Gaar Campbell Williams was a prominent American humorist and cartoonist who worked for the Indianapolis News and the Chicago Tribune.
Background
Gaar Campbell Williams was born on December 12, 1880 in Richmond, Indiana, only son and first of two children of George Rich Williams and Sarah Elizabeth Campbell, whose mother was a member of the substantial Gaar family of eastern Indiana. The father, an accountant for a threshing-machine manufactory and auditor for Wayne County, Indiana, was also a draftsman, wood-carver, and amateur artist; when his son showed an early skill at drawing he encouraged the talent in every way he could.
Education
As a high-school student Gaar was so interested in sketching people and county-seat scenes that he failed at elementary Latin three times. He spent several summers as a riveter and foundry helper, but he was allowed to go in 1898 to the Cincinnati Academy of Fine Arts for a vacation term. Determined to be an artist of some kind, he enrolled January 1, 1901, in the Art Institute of Chicago, where he studied for two years.
Career
As he could, he did odd-job illustrating, his first commercial success being a triumph in competition for a beer-bottle label. After working for his home-town threshing-machine company at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis, 1904, he and art-class friends opened a studio in Chicago, but commercial drawings, sheet-music covers, and advertising layouts did not satisfy him.
Attracted to newspaper work, he obtained a place on the art staff of the Chicago Daily News. This paid him fifteen dollars a week, his chief assignment being to illustrate a daily short story. Still more to his liking were the occasional political cartoons he had the opportunity to draw, and when the chance came in 1909 he went to the Indianapolis News as its editorial cartoonist. This was Williams's work for twelve years. In that time his cartoon comments on Hoosier political personalities and their heated campaigns were relished throughout Indiana and widely reprinted outside the state. A poll of newspaper men by the New York Evening Post rated him as "one of the five most effective cartoonists in the country. "
Meanwhile, he experimented with human interest drawings. They were so successful that he was engaged by the Chicago Tribune in 1921 to devote himself to them exclusively. Beginning as "Just Plain Folks, " these single picture "panels" were complete each day. They developed, however, under a series of "standing" captions which reappeared at intervals with the result that the titles became household phrases for countless families. In the minor domestic tragedies which confronted the Mort Greens, leading characters in "A Strain on the Family Tie, " husbands and wives recognized situations common to their own married life. "Our Secret Ambition" recorded hopes that were equally native to average men and women - such things as "to be known as an infallible election predictor" and "to sometime deserve the hero seat in the lead automobile" in a parade.
Any community could find its advice givers, practical jokers, and bores in "How to Keep from Growing Old, " while "Something Ought to Be Done about This" expressed humorously the universal indignation over being summoned from the bathtub to answer a wrong telephone call and similar annoying situations. The more or less human escapades of little "Zipper, " a friendly, curious dog, made him almost a person. Still other regular titles were "Static" and "Wotta Life! Wotta Life!" which became fixed in American talk.
Williams's Sunday drawing was his favorite as well as that of many of his followers.
Faithful in details of furniture, dress, and architecture, these delightful pictures revived memories of Swiss bell-ringers, home remedies, Main Street runaways, "setting room" base-burners, the first elevators, county fairs, leather kneepads, livery stables, circus posters in covered bridges, and a host of other things. For these and the other titles newspaper readers frequently sent ideas, which Williams acknowledged with the suggester's initials on the cartoons. Syndication greatly increased his audience, and nearly a decade after his death the Chicago Tribune was reprinting from its collection of his drawings. A posthumous book, Among the Folks in History (1935), contains 165 cartoons which Williams selected, a foreword by John T. McCutcheon, who says that he "stood alone in the field, " and a silhouette of Williams by Kin Hubbard, with whom he worked on the Indianapolis News.
Growing to six feet as a youth, Williams was known as "Spin" to his intimates. His home in Glencoe, Illinois, and his studio in the Tribune tower were furnished in the "early Indiana" style of the nineties.
In his fifty-fifth year, apparently in good health, Williams collapsed at the steering-wheel of his automobile as he was starting a drive to Brown County, Ind. Without regaining consciousness, he died four hours later of cerebral hemorrhage in Passavant Hospital, Chicago. His body was cremated and the ashes taken to Richmond, which in spirit he had never left.
Achievements
Labeled the Hoosier Cartoonist or the James Whitcomb Riley of the Pencil, his cartoon panels captured the flavor of a bygone era to the degree they were deemed worthy of reprinting in the mid-20th century years after his death.
His well-known drawings include The End of a Perfect Day, depicting the American doughboy returning from World War I, and Long Boy, published on the William Herschell song sheet. After illustrating Keeping Up with William (Bobbs-Merrill, 1918) by Irving Bacheller, he illustrated Ring Lardner's The Young Immigrants (Bobbs-Merrill, 1920).
Each year many visitors see the memorial collection of his cartoons in the Wayne County Historical Museum in Richmond. The much-used characterization "the James Whitcomb Riley of the newspaper cartoon" is a compliment to Riley no less than to Gaar Williams; through his whimsical drawing-board he reflected the lives of average Americans as intimately perhaps as any man of his time.
Personality
Called "Among the Folks in History, " it combined humor, sentiment, comic art and social history to produce a rich record of everyday life in the small-town and rural America of the cartoonist's own boyhood.
Interests
He shunned society and golf, but enjoyed fishing, hunting, and "road riding, " as he called motoring, which provided him with many ideas.
Connections
His wife was Lena Engelbert, a childhood companion, whom he married April 22, 1911, in Richmond. She survived him without issue.
