The Press: Grandpa’s Pa

One day in 1918, when player pianos were banging out Over There in every city block, a chuckly little old gentleman with muttonchop whiskers and a kewpie curl atop his shining baldspot, turned his last handspring in the pages of Mr. Munsey’s New York Press. A war-minded public scarcely noticed the passing of Foxy Grandpa, one of the great comic strip characters of an age that rejoiced also over the antics of Happy Hooligan, Buster Brown, Little Nemo.

The new school of biff-plop-ratatat-tat cartooning was coming up fast. Today even spry old Foxy would be hard put to it to dodge the machine gun slugs and interplanetary rockets that whiz through the “comic” strips of the Thirties.

But one man never gave up hope of reviving Foxy: big, bald, frog-jowled Carl E. Schultze, who looked a lot like Foxy and who started drawing him on the first Sunday of the 20th Century for the old New York Herald. As the money Foxy earned dwindled, Cartoonist Schultze moved down the scale of Manhattan rooming houses, drew gym class posters for the Y. M. C. A., passed out little pictures of Foxy to neighborhood kids. Several years ago he went on relief, for a time was put to work interviewing job applicants at an employment agency.

Last week it appeared that his dream of publishing a book of Foxy drawings would not come true. Doctors at Manhattan’s St. Vincent’s Hospital ordered him to bed, announced his 72-year-old heart was ailing. Said he: “Foxy was never afraid of anything. Neither am I.”