Western painter and master penman Charles M. Russell indulges in a little dinosaur fantasy in 1903 –

 

The Rev. Fiddle, D.D.

The Rev. Fiddle, D.D.

by Claude Eldridge Toles

New York Journal, August 7, 1898

★

 

Uncle Josh's trunk-full of fun

 

[1]

[2]

Uncle Josh's trunk-full of fun: a portfolio of first-class wit and humor, and never-ending source of jollity New York: Dick & Fitzgerald 1869. John Camel Heenan, also known as the Benicia Boy (2 May 1834 - 28 October 1873) was an American bare-knuckle prize fighter

★

Julius Schwartz and Richard A. Lupoff

 

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Snapshot of two giants, Julius Schwartz, renowned DC comics editor, and Richard A. Lupoff, author of the ground breaking EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS: MASTER OF ADVENTURE. Photo taken at BayCon 1987.

Thanks to MM

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Judy in Her Dotage (Judy; or, the London Serio-Comic Journal)

 "JUDY" AT HOME

The Sketch, May 27, 1896

Stanley Armstrong –

 
Stanley Armstrong, 

Slim Jim, May 5, 1923

IN MEMORY OF 'ARMI'

Editor & Publisher, August 20, 1949

To The Editor: I am going to ask a special favor that you carry a notice of the death of my dear friend Stanley Armstrong. He died on March 10, 1949 at his home in San Francisco.

Stanley Armstrong started with World Color Printing Co. in 1910 and we discontinued "Slim Jim" in 1932. He also drew "Bos'n Bill," a similar character.

A great deal of Armi's life was spent on the high seas and in foreign countries. He told me one time that he never took a drawing lesson but acquired the art by drawing portraits of men aboard ship. He was a kindly man and quick and easy to make friends and they were lasting friends.

His wife passed on about four years ago. Since the departure of his wife Armi had been living on his ranch in California. Armi was 73 years old at the time of his death. He worked for no other syndicate than the World Color Printing Co.

RS Grable, President

World Color Printing Co.

St. Louis, Mo.

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Another – 30 – .

JIM IVEY

One of Jim’s political cartoons

by Rick Marschall

I was 16 or 17 when I first met Jim Ivey. My family went on annual vacations to Florida, from New Jersey; and my father always indulged my interest in comics by reserving our last couple of days to visit cartoonists, of whom there were many in the Sunshine State.

I did not show up at front doors unannounced, of course. I sought the cartoonists out, usually with the help of cartoonists I was getting to know in the New York City area, and with the encouragement of my dad, who even helped me compose letters inviting myself to their homes. On those visits my father joined me – Roy Crane, Frank King, Leslie Turner, Mel Graff, Lank Leonard – as a vicarious fan, of course. My mother and sisters sat in the car or at a motel poolside.

But when I visited Jim Ivey I was alone, probably just old enough to drive. We usually stayed on the east coast, and I drove to Madeira Beach, over in the Saint Pete area. Surely I had already corresponded with Jim, probably trading originals. In those days, the 1960s, the hobby was barely hatched. The names I can summon are – now – a ghostly echelon; and I can write this because I started younger than others in that “first generation.”

John Coulthard – the San Franciscan who probably put me in touch with Jim; Abe Paskow of Brooklyn; Tony Sanguino; Angelo Cruz and Chester Grabowski; Gordon Hunter; Gordon Campbell; Ernie McGee; Vern Greene who drew Bringing Up Father and Art Wood the editorial cartoonist; all these have passed. About this time I met Charlie Roberts of Virginia, and Harvard student Fred Schreiber from France, who joined the small fraternity of newspaper-strip art collectors.

Then there was Jim Ivey. He “graduated” from collecting to producing minor publications; and in Madeira Beach he opened a “museum.” Like Jim’s letters and his drawings (he had been a political cartoonist)  – maybe his life itself – they were idiosyncratic and a little disorganized. His cARToon magazine was more of a scrapbook; and his Cartoon Museum that so attracted me was a storefront with original art from his collection thumb-tacked to the walls; books and cartoon anthologies on the floor at the base of those walls; and a platform by the street window, where Jim gave drawing demonstrations and held cartooning classes.

a self-caricature of Jim Ivey.

