SALTY ADVENTURES INTO CARTOONING HISTORY
Sauntering, sweltering, through the streets of Salt Lake City during the recent convention there of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, I came upon a restaurant named The New Yorker. And the restaurant’s sign even preserved the typography of the famed magazine. I was momentarily astonished until I remembered that the founder of the magazine in 1925, Harold Ross, had a Salt Lake City history. In fact, as I cogitated further, I recollected that Salt Lake City was a training ground for two people whose subsequent careers substantially affected cartooning.
Ross was born in Aspen, Colorado, in 1892. Aspen was on the cusp, then, of dying off. It had started as a mining camp in 1879 during the silver boom, but the boom fizzled in about 1893 when the government stopped buying silver. The Ross family moved out of Aspen when Harold was approximately eight; Aspen declined rapidly until the mid-20th century when it started skiing.
The first ski run in Aspen — in Colorado — was mapped out in 1936 by speed racer Andre Roch. The first chair lift didn’t use chairs, exactly. The townspeople made a ten-passenger boat tow powered by an old mine hoist and a truck engine. But enough about the slopes.
The Ross family moved around to some small Colorado towns, and then to Salt Lake City, where Harold attended high school but never graduated; he quit school after his sophomore year and went into newspapers. In high school, he’d worked on the school paper, The Red and Black.
There, he met the other Salt Laker who would influence cartooning in America — a teenage artist three years older than he, John Held, Jr., who was born and raised in Salt Lake City.
They became friends and both were stringers for the Salt Lake Tribune while in school, and they were sometimes sent to the Stockade, the old redlight district, to interview such stellar attractions as Ada Wilson, Belle London, and Helen Blazes.
Ross was on his best, most circumspect behavior when interviewing Blazes, one of the more flamboyant madams. Not wishing to give offense, he couched his queries in the most delicate euphemisms, overusing, perhaps, the most common of them, “fallen women.” His politesse finally exasperated the plain-spoken Blazes.
“Jesus Christ, kid,” she blurted out, “cut out the honey. If I had a railroad tie for every trick I’ve turned, I could build a railroad from here to San Francisco.”
The
teenagers grew into an unlikely pair of adults (as we see in the accompanying
drawing). Ross had a reputation for hair that stood straight up into the air
and, strange for the founder of a sophisticated big city magazine, for a
rumpled wardrobe. Ross and Held seldom worked together post-Salt Lake (although
Held drew uncharacteristic antique-looking woodcut-style cartoons about 19th
century life for Ross’s magazine), but separately, they shaped hunks of the
cartoon medium.
Ross had worked for at least seven papers around the country by the time he was 25, when he went into the American Expeditionary Force attacking the Hun in Europe. In Ross’s case, the attack was launched at editorial desks of the Stars and Stripes, where he was managing editor. Being an editor evidently got him to thinking: soon after he got back home, he started planning a magazine of his own.
Meanwhile,
Held had long left Salt Lake City for the glitter of the Jazz Age. His cartoons
of round-headed sheiks in “Oxford bags” (bell-bottom trousers) and shebas in
short skirts established the look of Youth in the roaring 1920s. When
Ross’s
magazine got going, it effectively re-defined the single-panel magazine cartoon
by blending the captions and the pictures so thoroughly that neither made any
comedic sense alone without the other.
We don’t know if these epoch-shaping events are the result of growing up in Salt Lake City — or leaving it. So you can draw your own conclusion.
More about the AAEC Convention is dispensed at Rants & Raves Op. 313 at the Usual Place, RCHarvey.com