not a particularly major player in the pocket watch market, and the factory was shuttered just six years after this marketing campaign. Perhaps a victim of the newfangled wristwatches, I wonder? 

These cards seem to have been produced with the idea that Rockford dealers would do the posting, but then you would think they would not be preprinted with "Dealers Name and Address Here" on them, but rather just an open space for the dealer's stamp. Bad planning, that. 

Thanks to Mark Johnson, who provided the scans of this card.

Labels: Wish You Were Here

 

In the heyday of Yellow Journalism, when Sunday circulation figures were more important to newspaper publishers even than the company's profit or loss, all sorts of freebies were given away with Sunday issues to stimulate those figures. One of those freebies were pictures that could be watercoloured by the buyer's children, using "special" inks printed directly on the pages. Add a little water and you could paint with the resulting concoctions. 

My educated guess is that those special inks were actually ink formulations that were found not to be colourfast and therefore poor choices for newspaper printing. This was, after all, in the days when publishers were still experimenting with ink formulas, looking for the quickest drying, most vibrant hues possible. The story of the Yellow Kid's origination, after all, was supposedly due to one of these experiments that required a nice big spot of yellow ink for testing. While I find the exact circumstances of the famous tale hard to swallow (there was already a workable yellow ink in use at this time), there is no doubt that colour ink experiments did take place. 

Anyway, back to today's One-Shot Wonder. Ed Carey neglected to sign this strip, but there's no doubt this is his work. It ran in the McClure colour comic section of August 17 1902 and the gag depends on the reader's knowledge of the watercolour stunts in use with some newspapers at the time, proof that they were quite common and well-known.

Labels: One-Shot Wonders

 

In their heyday New York's evening newspapers were designed with the evening commuter in mind. The stories tended to be short and punchy, the headlines lurid, and the comics catered to grown-up humour tastes. And yet sometimes decidedly different material snuck in, like Eleanor Schorer's Tumble Tom, which appeared in the Evening World daily from July 12 to September 18 1915. Tumble Tom was basically a rehash of Little Nemo, but with simpler stories and no apparent intent to entertain the grown-ups as well as the young 'uns.

In Tumble Tom a young boy divides his time between the waking world (Ope-Eye-World) and his version of Slumberland, called Bye-Low-Land. In Tom's dreamland there reside all the characters from the familiar fairy tales. In the confines of each daily strip he has a little adventure with the fairy tale characters and then wakes up, often to tell his mother of his experiences. It's a perfectly sweet strip, and no doubt was gobbled up by the children of Mr. Commuter when he arrived home and let them have the paper. 

But why did this strip, obviously geared for children, appear in the Evening World? The telltale answer comes in the running dates. In high summer New Yorkers, even cartoonists, took their vacations to get out of the blast furnace of NYC. The Evening World offered its A-list cartoonists leaves at this time of year, and that was an opportunity for cartoonists lower on the totem pole to get some of their wares accepted by the paper. Schorer took this opportunity to try out a kid's strip, as opposed to her more usual fodder of romantic material. Perhaps she was seeking to create a strip that would gain her a permanent berth with a regular title. If so it didn't work, and Tumble Tom took the long beddy-bye as the A-listers reappeared along with the cooler weather at their drawing boards.

Labels: Obscurities

 This year’s survey lost 3 papers, the News-Pilot (San Pedro, CA), San Bernardino County Sun (CA) and Pottsville Republican (PA). So the total for this survey is down to  254 papers. The loss of these three papers has caused an interesting situation at the top of the chart. Since two of these papers ran Garfield and not Peanuts, we now have a tie at the number one position.

In other Top 30 movements, Fox Trot added 7 papers and joined the 100 paper club and moved up 2 spots from 15 to 13. Zits being the big gainer this year it moved up 5 spots from #22 to 17. Rose is Rose enters the Top 30 while Arlo and Janis falls off.

