| Robert Ripley | |
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Ripley in 1940. |
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| Born | December 25, 1890, Santa Rosa, California |
| Died | May 27, 1949 (aged 58) United States |
| Occupation | cartoonist, entrepreneur and amateur anthropologist, and creator of Ripley's Believe It or Not! |
Robert LeRoy Ripley (December 25, 1890 – May 27, 1949)[1] was an American cartoonist, entrepreneur and amateur anthropologist, who created the world famous Ripley's Believe It or Not! newspaper panel series, radio show, and television show which feature odd 'facts' from around the world.
Subjects covered in Ripley's cartoons and text ranged from sports feats to little known facts about unusual and exotic sites, but what ensured the concept's popularity may have been that Ripley also included items submitted by readers, who supplied photographs of a wide variety of small town American trivia, ranging from unusually shaped vegetables to oddly marked domestic animals, all documented by photographs and then depicted by Ripley's drawings. He died of a heart attack on May 27, 1949.
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In 1919 Ripley married Beatrice Roberts. He made his first trip around the world in 1922, delineating a travel journal in installments. This ushered in a new topic for his cartoons: unusual and exotic foreign locales and cultures. Because he took the veracity of his work quite seriously, in 1923, Ripley hired a researcher and linguist named Norbert Pearlroth as a full-time assistant. That same year his feature moved from the New York Globe to the New York Post. His grandson, Neil A. Ripley, is currently breaking up his grandfather's empire in hopes of creating something of his own.
Throughout the 1920s, Ripley continued to broaden the scope of his work and his popularity increased greatly. He published both a travel journal and a guide to the game of handball in 1925 and, in 1926, became the New York state handball champion and wrote a book on boxing. With a proven track record as a versatile writer and artist, he attracted the attention of publishing mogul William Randolph Hearst, who managed the King Features Syndicate. In 1929, Hearst was responsible for Believe It or Not! making its syndicated debut in seventeen papers worldwide. With the success of this series assured, Ripley capitalized on his fame by getting the first book collection of his newspaper panel series published.
On November 3, 1929, he drew a panel in his syndicated cartoon saying "Believe It or Not, America has no national anthem."[2] In 1931, John Philip Sousa published his opinion in favor, stating that "it is the spirit of the music that inspires" as much as it is Francis Scott Key's "soul-stirring" words. By a law signed on March 3, 1931 by President Herbert Hoover, "The Star-Spangled Banner" was adopted as the national anthem of the United States.
The 1930s saw Ripley expand his presence into other media. In 1930, he began an eighteen-year run on radio and a nineteen-year association with the show's producer, Doug Storer. Funding for his celebrated travels around the world were provided by the Hearst organization, and Ripley recorded live radio shows from underwater, the sky, caves, snake pits and foreign countries. The next year he hosted the first of a series of two dozen Believe It or Not! theatrical short films for Warner Brothers Vitaphone, and King Features published a second collected volume of Believe it or Not! panels. He also appeared in a Vitaphone musical short, Seasons Greetings (1931), with Ruth Etting, Joe Penner, Ted Husing, Thelma White, Ray Collins, and others. After a trip to Asia in 1932, Ripley opened his first museum, the Odditorium, in Chicago. The concept was a success, and by the end of the decade, there were Odditoriums in San Diego, Dallas, Cleveland, San Francisco, and New York City. By this point in his life, Ripley had been voted the most popular man in America by the New York Times,[3] received an honorary degree from Dartmouth College, and visited 201 foreign countries.
During World War II, Ripley concentrated on charity efforts rather than world travel, but after the war, he again expanded his media efforts. In 1948, the year of the 20th anniversary of the Believe it or Not! cartoon series, the Believe it or Not! radio show drew to a close and was replaced with a Believe it or Not! television series. This was a rather bold move on Ripley's part because of the small number of Americans with access to television at this early time in the medium's development. Ripley only completed thirteen episodes of the series when he became incapacitated by severe health problems. He reportedly passed out during the filming of his final show. His health worsened, and on May 27, 1949, at age 58, he succumbed to a heart attack. He was buried in his home town of Santa Rosa, in the Oddfellows Lawn Cemetery, which is adjacent to the Santa Rosa Rural Cemetery.
Ripley is often regarded as an extraordinary individual. His cartoon series was estimated to have 80 million readers worldwide and it was said that he received more mail than the President of the United States. He became a wealthy man, with homes in New York and Florida, but he always retained close ties to his home town of Santa Rosa, California, and he made a point of bringing attention to The Church of the One Tree, a church built entirely from the wood of a single 300 ft (91.4 m) tall redwood tree, which stands on the north side of Juilliard Park in downtown Santa Rosa.
Some, such as Wayne Harbour who resided in Bedford, Iowa[4] have called Ripley a liar and accused him of exaggerating the facts, but throughout the years, he always gave appropriate sources. He claimed to be able to "prove every statement he made.",[5] and the major reason he could make such a claim was that behind him stood the work of the indefatigable professional fact researcher, Norbert Pearlroth, who assembled Believe it or Not!s vast array of odd historical, geographical, and scientific facts and also verified the small-town claims submitted by readers. Pearlroth, who spoke 11 languages, spent 52 years as the feature's researcher, working in the New York Public Library ten hours a day, six days a week, finding and verifying unusual facts for Ripley and, after Ripley's death, for the King Features syndicate editors who took over management of the Believe it or Not!' panel.
Other employees who researched the newspaper cartoon series over the years were Lester Byck and Don Wimmer. Others who drew the series after Ripley's death include Joe Campbell (1946 to 1956), Art Slogg, Clem Gretter (1941 to 1949), Carl Dorese, Bob Clarke (1943 and 1944), Stan Randall, Paul Frehm (1938–1978) – who became the panel's full time artist in 1949 – and his brother Walter Frehm (1948–1989).
Ripley's ideas and legacy live on in Ripley Entertainment, a company bearing his name, which, since 1985 has been owned by the Jim Pattison Group, Canada's 3rd largest privately held company. Ripley Entertainment airs national television shows, features publications of oddities, and has holdings in a variety of public attractions, including Ripley's Aquarium, Ripley's Believe it or Not! Museums, Ripley's Haunted Adventure, Ripley's Mini-Golf and Arcade, Ripley's Movie Theater, Ripley's Sightseeing Trains, Great Wolf Lodge overlooking Niagara Falls, Guinness World Records Attractions, and Louis Tussaud's wax Museums.