484 The joy of cartoon memories

Did you have a favorite book at Grandma's house? When visiting my father's parents we cousins could walk to the town movie theater to get away from the boring adult conversation. However, when visiting my maternal grandparents, who lived on a farm, entertainment was a bit more old fashioned--playing in the out buildings, climbing trees, creating villages with a box of wooden blocks, playing the card game "Authors," or looking through dusty, old books. Not a bad way to spend a boring Sunday afternoon.

When my family visited that same farm house, about a decade after my grandparents were gone and my mother had converted the house to a retreat center for church groups and family reunions, my own children entertained themselves with the same activities (no TV). They would reach for a favorite book which was a compilation of cartoons from the late 19th century through the 1940s, Cartoon Cavalcade. It was most likely a People's Book Club selection (like Book of the Month but through Sears). It was my mother's book, and I had spent many hours browsing it when I was little. Many of her books migrated to the farm house to provide just such entertainment for quiet week-ends.

Good cartoons are difficult to create and probably even harder to understand from a distance of 50 years. For that reason I thoroughly enjoyed the wonderful entry at Library Dust for September 19 on H. T. Webster, the creator of the Casper Milquetoast character, whose work is now rarely seen except in libraries' cartoon collections. McGrorty writes:

"Where I will go is out on a limb enough to suggest that Webster is one of the finest cartoonists the country has ever seen in the pages of its newspapers. Cartooning is a difficult line of work. The artist has to create images that will become familiar without going stale over a considerable period of time, and always be amusing: funny, wry, hysterical or any of the other degrees of mirth must be produced with regularity, which effect requires a great understanding of human nature and an evocative power that must be strong but operate with no wires showing. If you do not think this is so, try to sketch the future panels of your favorite strip in your head—just see if you can follow the formula. It is difficult because the cartoon is such a precise balance of things, all familiar and practically sacred to the regular reader—who nevertheless requires frequent shifts in focus and theme upon the established base."

Click over to Library Dust and read some excellent writing about this cartoonist. Then blow the dust off one of your favorite books.