Title (total 254 Papers)	Rank	Rank Change	Papers +/-	Total Papers
Garfield	1	Same	-2	223
Peanuts	1	Up 1	1	223
Blondie	3	Same	-1	209
For Better or For Worse	4	Same	4	204
Beetle Bailey	5	Same	1	182
Dilbert	6	Same	13	178
Family Circus	7	Up 1	4	157
Hagar The Horrible	7	Same	-3	157
Cathy	9	Down 1	-4	149
Doonesbury	10	Same	-1	145
Hi and Lois	11	Same	-1	108
B.C.	12	Same	-1	107
Fox Trot	13	Up 2	7	102
Frank and Ernest	13	Same	-3	102
Wizard of Id	15	Down 1	0	99
Born Loser	16	Same	-2	90
Dennis The Menace	17	Same	-3	81
Zits	17	Up 5	21	81
Shoe	19	Down 1	-4	76
Sally Forth	20	Same	1	65
Marmaduke	21	Down 2	-4	63
Mother Goose and Grimm	22	Down 1	0	61
Baby Blues	23	Up 2	8	58
Close To Home	24	Up 1	4	54
Non Sequitur	24	Down 1	2	54
Ziggy	26	Down 3	1	53
Mallard Fillmore	27	Down 2	1	51
Jump Start	28	Up 2	3	43
Mary Worth	29	Down 1	-2	42
Rose Is Rose	29	Entering	5	42

 Not much movement on the universal comic section this year. The Top 6 and 7 had an increase and like last year the Arizona Republic won the most universal comic section running the Top 26 strips.

Top 2 – 209 (Up 5)
Top 3 – 182 (Up 6)
Top 4 – 157 (Up 5)
Top 5 – 124 (Same)
Top 6 – 88 (Down 3)
Top 7 – 71 (Down 4)
Top 8 – 63 (Up 4)
Top 9 – 56 (Up 9)
Top 10 – 48 (Up 12)
Top 11 – 33 (Up 11)
Top 12 – 23 (Up 8)
Top 13 – 7 (Down 2)
Top 14 – 6 (Up 3)
Top 15 – 4 (Up 1)
Top 16 – 3 (Up 1)
Top 17 – 2 (Same)
Top 18 – 1 (Same)
Top 19 – 1 (Same)
Top 20 – 1 (Same)
Top 21 – 1 (Same)
Top 22 -  1 (Same)
Top 23 -  1 (Same)
Top 24 – 1 (Same)
Top 25 – 1 (Same)
Top 26 – 1 (Same)


The Avenge Number of daily comics run by our papers went up just a tad. It is now 18.18 strips per paper, up from 18.03.

Here are the rest of the features that made this year's survey, along with the number of papers, and their increase or decrease from last year:


41 – Arlo & Janis (-1)

37 – Crankshaft (0), Rex Morgan (0)

36 – Barney Google and Snuffy Smith (-1)

35 – Herman (+8)

33 – Mutts (+4)

32 – Funky Winkerbean (-1), Lockhorns (0), Luann (+2)

28 – Alley Oop (-2), Curtis (0)

25 – Andy Capp (-4), Grizzwells (-1), Kit N Carlyle (+4), Pickles (+3), Rubes (+3)

24 – In The Bleachers (-2), Marvin (-4)

23 - Real Life Adventures (-2)

21 – Geech (0)

19 – Eek and Meek (-1), Judge Parker (+1), Rugrats (R)

18 – One Big Happy (-1), Robotman (0)

17 – Bizarro (-3), Gasoline Alley (-2), Overboard (+1)

16 – Crabby Road (+2), Tank McNamara (-1)

14 – Big Nate (+1), Piranha Club (-1), Stone Soup (+2)

13 – Adam (-2), Drabble (0), Pluggers (0)

12 – Betty (+1), Fred Basset (-2), Mark Trail (0), Sherman Lagoon’s (+4)