In Jim’s last note to me he tweaked me, saying that I always had “pooh-poohed” his museum. I never did so to him directly – not even one “pooh” – but I know the troublemaker who tried to be a provocateur. In fact I have served on the boards of several museums and, more pertinently, I have visited many museums. Calling his gallery / displays / drawing board in a storefront, a Museum did not make it a museum. But it was better.

The space in Madeira Beach – just like the comic shop in Orlando he later opened – was a representation of Jim’s mind and personality. Full of comics, old and older. Displays of his favorites – his love on display. Things for sale; things he gave away. And unlike any formal museum, the personality of the host (which he was, more than a Director) was a necessary component.

Jim was omnipresent in those places – and subsequently at OrlandoCon, the legendary annual comics fest he started with Charlie Roberts and Rob Word – with his trademark soft voice and Southern accent, bow tie, handlebar mustache, and, when it was allowed, a large cigar.

Better than these descriptions (and I hope worth the wait in this tribute to Jim, who died last week at the age of 97) was the experience of our first meeting, my first “museum” visit. We talked about everything under the comic-strip sun, tangent leading to tangent as he pulled out drawings and books to show me. King Aroo popped up, and I said I did not know it (it was before I found the Gilbert Seldes-prefaced reprint book).

With the zeal of missionary (which Jim was, and many of us are about classic strips), Jim rushed to the back room, emerged with a week’s worth of Jack Kent daily originals, appropriately self-referential in theme: King Aroo, Yupyop and others discussing how, as comic-strip characters, they should register surprise. Plops; hats flying off; classic nonsense. Of course I fell in love immediately (and subsequently became friends with Jack Kent), but Missionary Jim, noting my enthusiasm – and correctly assessing the investment he was making in my appreciation of strips, and our own future friendship – gave me the six dailies. Of course I tried to protest, and I forget what items I sent him when I returned home… but. That was Jim.

a Thoughts of Man panel.

The outline of his career is more than a rattly skeleton. A Kansas cartoonist, Albert T Reid, had established a university fellowship, and young Jim was a recipient, sent to Europe for a season to study cartooning. He returned with a taste for avant-garde drawing styles, as which his own minimalist style could afterward be classified. That was in 1959, and supplemented what he gleaned from the Landon Correspondence Course.

Jim drew political cartoons for a succession of big-city papers: The Washington Star; St Petersburg Times; The San Francisco Examiner; and Orlando Sentinel. Jim was active in the National Cartoonists Society and a recipient of its Silver T-Square Award. Beginning in 1973 he drew the syndicated daily panel Thoughts of Man for the Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate and, ironically but not uncommonly with cartoonists I met as a fan, I was his editor there.

As a comic-shop proprietor, Jim stocked all the latest releases, even if characters and costumes flummoxed him. In the back room were always vintage strip originals and rare reprint books. As mid-Florida was full of famous cartoonists, he frequently hosted signings and celebrations, even if mall kids did not know who Wash Tubbs or Smilin’ Jack or Snuffy Smith or Skeezix were. Usually their parents did.

a color Wash Tubbs drawing that Crane dedicated to Jim, and Jim in turn signed to me.

Among Jim Ivey’s legacies is the Wash Tubbs reprint book he did, the early years by Roy Crane, with a foreword by Charles Schulz. Jim and Nashville’s Gordon Campbell assembled it, a fine selection of adventures from precisely 50 years earlier, 1924. When I acquired Jim’s own copy, overflowing with color sketches by Roy on every blank page and margin, Jim included a note on how the book was produced, including the lament that he received author’s copies but never made a penny. He had to settle for the gratitude of uncountable fans.

When I edited the old NEMO magazine, it was natural that I turn to Jim for articles, for beneath his casual exterior was a fierce scholar and a good historian. Another “closed circle,” as I similarly recruited Ron Goulart, Bill Blackbeard, et al.

I should mention a little more about OrlandoCon, truly one of the great conventions, always boasting major-name guests (thanks to Florida’s cartooning community plus the proximity of Disney World) and, adding to my childhood forays, it was where I first met, or first spent significant time with, Dick Hodgins Sr., Dick Moores, Floyd Gottfredson, Beanie Velosky, Jim Scancarelli, Bob Burden, Ralph Kent, Rob Word, Ralph Dunagin, and Dave Graue.

