Slow Ball Cartoonist , livre ebook

S LOW B ALL C ARTOONIST
S LOW B ALL C ARTOONIST
The Extraordinary Life of Indiana Native and Pulitzer Prize Winner John T. McCutcheon of the Chicago Tribune
By Tony Garel-Frantzen
Purdue University Press West Lafayette, Indiana
Copyright 2016 by Purdue University. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America.
Cataloging-in-Publication data on file at the Library of Congress.
Cover image courtesy of the Virginia Kelly Karnes Archives and Special Collections Research Center, Purdue University Libraries.
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-55753-730-0 ePub ISBN: 978-1-61249-433-3 ePDF ISBN: 978-1-61249-432-6
C ONTENTS
Foreword
Author’s Note
1 A Sleepy Setting of Uneventfulness
2 Young, Green, and Not a Friend in the City
3 Into the Jaws of a Dragon
4 Broke Again and Starting Out Fresh
5 In Search of More Fresh Air
6 A Small Effort of Imagination to Make an Epic Cartoon
7 Look Who’s Coming Back
8 A Man Making His First Flight
9 An Ominous Shudder
10 A Good Day to Start Things
11 Anatomy of a Pulitzer Prize Cartoon
12 An Equatorial Baptism
13 Hard to Be Lost on a Straight Road
Postscript: A City Mourns the Passing of Its Cartoonist
Index
F OREWORD
M Y GREAT-GREAT GRANDFATHER , Andrew McNally, was among the industry leaders in the late 1800s who helped transform Chicago into a world-class business center. He cofounded Rand McNally & Co., which would become famous for maps and other travel-related products. Another giant from that era who shared a passion for travel was Chicago Tribune cartoonist John T. McCutcheon—the plainspoken Indiana native and Purdue University graduate whose charming and delightful cartoons graced the pages of the newspaper from 1903 until his retirement in 1946. I am pleased to introduce readers to the story of his fascinating life.
More than a cartoonist, McCutcheon was a veteran world traveler, combat artist, and foreign correspondent whose drawings and illustrations provided readers with commentary and reflections about the day’s scientific, political, commercial, and human progress at a time before television, Internet, and e-mail.
The gentle soul from rural Indiana quickly became a favorite among Tribune readers. His longtime friend, George Ade (a noted humorist and playwright), summed up why readers were so fond of McCutcheon in a 1903 book titled Cartoons by McCutcheon that was published by Chicago-based A. C. McClurg & Co.:

Those who have studied and admired John McCutcheon’s cartoons in the daily press have been favorably impressed by the two eminent characteristics of his intent: First, he cartoons public men without grossly insulting them. Second, he recognizes the very large and important fact that political events do not entirely fill the entire horizon of the American people.
When McCutcheon did cover politics, it was with gentle humor, clever artistic execution, and considerate treatment of the public figures he targeted with his pen. His style was in marked contrast to contemporary cartoonists who attacked public figures with a vicious wickedness. Noted his friend Ade: “McCutcheon tried to avoid hackneyed political subjects and give his readers pictures of their real interest —everyday life.”
At the beginning of McCutcheon’s career, the process for reproducing photographs in newspapers was not yet widely adopted. So, papers relied on a cartoonist to be a sort of graphic reporter, illustrating major news events by making sketches on scene. In the beginning, sporting events, courtroom trials, fires, and crime scenes were all part of McCutcheon’s typical day’s work. Eventually, however, he settled into cartoons exclusively.
McCutcheon may have had the soul of a poet, but his heart was all adventurer. He sketched General Pancho Villa as the Mexican Revolution leader sat menacingly holding a pistol. He was aboard Commodore George Dewey’s flagship at the start of the Spanish-American War. He was likely the first civilian to fly in a warplane over a World War I battlefield. He hunted big game in Africa with Theodore Roosevelt. He rode horseback through Persia and Chinese Turkestan, explored the jungles of New Guinea, traveled the Gobi Desert in a motor car, and made two airplane trips to South America. The list goes on. All this before commercial airlines, ATMs, and cell phones.
John T. McCutcheon also likely crossed paths with Andrew McNally.
In 1889, an executive committee was formed to secure a location in Chicago for the World’s Columbian Exposition. In addition to McNally, the committee included such famous members as industrialist George Pullman, steel magnate Charles H. Schwab, publisher Joseph Medill, and Chicago’s thirty-third Mayor DeWitt C. Cregier. McCutcheon was assigned to provide sketches of the construction, opening, and ongoing events. The Chicago Daily News prominently featured his work. Thus, it seems likely that McNally and McCutcheon at least knew of each other.
In Slow Ball Cartoonist , Tony Garel-Frantzen chronicles all of McCutcheon’s adventures, from his birth on a small rural farm near Lafayette in 1870, to his rise as the “Dean of American Cartoonists” and winner of the first-ever Pulitzer Prize awarded to the Tribune for McCutcheon’s cartoon about bank failures in the Great Depression. I hope you enjoy reading the story of this great Indiana native, Purdue University graduate, and iconic Chicago figure.
Andrew McNally IV Former Chairman and CEO Rand McNally & Co.
December 2015
A UTHOR’S N OTE
A FEW WORDS ABOUT how this book came to be. Early in my career I worked as a newspaper reporter and editorial cartoonist. On the reporting side, one of the beats was a high school district in the suburbs of Chicago. Shortly before I arrived at the newspaper, that high school district endured a bruising teacher’s strike. In my view, several colleagues in the newsroom had deliberately, and perhaps unfairly, painted the administration in a poor light. So when I took over the beat, I tried instead to find positive stories to tell. The beleaguered high school officials were grateful. One day, after I no longer covered the high school, a box arrived with a copy of Drawn From Memory , by John T. McCutcheon (hereafter, “JTM”), the Chicago Tribune’s longtime cartoonist. A handwritten note was inside:

