William Morgan DeBeck (April 15, 1890 - November 11, 1942) was a popular cartoonist who was widely known as Billy DeBeck. He created some of the memorable comic strip characters of the 1920s and 1930s, including Barney Google, Bunky, Snuffy Smith and the racehorse Spark Plug. The first awards of the National Cartoonists Society, beginning in 1946, were the Billy DeBeck Memorial Awards, aka the Barney Awards.
DeBeck’s art style is considered to be in the classic "big-foot" tradition of American comic strips (e.g., The Katzenjammer Kids, Hägar the Horrible and Robert Crumb's characters).
DeBeck was born and grew up on the South Side of Chicago, where his father, Louis DeBeck, was a former newspaperman employed by the Swift Company. His father was French, and the name DeBeck evolved from DeBeque. His Irish-Welsh mother, Jessie Lee Morgan, had lived on a farm and was a former schoolteacher.
Contents |
Graduating from Hyde Park High School in 1908, Billy DeBeck enrolled at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and began doing cartoons that same year for the Chicago Daily News. In 1910 he took a job as a staff artist with a local weekly theater publication, Show World. From 1912 to 1916 he was an illustrator and political cartoonist with the Youngstown Chronicle Telegraph and the Pittsburgh Gazette-Times. In Youngstown he married Marian Louise Shields in 1914. While in Pittsburgh, he went to a Hearst newspaper in New York and showed comic strip samples to Arthur Brisbane, who rejected the work. DeBeck later admitted, "They were terrible. I had been doing political cartoons for the Pittsburgh Gazette, and the comics were new to me."[1]
He launched a correspondence school that included cartoon instruction, and in 1916, back in Chicago, he started the comic strip, Finn an' Haddie, for the Adams Syndicate. At the Chicago Herald he created Married Life, a panel that eventually became a strip. He taught at the Chicago Academy and experimented with another panel, Olie Moses and Mara, Inc. He introduced Barney Google in 1919 in a strip titled Take Barney Google, F'rinstance.
As Barney Google found an increasing readership, he moved to New York and lived on Riverside Drive. In 1921, he began the gag panel Bughouse Fables, which he signed Barney Google. Above Barney Google, he later added Bughouse Fables as a topper strip, which he eventually turned over to his assistant, Paul Fung. On May 16, 1926, he replaced Bughouse Fables with another topper, Parlor Bedroom and Sink, which evolved into Bunky.
Marian and Billy DeBeck divorced, remarried in 1921 and finally ended their marriage. In 1925, health problems prevented DeBeck from working on the strip. According to newspaper reports, he suffered "an attack of neuro-circulatory asthenia" (a psychosomatic anxiety disorder) but made a satisfactory recovery in a New York hospital.[2]
In 1927, he married Mary Louise Dunne, and they spent two years traveling about Europe. After their return, the couple maintained a Park Avenue apartment and a house in Great Neck, Long Island. DeBeck first began working in St. Petersburg, Florida in 1929. Later, he acquired Villa Florentina, a large home at Snell Isle in St. Petersburg, where he lived at 321 Brightwaters Boulevard on Coffee Pot Bayou.[3] This was only a short walk from 375 Brightwaters Boulevard, the home of his friend Wally Bishop (1905–82), cartoonist of the Muggs and Skeeter comic strip. Bishop moved to St. Petersburg in 1928, and DeBeck soon followed.
DeBeck hired 17-year-old Fred Lasswell as an assistant in 1933. During winters, DeBeck and Lasswell worked at the St. Petersburg house, usually opening it up in late October or November. Another assistant to DeBeck was Cliff Rogerson, later an editorial cartoonist for Newsday beginning in 1946.
DeBeck's active lifestyle sometimes caused him to miss deadlines. He enjoyed deep sea fishing and playing bridge. As a golfer since 1916, DeBeck spent time on golf courses with such notables as Harold Lloyd, Walter Huston, Rube Goldberg, Fontaine Fox, Clarence Budington Kelland and bridge authority P. Hal Sims. He was also acquainted with such celebrities as Babe Ruth, Lowell Thomas and Damon Runyon. His best friend was the cartoonist Frank Willard.[1][3]
The main character, Barney, was initially a simple henpecked husband and avid follower of sports, but within ten years Barney morphed into an urban rascal and natty dresser. The bony and goofy racehorse, Spark Plug, trotted into the storyline in 1922. During the early 1930s, DeBeck made a study of Appalachian language, customs and folklore. evident in his book collection later donated to Virginia Commonwealth University. He also traveled into mountain country in Virginia and Kentucky, doing sketches of the locals. Following this research, he introduced Barney's hillbilly friend, Snuffy Smith, in 1934. Readers found the strip a comic relief from tragic conditions of the Great Depression, and Snuffy Smith eventually became the central character of the strip.[3] DeBeck popularized such expressions as "sweet mama", "heebie jeebies" (a fit of intense nervousness), "horsefeathers", "hotsy-totsy", "balls of fire" and "What did the doodle-bug say?" "Times a-wasting" has remained a familiar catchphrase to the present day.[3] DeBeck's Sunday page for September 18, 1938 was placed in the Time Capsule at the 1939 World's Fair. After DeBeck's death from cancer on Veterans Day, 1942, the strip was continued by Joe Musial until Fred Lasswell took over completely in 1945.
In 1943, Mary DeBeck donated to the Ringling School of Art all of her late husband's art supplies, including drawing tables, reams of drawing paper, hundreds of colored pencils, lamps, drawing boards, inks, drawing pens, artist smocks, etching plates and an etching press.[4] Mary DeBeck remarried, and she died February 14, 1953, aboard a National Airlines DC-6 which went down in the Gulf of Mexico during a thunderstorm on a flight from Tampa to New Orleans.[5]
The National Cartoonists Society's annual award was originally named the Billy DeBeck Memorial Award. Created by Mary DeBeck Bergman in 1946, these were known as the Barney Awards. She also made the annual presentation of engraved silver cigarette cases, with DeBeck's characters etched on the cover, to the winners (Milton Caniff, Al Capp, Chic Young, Alex Raymond, Roy Crane, Walt Kelly, Hank Ketcham and Mort Walker). In 1954, after her death, the DeBeck Award was renamed the Reuben Award (after Rube Goldberg's first name). When the award name was changed in 1954, all of the prior winners were given Reuben statuettes.[3][6]