“You dirty dog” was one of Jim’s affectionate epithets, if you told him you had just just acquired some treasure of original art. It was affectionate, with a twinkle in his eye, because he had taste but little envy. Jim often traded away excellent examples of an artist’s work if he could yet claim that his collection had some representation of the cartoonist’s. He aimed for a collection of 2500 different artists.

I realize now that Jim Ivey traded not only artwork and vintage books, but he dealt in joy, and traded enthusiasms. He will be missed; and we are a bit lonelier.

115

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Peeps into the Past –

  A Detailed 1919 History of Penny Bloods, Penny Dreadfuls, and Penny Journals

by Frank Jay

Compiled by Bill Blackbeard and Justin Gilbert (2001)

Link HERE

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Jack’s Sporting and Literary Society –

 THE NIGHT THEY BUMPED OFF HERMAN ROSENTHAL.

by John Adcock

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Boardman Robinson, New York Tribune, July 20, 1912

“We take him to a dago joint down on the east side and let him eat a lot of ravioli and listen to the wops. He always got a kick out of that… then we take him up to the McAlpin and set him up in a window on the top floor where he can look straight up Broadway. He just sits there and looks at the lights and traffic and talks about the old mob up at Jack’s café.” — Ike Dorgan about his brother’s last days, to Westbrook Pegler in ‘Death Claims Tad Dorgan, Phrase Maker’ in the Chicago Tribune, May 3, 1929

THE ROARING FORTIES

The term “roaring forties” designated both a region and a glamorous era in time specific to New York. Geographically they started (roughly) at 40^th Street and extended northward on Broadway to 42 Street and on to 50^th Street. Damon Runyon recalled

Twenty years ago, the era of the Roaring Forties was commencing to pass. It had succeeded the era of the Gay Nineties and the Broadway South of 42^nd street. Some of the Gay Nineties lapped over briefly into the era of the Roaring Forties, as one area always laps over into another for a spell. Lillian Russell, “Diamond Jim” Brady, the Hoffman House, Martin’s, Sherry’s, Delmonico’s, Shanley’s and Mouquin’s still were going concerns and bright memories of Manhattan Island.

The Roaring Forties era brought on the glamor, that was to become tradition, of the Knickerbocker hotel and Enrico Caruso and Jack’s restaurant and the Hippodrome and Murray’s, with the revolving glass dance floor, and the Castle’s and Healy’s and Releenweber’s and the Follies and Churchill's and Rector’s. It was the era of Wilson Mizner and Irving Berlin, and George Cohen and of the Harry Thaw trial and the Herman Rosenthal murder and the old Waldorf. – ‘The Brighter Side of News,’ Damon Runyon, Times-Union, Oct 3, 1939

THE PRINCE OF REPORTERS

O’Malley was known around town simply as “O’Malley of the Sun.” Despite the veil of anonymity — the old Sun did not use “by-lines” — O’Malley became widely known as a reporter and humor columnist. The brilliance of his style identified him to all who commonly read the paper. O’Malley’s reign as the prince of reporters began in 1906 and ran on until 1920, when he resigned to contribute to magazines and publishers.

Frank Ward O’Malley, Tad Dorgan, Hype Igoe, Benjamin DeCassares, Wilson Mizner, “Spanish” Jack O’Brien (cable editor on the old NY Sun), Tom Geraghty, Ring Lardner, Damon Runyon, George Luks the cartoonist, Stuffy Davis, Jim Huneker of the Sun, Vince Barton, and Jack Francis were members, some regular and some on the periphery, of ‘Jack’s Sporting and Literary Society’ who met at Jack’s restaurant with its famed Battling Nelson grill during the Roaring Forties.

That was a year—1912—notable for many things. So much happened that our great major Broadway sport of all night discussion and tableside debate hit a new high for all time. For one thing newspaper men will tell you that 1912 was the greatest year for news in journalistic history, at least in variety. Early in the year the Titanic went down, one of the very greatest news stories of all time. Then, just before 2 o’clock the morning of July 16 gunmen procured by Police Lieut. Charley Becker murdered Herman Rosenthal thereby beginning a murder yarn that held the front-page attention of readers for months. – ‘Back on Broadway – Golden Era of Indoor Sports,’ Frank Ward O’Malley, Buffalo Evening News, Aug 23, 1930.

