The Best of H. T. Webster: A Memorial Collection (Classic Reprint)
(Excerpt from The Best of H. T. Webster: A Memorial Collec...)
Excerpt from The Best of H. T. Webster: A Memorial Collection
Webster denounced Wives, as a class, in And There's Nothing You Can Do about It, and he excoriated Husbands, as a class, in How To Tor ture Your Wife.
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Harold Tucker Webster was born in Parkersburg, W. Va. , the son of James Clarence and Fannie Marsh Tucker Webster. He was still a small boy when the family moved to Tomahawk, Wis. , where he observed the townspeople who patronized the family drugstore. He delighted in fishing and hunting and was talented, so he professed, at playing hooky from school. These rural Midwestern influences helped shape his later career. From boyhood he shunned his given names and was known as Webby or simply Web.
Education
He studied drawing from a correspondence course when he was 15, and two years later, he left high school and Tomahawk to study in Chicago at the Frank Holmes School of Illustration, where cartoonist Harry Hershfield had also studied. However, the Holmes School closed only a few weeks after Webster's arrival, bringing an end to his formal art training.
Career
In his early teens he produced drawings for Tomahawk's weekly paper and published his first cartoon, for which he was paid $5, in Recreation magazine. Working summers at a brickyard, at a railroad station, and on a grocery wagon, Webster accumulated $150 by the end of his junior year in high school. He then enrolled in the Frank Holmes School of Illustration in Chicago - which closed three weeks later. After a short stay in Denver, Colo. (1902), where he submitted drawings to the Republican and worked briefly on the Post's sports page, Webster canvassed the newspapers of Milwaukee and Chicago, and arranged to sell illustrated jokes to the Chicago American. He then worked for two years (1903 - 1905) as a $20-a-week comic artist on the Chicago Daily News. In 1905 a $10 increase lured him to the Chicago Inter-Ocean, for which he drew political cartoons. One of these so enraged an Illinois state representative that he sponsored a bill proposing that ridicule of legislators be declared a criminal offense. A turning point came in 1908, when Webster moved, at $70 per week, to the Cincinnati Post. For the first time he experimented with sketches based on poignant moments in life. His earliest series, "Little Tragedies of Childhood, " was the predecessor of one of his best-known series, "Life's Darkest Moment. " Much of 1911 was spent on a round-the-world trip, during which he sketched unusual sights. Still only in his mid-twenties, Webster next settled in New York, placed a political cartoon in the World, and contracted to produce others for Associated Newspapers, which had a wide range of client-members. Although his assignment was to draw political cartoons, Webster allotted more and more time to human-interest drawings that dealt with boyhood recollections, married life, personal foibles, and pets. In 1919 he joined the New York Tribune, and four years later transferred to the World. In 1931, shortly before the demise of the World, he rejoined the merged Herald Tribune, thereafter his newspaper and syndicate "home. " The warm reception accorded his first book of collected drawings, Our Boyhood Thrills and Other Cartoons (1915), followed by Boys and Folks (1917), convinced Webster that his choice of subject matter was sound. Gradually his 1923 creation, Egbert Smear, in the World's strip "The Man in the Brown Derby, " evolved into one of the best-known of all comic-strip characters, Caspar Milquetoast, who appeared in a series entitled "The Timid Soul. " Afraid of his shadow, always suspecting that he was doing the wrong thing, the shy, thin, white-moustached, henpecked Milquetoast entered the American language almost immediately as the epitome of insecurity and excess caution. The themes of Webster's series drawings over a typical week in the early 1950's included "The Thrill That Comes Once in a Lifetime, " "How to Torture Your Wife, " "The Unseen Audience, " "Bridge, " "Trailer Types, " and the cringing husband in "The Timid Soul. " Other Webster series over the years were "Our Boyhood Ambitions, " "They Don't Speak Our Language, " "And Nothing Can Be Done About It, " "The Boy Who Made Good, " "Poker Portraits, " "The Beginnings of a Beautiful Friendship, " and "Are You Listening?" When "How to Torture Your Wife" became popular, Webster balanced family accounts by producing "How to Torture Your Husband. " His satirization of radio in "The Unseen Audience" brought him the 1948 Peabody Award for "distinguished service to radio. " During wartime Webster frequently adapted his subjects and locales to the armed forces, and he was a strong promoter of war bonds. At his peak his drawings appeared in 125 newspapers with a combined circulation of 8 million. As Coulton Waugh put it, in a "happy, prosperous period" Webster "rode the crest of the great suburban comic reading wave. " His most famous cartoon, "Hardin County - 1809, " first appeared on Lincoln's birthday in 1918. Reproduced many times, it shows two backwoodsmen meeting on a snow-covered frontier road. "Any news down t' th village, Ezry?" /"Well, Squire McClean's gone t' Washington t' see Madison swore in, an' ol' Spellman tells me this Bonaparte fella has captured most o' Spain. What's new out here neighbor?" /"Nuthin' a tall, nuthin' a tall, 'cept fer a new baby down t' Tom Lincoln's, nuthin' ever happens out here. " In 1927, in anticipation of an extensive tour of Europe with his wife, he did enough drawing in one month to last for three and a half months. The effort caused paralysis in his right hand; and when he returned, he began to draw with his left hand. He eventually grew as skilled with his left hand as he had been with his right. His interest in the development of speech and jargon led him to write a humorous article, "They Don't Speak Our Language, " that defended slang and corruptions as vital to graphic expression (Forum, December 1933). Webster died while returning to his home at Stamford, Connecticut, where he had his studio-workshop, from a weekend of fishing and bridge, his favorite pastimes.