The Press: John T. Calls It Quits

Lean and leisurely John Tinney McCutcheon was crowding his deadline. His mind and drawing board were blank, and the bulldog edition over at the Chicago Tribune would wait just so long. Outside his studio window, there was a promise of fall in the hazy September air. He fell to daydreaming . . . on such a smoky afternoon, back home in Indiana, a boy might gaze at a cornfield studded with tattered golden shocks, and see them turn into Indian tepees. Idly he began to sketch. When the Tribune messenger arrived, he had finished his greatest cartoon. That was 39 years ago.

Last week, as gaunt old John T. McCutcheon rounded out his 76th year and laid aside his crayons for good, his Injun Summer was still the most popular cartoon that ever came out of the Midwest. In recent years his crosshatched, mild-&-mellow drawings, fussy and cluttered-up by modern standards, have all but vanished from Colonel Robert R. McCormick’s isolationist, Anglophobic pages. McCutcheon’s pen scratched its best when dipped in the milk of human kindness, and one-eyed Carey Orr’s vitriol is more to the Colonel’s taste. McCutcheon, in failing health, did not mind the eclipse; his kind of cartooning had brought him fun and fame, a Pulitzer Prize (1931) and a good living (around $50,000 a year).

Hoosier Hooky. The dean of U.S. cartoonists was a Tippecanoe County farm boy. He went to Purdue (class of ’89) with two other famous Hoosiers, Author Booth Tarkington and Humorist George Ade. A few years later, after Ade joined him on the staff of the old Chicago News, he pair played hooky to go sightseeing in Europe. Their boss astonished them by raying for the features (stories by Ade, ketches by McCutcheon) that they mailed home.

In 1898 McCutcheon took a round-the-trip, bumped into the Spanish War, was with Dewey at Manila Bay, moved on to sketch the Boer War for the folks jack home. Between junkets in 1903, he switched to the Tribune. He hunted in Africa with Carl Akeley and Teddy Roosevelt, covered both sides in World War I, always saw to it that his contracts called for long vacations. That gave him spare ime to write books, lend an encouraging land to youngsters like Milton (Terry and the Pirates) Caniff.

Gentle Cartoonist McCutcheon began thinking of calling it quits about the time Bertie McCormick began flogging the New Deal. Retiring now on a fat pension, he plans to loll on his own “Treasure Island” in the Bahamas, poke around the U.S., edit a book of his cartoons. As he once cracked in an after-dinner speech: “I draw to a close, perhaps one of my most successful drawings.”