11 – Buckles (0), Heathcliff (-5), Hocus-Focus (+3), Phantom (-2), Tiger (-2)

10 – Berry’s World (-3), Dave (+1), Dunigan’s People (+1), Mr. Boffo (0), Nancy (-2), Speed Bump (0), Sylvia (-1)

9 – Amazing Spider-Man (-2), Bound & Gagged (0), Middletons (-1)

8 – Apartment 3-G (-1), Dick Tracy (0), Gil Thorp (0), Zippy (0)

7 – Against The Grain (0), Brenda Starr (0), Duplex (0), I Need Help (-2), Rhymes With Orange (-2), They’ll Do It Every Time (+1)

6 – Buckets (-1), Citizen Dog (0), Herb & Jamaal (-1), Kuduz (0), Mixed Media (-4), Momma (0), Ralph (0)

5 – Archie (-2), Ben (R), Committed (+1), Free For All (+5), Fusco Brothers (0), Grin and Bear It (0), Horrorscope (0), Over The Hedge (-2), Safe Havens (0), Tumbleweeds (0)

4 – Crock, Dr. Katz, Liberty Meadows, 9 Chickweed Lane. Our Fascinating Earth, Strange Brew, That’s Jake, Twins

3 – Bliss, Bottom Liners, Broom Hilda, Comic For Kids, Dinette Set, Donald Duck, Love Is, Motley’s Crew, Murray’s Law, On The Fastrack, Ripley’s Believe It or Not, Us & Them, Willy N Ethel

2 – Animal Crackers, Ballard Street, Better Half, Between Friends, Chubb & Chauncey, Claire & Weber, Cornered, Fair Game, Mandrake The Magician, Heart of The City, Meg!, Mickey Mouse, Nest Heads, New Breed, Norm, Quigmans, Redeye, Reality Check, Rip Kirby, Second Chances, Steve Roper and Mike Nomad, Tuttle, Warped

1 – Belvedere, Charlie, Farcus, Good Life, Graffiti, Laffbreak, Littlebuck, Little Orphan Annie, Loose Parts, Meet Mr. Lucky, Modesty Blaise, No Huddle, Offline, Outcasts, Pellets, Raw Material, Rural Rootz, Small Society, Tarzan, Top of The World, Trudy, Tundra, Two Toes, Walnut Cove, Word for Word

Labels: Paper Trends

 After its big debut last year with 60 papers, Zits continued its growth by adding another 21, which is the biggest gainer of the year. Dilbert continues its growth adding another 13 papers. Baby Blues added 8 papers from last year, perhaps piggybacking on the success of Zits. Here is the list of the strips that gained 5 or more papers.

Zits - 21
Dilbert – 13
Baby Blues – 8
Herman – 8
Fox Trot – 7
Rose is Rose – 5

Only one strip lost 5 or more papers this year and that was Heathcliff with 5.

Adventure and Soap strips continue their slow downfall. Adventure lost 6 spots falling from 92 to 86 spots. Soaps lost 2 spots going from 114 to 112.

Spiderman dropped 2 papers this year. It falls below the 10-paper mark and has gone a long way down since it debuted in the 1978 survey with 50 papers.

Adventure (-6)

Alley Oop – 28 (-2)
Mark Trail – 12 (0)
Phantom – 11 (-2)
Amazing Spider-Man – 9 (-2)
Dick Tracy – 8 (0)
Brenda Starr – 7 (0)
Mandrake The Magician – 2 (+1)
Mickey Mouse – 2 (0)
Rip Kirby – 2 (0)
Steve Roper and Mike Nomad – 2 (-1)
Little Orphan Annie – 1 (0)
Modesty Blaise – 1 (0)
Tarzan – 1 (0)


Soap (-2)

Mary Worth – 42 (-2)
Rex Morgan – 37 (0)
Judge Parker – 19 (+1)
Apartment 3-G – 8 (-1)
Gil Thorp – 8 (0)

