Toonerville Trolley -- That Nervy Woodpecker -- May 3, 2024

Perth Amboy Evening News, 27-May-1924

I love Fontaine Fox's The Toonerville Trolley That Meets All the Trains. The skipper is upset that a woodpecker has made a home on the trolley but can't do anything about it. I remember when much of the equipment stored outdoors at the Nevada State Railroad Museum was riddled with holes made by woodpeckers.

Victoria Daily Times, 02-May-1924

John T McCutcheon was a cartoonist who was famous for a series of childhood-themed cartoons set in the town of Bird Center. George Fitch wrote a series of magazine stories about "Good Old Siwash College."

Fontaine Fox Gave Up Literature For Cartooning

By WESLEY W. STOUT

Fontaine Fox, whose cartoons will appear in The Victoria Times hereafter, wanted to be a writer, and had no gift for drawing, according to his telling.

Out of high school Fox went to work with high journalistic ideals which survived the better part of a week. He was given what was known In the Louisville Herald city room as the "West End run." That is, he made his headquarters in the reporters' room at City Hall, called on a few undertakers, justices of the peace, and politicians, and waited for telephone calls from the city editor.

In practice he spent his time shooting craps with the opposition reporters. He learned, moreover, that scoops or beats were bad form. At 5 p. m. the reporters divided up their gleanings, each returning to his ffice with the same grist. This left small opportunity for independent effort by an ambitious cub.

Someone told him that a colony of men and women were conducting themselves scandalously on an island in the Ohio River just below the city. Islands being out of bounds, Fox didn't share his tip. Instead he hired a farmer to row him to the island.

On landing Fox said to the farmer: "You better wait for me here. I'm with the Herald, and I'll be going back as soon as I get this story.

A BLOW ON THE JAW

"Oh, you are, are you?" exclaimed a male member of the colony, and hit Fox with force and accuracy on the point of the jaw. This blow knocked Fox 51 per cent of the distance from literature to art.

Fox told the city editor, who told everyone. A political reporter named Peters, with a robust sense of humor had Fox assigned to accompany him to the Churchill Downs racetrack. In the paddock Peters pointed out a large, hook-nosed person and said: "Get a good sketch of him, my boy."

The hook-nosed man was Ed. Corrigan, master of Hawthorne, a notorious camera smasher and sketch artist caner. Fox got in range and began sketching under the impression that Corrigan would be flattered. 

The sketch was almost finished before Corrigan noticed him. The Master of Hawthorne's cane just missed the artist's head. Fox dropped his pencil in getting away, but saved the sketch. Back at the office the sketch was praised as a likeness and the sketcher for his temerity. Fox confined himself thereafter to art.

"As a boy I had sketched as most boys do," he will tell you, "but I had no real gift for drawing and no thought of caricature. Instead, I had a very real desire to write, forced myself later on to a stiff course of reading as a preparation, and worked much harder at it than I ever did at drawing.

"I attracted enough notice after several years to get an offer from the Chicago Post. John T. McCutcheon was in his zenith then, and had begun the revolution of the newspaper cartoon by introducing boy life and other homely topics. To try to follow McCutcheon on boys was thought nothing less than heresy. But McCutcheon's boys were of the village and the farm. I had been brought up on the outskirts of Louisville in a different environment. McCutcheon's boys played on forty-acre fields, mine on vacant lots.

"In Chicago I began to evolve some stock characters, such as 'Thomas Edison Jr.,' 'Sissie' and 'Grandma the Demon Chaperone,' but I wanted new, more and better ones.

Victoria Daily Times, 02-May-1924

THE TOONERVILLE TROLLEY

"The Toonerville Trolley was one of these, and my most successful. It has been done in the movies, will be put into vaudeville next season and has been made into a toy.

"My wife says that I am the original of the Terrible Tempered Mr. Bang.

"The Powerful Katrinka' is a combination of two cooks we had and a 'Dear Old Siwash' story of George Fitch's. One of these cooks, Sally, was a powerful Negress. She saved me more than once from Micky and his gang. The other was as stupid as Sally was strong. While I was trying to put them together, I read Fitch's story of Ole Oleson, the giant Siwash fullback who while at the bottom of a heap of players suddenly had an idea. Why not simply get up the next time and carry both teams and the ball down the field for a goal? Which he did. That suggested making my strong woman a Scandinavian.

Cartoonists are supposed to work by inspiration. I do not, nor any I have known. We get our background from our own lives. In my case the particular idea almost invariably is the result of the impact of two dissociated ideas, produced after much thought and experiment. I first noticed the trick in the stories of O. Henry, who, like a cartoonist, first thought out his climax, then worked back.

Brooklyn Times-Union, 25-May-1924

Washington Times, 30-June-1918