Hype Igoe, 1938

Hype Igoe was a cartoonist and sporting columnist on the staff of the San Francisco Examiner. The year following the earthquake he came to New York and worked on the New York American’s art staff for a few years, thence to New York Sun as a writer of boxing, later to the Tribune, and finally a member of the World’s sports staff. Igoe was on the scene of the Rosenthal killing:

THE NIGHT THEY BUMPED OFF HERMAN ROSENTHAL

‘O’Malley Greatest of All, Igoe Tells Bill Corum,’ Albany Times-Union, New York, Nov 30, 1932

Dear Bill Corum: When Frank Ward O’Malley passed on in Paris a few weeks ago, I got me the sinks. Sad, because Time, greatest of all the line buckers, had taken another of the disappearing old guard.

I don’t know that you ever knew him. Not to have been in his company at some time or another in your newspaper career was to have missed a gentle genius of his kind. Our (Arthur) Brisbane always called him “the greatest reporter in the world.” Chronicling was only one of his sidelines. He played at being a human being better than anyone I had ever met. He wrote with tremendous sweeps of English, yet each line seemed leavened with the sweet wit which dominated his soul.

For twenty years or more O’Malley, with Tad (Dorgan), Ben De Casseres, Wilson Mizner, “Spanish” (Jack) O’Brien, Harry Pollock, Vernie Barton, Corse Payton, Jack Francis, Arnold Rothstein, Jack Shaughnessy, Freddie Griesheim, and the bold bad boys of “wire tapping” and “the boats,” made Jack’s eating and drinking shebang our ole swimmin’ hole. That was before the camel prohibition came.

Herman Rosenthal

Bill, the night they bumped off Herman Rosenthal! It was maddening in the whirl of its excitement. Charley Meeghan, the then sports editor of the Morning Telegraph, and myself, had sauntered into George Considine’s New Metropolis, in 43^rd, to gas and read “copy” on Charley’s printed story of a bout we had just seen in old Madison Square Garden.

Charley had wired his story from the ringside and here we were, 20 minutes later, reading it in type that couldn’t have been cold in the printing.

Charley, who is no more, Bill, looked up and said “Great age, Hype, great age. The fight isn’t half an hour old and it–” Charley never finished that sentence.

Bang-bang-, bang, bang, bang!!!

Five shots, Bill, two fast, then three.

“Backfire, Charley?’ I said.

“Backfire, hell,” said our waiter as he did a standing, sitting dive under the table. Before he disappeared, he pointed one long great cloud of powder reeking finger at the big open window. A smoke was floating into the room.

With the five shots came the piercing voice of Artie Hall, a famous blues singer. She was sitting at a table with Billy Atwell and Lieutenant File of the police department. From a rear seat, facing the door, Artie Hall had jumped to her feet and hit high C in a scream which still rings in my ears.

Miss Artie Hall, June 1900

File, in light civvies, his back to the door, whirled around, whipped out a long blue service gun and was through the door like an antelope. They brought him up on charges of negligence afterwards and Charley and I testified on his behalf. We told how he had gone “out in the smoke” not knowing what fate had in store for him.

Charley and I ran to the front door. A figure lay sprawled on the sidewalk, face downward. The fallen man’s right hand was stretched out full length and between the first two fingers, standing straight up, there was a half-consumed cigar. A little ribbon of blue smoke curled upward from it, which through some strange miracle, had not been disclosed from the man’s fingers as he crashed, stone dead, to the sidewalk. The maddening whirl in its beginning!

“Herman. It’s Herman,” whispered big “Judge” Crowley.

“Herman who?” I asked.

And from over my shoulder came the answer- “Herman Rosenthal, by God!”

I whipped around and there stood Frank Ward O’Malley. Always the “greatest reporter.” He had beaten Swope and Hill and the others in from the ole swimmin’ hole. He hadn’t waited for night editor’s orders. He had started with the first crack of the four gunmen’s gats. Indeed, a reporter, Bill.