Labels: Paper Trends

In 1998 newspaper editors again went to the entertainment medium (movie and television) for the biggest rookie, trying again to get the kids to read newspapers. Of course this did not work in the long run. The rookie winner was Rugrats; the kid’s show that was airing on Nickelodeon debuted in 19 papers. The remaining rookies did not make a significant impact in 1998. Only one other strip got 5 or more papers and that was Ben by Daniel Shelton which also got 5 papers, 4 of them being in Canada. Here is the complete but very short list of 1998 rookies:

 Rugrats – 19

Ben – 5

Murray’s Law – 3

Clarie & Weber, Heart of The City, Nest Heads – 2

Littlebuck, No Huddle, Offline (remarketing of old Smart Chart feature), Raw Material, Top of The World – 1

Labels: Paper Trends

 

Labels: Wish You Were Here

 

This is a public service announcement: on Monday beware offers of tinned nuts, requests for you to fetch implausible seeming items, notices of lottery winnings, and check mirrors often for "Kick Me" signs on your back. 

Here we have Archie Gunn's take on April Fools Day, seen through his bread-and-butter lens of the pretty girl cartoon. And he certainly did a nice job on this New York Journal funnies section cover. I also love these early Journal covers for their contributor lists (see upper left), giving pride of place to the Journal's impressive bullpen of writers and cartoonists.

Labels: One-Shot Wonders

 

To Golden age comic book fans the name Harry Lampert is well-known. Although he did not spend a great deal of time toiling in the comic book bullpens, he happened to be paired up with Gardner Fox to create a new superhero, The Flash, in 1940 for DC Comics. Of course, as was typical of those times, Lampert received no financial bonanza for a creation that would make DC Comics untold millions of dollars, and he went on with his life unchanged.

Lampert preferred doing humor work, and so he then gravitated toward magazine gag cartooning, and also got into instruction and had an ad agency during his later career. What many of us fans remember, though, was how Lampert spent his retirement years. Harry and his wife started appearing at comic book conventions in the 1970s and he was a big hit with the fans because for a certified legend  he was very gosh-darn friendly and approachable. We fans eagerly paid him back for his friendliness; he sold a LOT of badly drawn sketches of The Flash at those conventions, including to me. I don't know if Jim Ivey's OrlandoCons were his first experience of being a convention guest, but I very well remember that he absolutely revelled in them. 

As far as I know Lampert never let on that he had a newspaper strip series, but if he did it would have made for a pretty funny story (or sad, but Lampert was too positive a fellow to see it that way). Lampert created the strip Digby, a strip about a teenage boy, in 1949. It was basically just a me-too affair, with no obvious originality over Archie, Harold Teen and their ilk. Well, I say it didn't exhibit any originality in concept, but in fairness the strip didn't last long enough for Lampert to do much with it. 

How long? Well, Digby debuted in the New York Star on January 23 1949*. And that was a really bad time to be hitching your wagon to  that particular Star, because the paper went belly up on January 28. So Lampert's strip came and went in exactly six days. As far as I know, Lampert did not succeed in selling it anywhere else. The New York Compass, debuting a few months later, was considered essentially the resurrection of the Star, but alas, Harry's strip was not revived therein.

* The New York Star bucked normal newspaper practice by publishing their 'daily' paper Sunday through Friday, issuing no paper on Saturdays.

Labels: Obscurities

College of Literature, Science and the Arts 1918 Graduates

Jeannette Maud Kiekintveld, A.B. Advertising writer and newspaper writer. In Publicity Dept., McCall Co. 236 W. 37th St., New York, N.Y.

Q. Please name some women who are prominent in the advertising business.—E.R.M.

A. Such a list would include Katherine Fisher, director of Good Housekeeping Institute; Mary Lewis of Best & Company; Bernice Fitzgibbon, Wanamaker’s; Margaret Fishback, R. H. Macy; Hildegarde Dolson, Franklin Simon; Jeanette Moser, Stern’s; Pegeen Fitzgerald, McCreery; Mary Moore, Namm’s; Wilma Libman, Gimbel’s, and Virginia Shook, Lord & Taylor.

