Naperville, Illinois will soon unveil a 9-foot-tall,
one-ton sculpted likeness of Dick Tracy,
whose cleaver-chin profile has been gracing the pages of the nation’s
newspapers for 77 years. The statue, the 35th piece of artwork erected in Naperville by the
non-profit Century Walk Corp., will depict the iconic sleuth in a familiar
pose — using his two-way wrist radio to talk to a colleague. Bob Goldsborough at
the Chicago Tribune reports that
dedication is scheduled for October 4, the 78th anniversary of the debut of the
comic strip concocted and sustained by Chester
Gould and, after Gould’s death, chiefly by Dick Locher. Locher, who had assisted Gould briefly, 1957-61, has
lived in Naperville for the last 40 years, drawing editorial cartoons for the Chicago Tribune since 1972 and winning a Pulitzer in 1983, the year
he returned to Dick Tracy full-time.
Locher created an 11-inch model for the
sculpture, which, if memory serves, was originally intended to be installed in Woodstock, Illinois,
Gould’s hometown, where the Dick Tracy Museum,
founded in 1991, operated until last year, when it closed for lack of
funding. Other comic strip characters
have been immortalized in statues. Downstate Metropolis has a Superman statue, and Santa Rosa,California,
sports a bronze Charlie Brown and
Snoopy. Bill Mauldin’s Willie and
Joe are in Santa Fe, New Mexico,
and a statue of Andy Gump of the
vintage strip, The Gumps, is on
display in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. A limestone Steve Canyon stands at the junction of U.S. Highways 6 and 40 at
the edge of Idaho Springs, Colorado, and Popeye
looms in at least two cities, creator E.C.
Segar’s home town of Chester in Illinois, and Crystal City, Texas, which
calls itself “the world capital of spinach.”
And Joe Palooka stands at Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania,
the home town of his creator, Ham Fisher.
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