The Gumps
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The Gumps, a popular comic strip about a middle-class family, was created by Sidney Smith in 1917, launching a 42-year run in newspapers from February 12, 1917 until October 17, 1959.
The Gumps were utterly ordinary: chinless, bombastic blowhard Andy, his wife Min (short for Minerva), their son Chester, rich Uncle Bim and their annoying maid Tilda. The idea was envisioned by Captain Joseph M. Patterson, editor and publisher of the Chicago Tribune, who was important in the early histories of Little Orphan Annie and other long-run comic strips. Patterson referred to the masses as "gumps" and thought a strip about the domestic lives of ordinary people and their ordinary happenings would appeal to the "gumps." He hired Smith to write and draw the strip, and it was Smith who breathed life into the characters.
The Gumps made its debut in an unusual way. Cartoonist Sidney Smith had previously drawn and written Old Doc Yak, a talking-animal strip that sustained only a brief run. The very last Old Doc Yak strip depicted the Yak and his family moving out of their house, while wondering who might move into the house next. The last panel showed only the empty house. The next day's newspapers, in the space formerly occupied by Old Doc Yak, printed the very first strip of The Gumps, showing the Gumps moving into the house formerly occupied by the Yak family.
[edit] Films
As one of the earliest continuity strips, The Gumps was extremely popular, with newspaper readers anxiously following the convoluted storylines. By 1919, this popularity prompted an interest in film adaptations, and in 1920-21, with writing credited to Smith, animation director Wallace A. Carlson produced and directed more than 50 animated shorts, some no longer than two minutes, for distribution through Paramount. Between 1923 and 1928, Universal Pictures produced at least four dozen Gumps two-reel comedies starring Joe Murphy (1877-1961), one of the original Keystone Cops, as Andy Gump, Fay Tincher as Min and Jack Morgan as Chester. Many of these shorts were directed by Norman Taurog, later famed as the leading director of Elvis Presley movies.
In the comic strip, Sidney Smith had Andy run for Congress in 1922 and for President in 1924 and in practically every succeeding election, one of the first of many comic strip and cartoon characters to run for office. In 1924, Smith wrote his characters into a novel, Andy Gump: His Life Story, published in Chicago by Reilly & Lee. In 1929, when Smith killed off Mary Gold, she was the first major comic strip character to die, and the Tribune had to hire extra staff to deal with the constant phone calls and letters from stunned readers.
The strip and its merchandising (toys, games, a popular song, toys, games, playing cards, food products) made Smith a wealthy man. On his way home from signing a $150,000 a year contract in 1935, he crashed his new Rolls-Royce and died. Patterson replaced Smith with sports cartoonist Gus Edson, but Edson's version was not as popular. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, when actor Martin Landau was a cartoonist, he worked as Edson's assistant on The Gumps.
[edit] Radio
The Gumps launched a craze for continuity strips in newspapers. It also had a huge influence on the history of radio broadcasting, as detailed by broadcast historian Elizabeth McLeod in the "Andy Gump to Andy Brown" section of her popular culture essay, Amos 'n' Andy -- In Person and her book, The Original Amos 'n' Andy: Freeman Gosden, Charles Correll, and the 1928-43 Radio Serial (McFarland, 2005).
At the Chicago Tribune's radio station WGN, Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll signed on as staffers in 1925. WGN executive Ben McCanna believed that a dramatic serial could work on radio just as it did in newspapers. When he approached Gosden and Correll to adapt The Gumps to radio, they declined and instead devised their own characters for the 1926-27 radio serial, Sam 'n' Henry. After reworking these characters for Amos 'n' Andy in 1928-29, while borrowing certain elements from The Gumps, they were on their way to becoming millionaires, and the radio serial format they created soon became the model for many other radio dramas. After The Gumps were finally heard on WGN in 1931, the series moved to CBS for a four-year run (1934-1937) with scripts by Irwin Shaw. Dorothy Denvir was heard as Min, with Agnes Moorehead, in her first radio role, portraying Min during the last two years of the series.
Herb Galewitz assembled a selective compilation of the comic strips for the book, Sidney Smith's The Gumps, published in 1974 by Charles Scribner's Sons. A reproduction statue of Andy Gump, commissioned by the local city council, stands in Flatiron Park in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. The original was a gift from the Tribune management to Sidney Smith and stood on Smith's Lake Geneva estate, then moved to the city park after Smith's death. In 1967 the original statue was smashed in a drunken riot. [1]
