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When Frank Was King.
by Rick Marschall.
Two reasons had my “mind” returning to Gasoline Alley
and its creator Frank King this week. From my friend Germund Von Wowern, the Maharajah of Malmö, I received some
memorabilia of Tomah, the small Wisconsin town where King was born.
Also, I participated in the Theodore Roosevelt Center Symposium at
Dickinson State University in North Dakota. I am Cartoon Archivist for the
Center – all digital and internet work, as was this conference. All three days
by Zoom. Complicated for the organizers, but actually efficient and accessible,
and almost more intimate than the in-person event.
I mention the Roosevelt Symposium because this very week last
year, while driving to North Dakota, I passed by a highway exit for Tomah, and
was tempted to visit. Some day.
It surely is a place more interesting than most cartoonists’ heimat…
home place, wellspring, inspiration. That is because Frank King invented his
neighborhoods, whether Chicago houses’ garages, or the suburbs of later years
of Walt and Skeezix, Phyllis and Nina. King had a superb sense of place; his
environments were not stage-backdrops but, virtually, characters as vivid as
the people with names.
So Tomah went with Frank wherever he moved, and whatever setting
he chose for his characters.
After he retired from the northern Chicago suburbs, Frank King moved to the Winter Park suburb outside Orlando, Florida. I had written him fan letters when I was young and – well, I was still young – but every year our family vacationed in Florida. The Orlando area was a cartoonists’ colony, and my father encouraged me to write to my hero / pen-pals and see if we could visit.
So for many years, before returning to New Jersey and by gracious
pre-arrangement, the last one or two days of “our” vacation would be a detour
to Orlando (I use quotation-marks because I bless my father’s memory for this,
but my mother and sisters were not thrilled) and see cartoonists. I have
mentioned this here before, but almost every year Roy Crane and Frank King
would be on the list, and then there were visits to Leslie Turner, Mel Graff,
Dick Hodgins Sr., Lank Leonard, Zack Mosely, Jim Ivey, Fred Lasswell (some on
the east and west coasts of the state).
By the time I started visiting Frank King, almost all the work on
the strip was being done by Dick Moores, later a good friend; and in fact I
became his syndicate editor. I have, and will, tell more here about the visits
to Frank King – his studio and the interesting originals on the walls (for
instance, work by onetime assistants Garrett Price and Sals Bostwick); examples
of the “shadow boxes” he constructed – three-dimensional scenes with Gasoline
Alley characters and elements painted on glass panes.
Every year the cartoonists gave me “parting gifts” of
originals; Roy Crane once dug back for a Wash Tubbs from when it was
only a Sunday top-strip. Frank pulled work from the 1940s, 1930s, and once a Rectangle
panel, before Gasoline Alley was a titled feature. It is here, maybe the
first time Skeezix’s name is mentioned – days after he was left on Walt’s
doorstep.
Each year Frank’s age showed more and more; his
recollections grew foggier. One year he smiled and said, “Let’s look for some
real old-timers. The old drawings are in the tool shed.” It might have been
years since had gone there, because the central-Florida humidity had done its
work. Piles of originals were matted together, covered in mold. Tears came to
his eyes.
Mine too.
The Tomah drawing was for a special publication marking
the town’s centennial in 1955. To my eyes, although Frank might have done a
thumbnail sketch, this is by Dick Moores at the very beginning of their
collaboration. The panorama drawing, on the other hand, seems to be 100 per
cent Frank King, and from the details and lines, how he drew at the time.
In the text he identifies the location of the alley! Vast
areas of Chicago have homes whose back doors face rows of garages, and
middle-class owners of new automobiles tinkered and compared notes in those
alleys.
“The row of garages near 63rd Street in
Chicago,” he wrote; and ID’d Bill, Avery, Walt, and Doc.
I used to urge Dick Moores to construct a story about
Walt’s death. I certainly had nothing against the old boy… but the Gasoline
Alley WAS noted for its characters growing in real time. I thought, and
think, it would be true to the strip’s essence to “draw” that curtain. Jim
Scancarelli, the current and excellent artist, has Walt and Skeezix still
around, challenging the actuarial tables at Social Security; it was almost 100
years ago when Walt, an adult, found Skeezix on his doorstep.
But if they do ever “retire,” I know this great small-town
American village in rural Wisconsin where they would fit right in...
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