LeRoy Robert Ripley was an American cartoonist, entrepreneur, and amateur anthropologist who is known for creating the Ripley's Believe It or Not! newspaper panel series, radio show, and television show which feature odd facts from around the world.
Background
LeRoy Robert Ripley was born on December 26, 1893 in Santa Rosa, California, the oldest of three children and first of two sons of Isaac Davis Ripley, a carpenter, and Lily Belle (Yocka or Yucca) Ripley. Preferring Christmas to the day after, he designated December 25 as his birth date. Adventure ran in his blood. His father, a native of West Virginia, had left home at fourteen and made his way to California. His part-Portuguese mother was born on the Santa Fe Trail in a covered wagon. When LeRoy (he was grown before he added the Robert) was twelve, his father died, leaving the family in straitened circumstances.
Education
The shy youth helped out by polishing tombstones and working at odd jobs; he left high school before graduating.
Career
Devoted to baseball, he played whenever he could, even trying out to be a professional pitcher. An arm injury ended his hope for a sports career, and so he concentrated on drawing, which he had begun as a schoolboy. He was much encouraged when, in 1907, he sold a humorous drawing to Life magazine for $8.
A San Francisco newspaperwoman, Carol Ennis, impressed by his sketches, secured a job for him on the Bulletin as a sports cartoonist in 1909, when he was not yet sixteen. The following year he moved to the San Francisco Chronicle. With notables like Thomas A. Dorgan in the field, competition in San Francisco was keen; when Ripley asked for a raise in 1913, he was discharged.
He took the $100 he had received for illustrating a book and traveled to New York City, where, on the recommendation of the cartoonist Jay N. Darling, who had seen his work, he was hired as a sports cartoonist by the Globe. Ripley's sports sketches were popular, and they might have been his lifework except for a turn of chance in 1918. Lacking an idea for his December 19 drawing, he grouped small sketches of nine oddities from the athletic world - among them a Canadian who ran 100 yards backwards in 14 seconds, an Australian who jumped rope 11, 810 times in 4 hours, and a Frenchman who stayed under water 6 minutes and 29. 8 seconds - and published them under the caption "Believe It or Not!" Thus was launched the famous series.
At first a weekly drawing, "Believe It or Not!" soon was appearing daily. Ripley remained with the Globe until it closed in 1923 and then joined the Evening Post. In 1929 Simon and Schuster published a book-length selection of his sketches. Its overnight popularity led William Randolph Hearst to order his King Features Syndicate to sign Ripley for national distribution. Although the feature had its origin in sports, Ripley quickly broadened it to the world in general. It consisted of attractive bold-line drawings accompanied by such startling assertions as "The Battle of Waterloo was not fought at Waterloo" and "George Washington was not the first president of the United States. "
Ripley even reported in 1927 that he had found a "one-armed paperhanger" - Albert J. Smith of Dedham, Massachussets His documentation did not always convince incredulous, and sometimes outraged, readers, but it satisfied Ripley.
Despite the depression of the 1930's, Ripley's burgeoning success required him to build up a large staff of researchers (headed by Norbert Pearlroth), artists, and translators.
A corps of secretaries processed the mail that flooded in from around the globe, often bearing suggestions.
Ripley himself traveled a substantial part of every year, indulging his wanderlust and seeking out curiosities. The Duke of Windsor was said to have dubbed him "the modern Marco Polo" - an appropriate tag, since China above all other countries fascinated him and he made friends with many Chinese.
After all his traveling, he concluded that the Grand Canyon was the greatest sight in the world. Besides his widely syndicated feature, Ripley made twenty-six movie shorts for Warner Brothers-Vitaphone, began a popular radio version of "Believe It or Not!" in 1933, and sponsored "odditoriums, " where his curiosities were displayed in a carnival-type atmosphere, at several world's fairs. These ventures, along with later collections of his drawings in book form (1931, 1935, and 1939), boosted his annual income to about $500, 000.
Living and entertaining lavishly, he maintained a museumlike estate, Bion (the acronym of "Believe It or Not!") , on Long Island Sound, near Mamaroneck, New York, and a winter home at Palm Beach, Florida. The curios at his abodes were valued at $2 million and included a Chinese junk that he enjoyed sailing.
Thereafter Ripley never seemed to want for feminine companions at Bion.
Ripley died of a heart attack at New York City's Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center. He was buried in Odd Fellows Cemetery in his hometown of Santa Rosa.
Achievements
Subjects covered in Ripley's cartoons and text ranged from sports feats to little-known facts about unusual and exotic sites. But what ensured the concept's popularity may have been that he also included items submitted by readers, who supplied photographs of a wide variety of small-town American trivia ranging from unusually shaped vegetables to oddly marked domestic animals, all documented by photographs and then depicted by his drawings.
A half-century after its inception, "Ripley's Believe It or Not!" was appearing in seventeen languages in 330 newspapers in thirty-two countries. Ripley's own life story had some of the incredible quality of the oddities he sketched.
He did not smoke or play cards. A large, energetic man, with dimples and prominent teeth, he was superstitious, sometimes hottempered, fond of animals, and too fearful to drive a car or dial a telephone.
Connections
Ripley was married to Beatrice Roberts, a New York model and Follies showgirl, in 1919. They lived together only a few months and were divorced in 1925.