Charles Becker

The strange death watch we kept in Jack’s that night. Becker was electrocuted for that slaying. O’Malley had gone up to Sing Sing as our and the old Sun’s representative. As the dawn came, we, Mizner, Tad, De Casseres, O’Brien, Payton, Barton, (Arnold) Rothstein, old Jimmy Wakely, Francis, Shaughnessy, (Jack) Dunstan himself, Henry M. T. Beekman, the great barrister, who coined the famous “old age is the death of enthusiasm” line, myself and one or two others, sat around a big table with our watches in the palm of our hands.

Each, in ghastly fashion, was trying to picture what Becker was doing. What his last moments were like. Each trembled in the strange excitement of that weird death vigil. Three minutes to go and it would be 5:30 of the morning, going away time in the big house in those days.

O’Malley came with the story. We clung to his Poe-like tale as ivy to an old oak. Bill, you’ll probably remember that Becker collapsed so pitifully that they asked a Negro companion in death to “wait on Charley.” Charley’s nerve was gone, Bill, and the Negro said he’d “sit it out until Charley had it over with.”

Breathlessly we waited for O’Malley’s return. Mizner got in the first word.

“Well?” he quizzed?

“Bill, the black man showed the “Czar of the Tenderloin” how to die,” said O’Malley.

“Then why the hell didn’t you lead off your story with that line?” stormed the exacting Broadway wit.  One of O’Malley’s better lines, which never got into type until now.

Frank Ward O’Malley! His lute laid aside for all time, Bill. I can see him now, black silk cords hanging from his nose glasses, handsome, kindly, sweet singer of prose! He was the only great reporter of my time who never talked of himself. I often wonder if Frank Ward O’Malley ever knew Frank Ward O’Malley.

Odd thing, Bill, they never put him on a big fight story. How he could have garnished the tragedy of the crushing of the Orchid Man at Boyle’s Thirty Acres or the malleting of the ox-like Willard at Toledo! A reporter!!

Hype Igoe.

Lt. Charles E. Becker, a brutal cop on the take, was convicted of Rosenthal’s murder and electrocuted on July 13, 1915, at Sing Sing prison.

THE BRAIN

Power of the Press, even when the Power was only half a horse. Arnold Rothstein, who came into Jack’s every morning, was one of the most delightful beer companions with whom I have ever sat out a session. He impressed me as being a great executive who simply took the easiest way in a country where craft and graft are all ye need to know. – ‘Jack’s,’ Benjamin De Cassares, American Mercury, Nov 1932

The man who ran the gambling parlor on the second floor of the Metropole at the time of Rosenthal's demise was the gambler Arnold Rothstein. He took over where Rosenthal left off, soon running New York’s drug and gambling rackets. His fate was the same, shot in the abdomen outside the Park Central Hotel on Nov 4, 1928. Rothstein was one of the peripheral members of ‘Jack’s Sporting and Literary Society.’ In a ‘Hollywood Day by Day’ column in New Movie Magazine, by NEMO (O. O. McIntyre), the author wrote.

I had dinner with Jack the other night and he told me what I didn’t know before: that Arnold Rothstein, the murdered gambler, used to join that famous restaurant round table, and that no one around the board had a more razor-like wit.

Damon Runyon called him “The Brain.” Runyon recalled “He was the villain in a Fitzgerald novel. He carried on where Becker left off after Rosenthal’s murder; introduced the modern gangster; served crime as pay off man; taught politician and crook how to work profitably together.”

Arnold Rothstein, financier of the New York Underworld – Lindy’s restaurant on Broadway was his favorite hangout, and it was from there that a telephone call summoned him to his death. Frequently he sat all night in Lindy’s. drinking cup after cup of coffee and swapping gossip and wisecracks with such figures as Damon Runyon, the reporter; T.A. “Tad” Dorgan, the cartoonist; Jack Lait, Con Conrad, and Harry Hershfield. – ‘The Murder of Rothstein,’ Chicago Tribune, April 28, 1940

––To be Continued––

Miss Artie Hall, 1903

Artie Hall was a white "coon-shouter" from Georgia who first appeared on the stage in 1899. She mixed her own brown make-up and at the end of her act she would lower her blouse to show the white skin beneath the cloth. Newspapers hectored her for showing too much torso at the reveal, and for showing her underwear while dancing. By 1912 language had changed, and she was now known as a "blues-singer."

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The Laughs of a Nation

The Publications of 

Gerald G. Swan

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by Alan Clark

Half Holiday Publishing

2022

294 Pages

Available HERE

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