To Tony Garel-Frantzen, a promising cartoonist:
From my collection of books by Hoosier authors
—a cartoonist worthy of emulation.
Best wishes from Gilbert R. Weldy, March 8, 1982
Gil Weldy was an assistant superintendent in that high school district I covered. A lifelong educator, he also was a Hoosier. Dr. Weldy was born in Indiana and earned his PhD in education from Indiana University. I did try to read JTM’s book in 1982, but life (marriage, three kids, career, and all the etc. that goes with it) got in the way. So, Dr. Weldy’s gift was placed on a bookshelf. I moved on from the newspaper business to a career in public relations and corporate communications. Then, thirty years later, itching to write my own book, I was searching for a topic close to my heart when I rediscovered JTM’s volume. I would have liked to personally thank Dr. Weldy for his long-ago gift, but I learned in the course of working on Slow Ball Cartoonist that he passed away in 2008. 1
After a few pages of reading, I realized why I never completed Drawn From Memory . To borrow a phrase from JTM himself, the autobiography can best be described as “rambling memoirs.” 2 But by applying a little patience and imagining that JTM was personally telling me the story of his life, I came to realize what an extraordinary, kind, and gifted man he was. I became fascinated with how a boy born in 1870 on a farm in rural Indiana could end up as a war correspondent, cartoonist, and author. A graduate of Purdue University, he worked at the Chicago Daily News from 1889–1901 and at the Chicago Record-Herald from 1901–1903, before joining the Chicago Tribune in 1903, where he drew cartoons until his retirement in 1946. Along the way, he married Evelyn Shaw in 1917 and they had four children: John T., Evelyn, Shaw, and Barr.
JTM traveled the world extensively, hunting wild game, crossing deserts, riding in zeppelins across the Atlantic, and serving as a war correspondent. The list of famous (and notorious) people that he personally knew or met includes Theodore Roosevelt and his two sons, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, Booth Tarkington, Pancho Villa, Ring Lardner, Billy Mitchell, Winston Churchill, and Carl Sandburg, to name a few. His 1931 cartoon, “A Wise Economist Asks a Question,” won the Chicago Tribune its first-ever Pulitzer Prize. His cartoon, “Injun Summer,” originally published in 1907, was reprinted each fall for decades by the Tribune (I remembered seeing it as a child). JTM authored eleven books. He died June 10, 1949, and was inducted posthumously into the Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame in 1981. 3 Cartoonist Carey Orr followed JTM at the Tribune . Orr, lifting a phrase from his days playing semi-professional baseball with the Seattle Seals as a young man, wrote that “McCutcheon brought change of pace. He was the first to throw the slow ball in cartooning, to draw the human interest picture that was not produced to change votes or, to amend morals, but solely to amuse or to sympathize.” 4
What follows is the story of how one man drew delight from adventure and enjoyed an incredibly well-lived life pitching his slow ball cartoons.
N OTES
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