Mrs. Moser Gets New Post

Mrs. Jeanette Moser, advertising manager of Bloomingdale’s for the last six years, has been appointed sales-promotion director of the store, effective Feb. 1. It was announced today by James S. Schoff, president. She will assume her new duties when Ira Hirschmann, a vice president, transfers his activities to the radio and television operations of Federated Department Stores, Inc.

Bustles Barge In snd Out of Style Every 50 Years

I don’t like to say “I told you so,” but—I have before me a column I wrote for the N. Y. World Telegram, August 21, 1933, an interview with Mrs. Jeanette Moser, then and still advertising director of a big N. Y. department store. Mrs. Moser sends me this column which reads: “Maybe we are approaching mid-century madness,” suggests Mrs. Jeanette Moser, seeking to explain why the fashion world, though believing itself in an era of practical people, vertical buildings and simpler styles suddenly finds Itself in the midst of billowing skirts, padded bosoms and rounded hips.

“It’s not the Mae West influence; it’s the turn of the half-century,” continued Mrs. Moser. For several centuries, as French and English women approached the 50’s of their century, they draped themselves in hippy hoops and bustles. Our own pre-Civil War belles extended in every direction as far as whalebone could carry them. Other women who minced toward the middle of their century gripped by a wasp waistline and waddling in bell-shaped skirts were Queen Elizabeth, Empress Eugenie and Marquise de Pomadour. Centennially, bulges barge into fashion and barge out again.”

Those 14-year-old words might easily be describing today. It’s certainly true that the clothes in style today have little relation to the times in which we live. And the turn-of-the-mid-century theory is borne out by history. We’re nearing the 1950 mark. The century is tiered [sic] of thinking up new styles. Why not pull the old ones out again? There are certain hazards that come with long skirts, but they’re not serious. Not so trifling is the wasp waist. Loyal Wolfe, manager of a national corset firm, says that wasp-waist corseting is detrimental to the health of women and nullifies the progress of the corset industry. A smallish waist, yes. But a waspish waist, one that your husband has to help you lace—no! Who wants to be a waist pincher?

Jeanette Moser has been appointed promotion director of Mandel Brothers, Chicago, it is announced by Col. Leon Mandel, president.

From 1939 to 1948 Mrs. Moser was with Bloomingdale’s, New York City, first as advertising manager, later as sales promotion director.

Mrs. Jeanette Moser

Advertising leader 

Wilcox [sic], Ariz., Oct. 20.—Mrs. Jeanette Moser, 53, for many years a leader in retail advertising circles, died here yesterday. From 1932 to 1939 she was advertising manager of Saks Fifth Ave., in New York City. She then became advertising manager of Bloomingdale’s and from 1946 to 1948 was promotion director of that store.

Mrs. Jeanette Moser

Mrs. J. Moser, Known in Advertising Field.

Mrs. Jeanette Kiekenfeldt [sic] Moser, who was well known in retail advertising circles, died Wednesday in Wilcox [sic], Ariz., at the home of her brother-in-law, Dr. Robert Hicks, according to word received here yesterday. 

Mrs. Moser was advertising manager of Saks Fifth Avenue from 1932 to 1939, when she took a similar post at Bloomingdale’s, where she was promotion director from 1946 to 1948. For the last year she was sales promotion director and a member of the executive board of Mandel Brothers in Chicago.

Mrs. Moser, who was graduated from the University of Michigan, had been a feature writer for The Detroit Free press. Afterward she came to New York to work on the editorial staff of McCall’s magazine and write a syndicated newspaper feature.

Surviving are a son, Alan, a student at the University of Kansas, and a brother, Chester Kiekenfeldt of Grand Rapids, Mich.

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