The Press: Wally Returns

Two days after the Fifth U. S. Marines landed at St. Nazaire. France on July 2, 1917, Buck Private Abian Anders Wallgren was arrested for trying to smuggle two bottles of cognac into camp. It was the first vagary of a mildly undisciplined disposition which ultimately got Private Wallgren seven court-martials, never for anything more serious than “butting an officer in the stomach to get into quarters.”

Having been a newspaper cartoonist in Philadelphia and Washington, “Wally” Wallgren was appointed Regimental Sign Painter; and for nearly nine months, punctuated by spells in the hoosegow, he ranged the Western Front painting “Latrine” and “Officers Only” signs. Meantime, Guy T. Viskniskki, looking for a cartoonist for his projected A. E. F. paper,The Stars and Stripes, heard about Wally, decided he wanted him.

Wally’s doughboys, like British Bruce Bairnsfather’s Tommies, were pathetic but unfrightened little runts wallowing in mud, beset by cooties and all the creature discomforts of trench warfare. Most endearing to his readers and most distressing to some General Staff “brass hats’ was Wally’s wholehearted disrespect for M.P.’s, top sargints, second looies and all forms of military discipline. Toward the more sanguinary aspects of the War, Wally maintained an attitude of good-humored fatalism.

One of Wally’s favorite models was Sergeant Alexander Woollcott, star reporter for The Stars and Stripes. Woollcott, elegant of uniform and gait, swooning at the sound of a tire blowout, was pictured with Reporter Hudson Hawley, whom Wally made famous as the “Salut-ing Demon.” In the hectic offices of The Stars and Stripes, Wally found other models: Editor Harold Ross, now editor of The New Yorker; Poet Tip Bliss, whose dog tried to bite General Pershing on his only visit to the office; Colyumnist Franklin Pierce Adams (F. P. A.); Mark Watson, now Sunday editor of the Baltimore Sun; Treasurer Adolph Shelby Ochs, now general manager of the Chattanooga Times.

By the time the War was over Wally had become one of the best-known and most popular A. E. F. veterans. To the delight of his buddies, this very model of a worthless soldier was awarded a medal of the Purple Heart on special recommendation of General Pershing. Wally returned to the quiet of suburban Drexel Hill, Pa., where he carried on as official cartoonist of the American Legion. This week the scattered staff of The Stars and Stripes prepared for the worst as Wally’s daily and Sunday comic strip, “Hoosegow Herman,” began to appear in 22 U. S. daily papers, nine Sunday papers through the McNaught Syndicate. Herman, created in Wally’s own image, will soon find himself in the army meeting his old comrades, among them Ross, as a supply sergeant, and Woollcott, as a medical sergeant, at the recruiting station (see cut).