Chester Gould

He was born in Oklahoma in 1900. By the age of seven he’d discovered a love for drawing in general and cartoons in particular. He spent hours copying cartoons and adding his own words. During the next decade he won a couple cartoon contests and brought in spending money painting advertising jobs on barns and names on office doors, even using part of the hard earned cash to purchase a correspondence course on “cartooning and caricatures”. Meanwhile, news of his talent spread. Not only did Oklahoma A&M College employ him to do the cartoon work for their year books, but the Tulsa Democrat hired him to draw political cartoons. Chester’s father recognized his son’s talent but couldn’t see it translating into a dependable career. After high school, and in spite of his growing reputation as a cartoonist, Chester’s father encouraged him to go to college.

Chester spent two years at Oklahoma A& M until he just couldn’t hold off the dream. Short on education but long on ambition, he left for Chicago with fifty dollars and a determination to become a Chicago Tribune cartoonist. Ten long years passed while he worked for other papers and simultaneously submitted ideas to the Tribune.

Finally, in 1931, he sold the Tribune on a fast paced comic strip starring a crime fighting detective who would soon become the incredibly popular Dick Tracy. The charismatic detective eventually landed on the front page of the New York Daily News where he remained for 45 consecutive years. The cartoon strip subsequently spread to twenty seven foreign papers. When Chester retired at the age of 77, he’d spent forty-six years drawing Dick Tracy and saw his childhood dreams more than realized through the combined forces of talent and tenaciousness.

In today’s Southern Quote we honor the late cartoonist Chester Gould who once penned these words, “Buddy, if you can’t tell the good guys from the bad guys, then YOU’RE one of the BAD guys!”

~Shellie