The Sunday Funnies

 

Fun With Dick (Tracy) And Jane (Tarzan's Swinging Mate)

Cub reporter Bill Barnett had just gotten off work at the Knoxville Journal one night in 1939 and was anxious to get on his way for a weekend visit with his parents in Rogersville.

Thirty-five years later he wrote about what happened next in his column in the Kingsport Times-News.

“The scene was the old Union Bus Terminal in Knoxville (the one you entered from Gay Street through an arcade and then went down one of half a dozen stairways to your bus parked beneath the waiting room).

“Two attractive young women had just boarded a  Tennessee Coach bus and were getting settled for an overnight trip through sleeping Kingsport and Bristol and across Southwest Virginia to Bluefield, W. Va., when a vendor poked his head inside the open door of the lighted bus and inquired whether any of the passengers wished to buy a Sunday paper, just off the press.

“The girls bought one, extracted from its center the colored Sunday comic section, then, without so much as a glance at the main headline on the front page, handed back the rest of the paper to the dumbfounded vendor to dispose of for them.”

Three decades later it was still a painful memory for Barnett who had worked eight hours that Saturday  in 1939 to get the Sunday Knoxville Journal onto the streets, only to see his handiwork rejected in favor of the Sunday funnies.

Portrait of the Editor As a Young Man - Bill Barnett, Knoxville Journal cub reporter in 1939

Little did Barnett know but in a mere six months the Sunday funnies would become a part of his regular newspaper duties. That was after he had been fired by the Journal for getting beaten on stories by the rival Knoxville News Sentinel. (“I was too timid,” he would confess years later to another Times-News reporter.)

He would write about his first day at work at the Kingsport Times:

“I came here in 1940 as State Editor. It wasn't until I reported for work that managing editor Frank Rule took me for a drive in his car and outlined other duties. Besides culling all the state news I learned I was to cover a daily city news beat, do two or three special features running to several thousand words each week, file a weekly radio column and handle the weekly motion picture publicity, a job which carried with it the title of Sunday editor and a pass to the first run theaters. And I was to help with the copy reading on Saturday nights.”

Oh, and one more thing. “After working until after midnight Saturday nights I had to get up early Sunday morning to read the Sunday comics to the kiddies on a 9:15 a.m. broadcast called ‘Uncle Bill Reads the Funnies.’ Fortunately for the listening public my radio career was short.”

When I first came upon this Barnett quote a few years ago, I was surprised. I didn’t know anyone had ever read the Sunday funnies to Kingsport kids before 1948 when Martin Karant began his regular Sunday radio show, “Fun with the Funnies,” during which he would read the Kingsport Times-News Sunday funnies to his son Ken. And the rest of us would eavesdrop via WKPT-AM.

And I thought Karant had gotten the idea from New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, who had famously gone on radio in 1945 during a newspaper strike to read “Little Orphan Annie” and “Dick Tracy” and the other funnies from the Sunday New York Daily News to New York kids who missed those Sunday morning color comics.

But it turned out that LaGuardia wasn’t the first to read the funnies over the radio. Far from it.

And it wasn’t Bill Barnett, the Kingsport Times editor who turned into Uncle Bill each Sunday morning either.

No, the tradition of reading the Sunday comics to the kids over the radio had a long and varied history.

At the same time Uncle Bill Barnett was reading the funnies to Kingsport kids over WKPT-AM, Pop Wise was reading the Sunday Comics from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch to Missouri kids.

In Kansas City it was “Grandpa Reads the Funnies.” In Des Moines another “Uncle Bill” read the funnies. In Los Angeles the “Funny Paper Man” read the funnies from the Los Angeles Times.

Reading the funnies over the radio wasn’t a recent addition to radio schedules in 1940.

It all started in 1924 in Chicago. That was when WGN radio debuted “Uncle Walt Reads the Funnies” featuring the Sunday comics from the Chicago Tribune. That was a natural pairing. WGN was owned by the Tribune and its call letters stood for World’s Greatest Newspaper.

Uncle Walt in reality was WGN announcer Quin Ryan. The name Uncle Walt came from one of those Sunday comic strips, “Gasoline Alley.”

 

The Sunday comics have been a regular – and popular – feature in newspapers since the early days of the twentieth century, originally a product of a New York newspaper war between William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal-American and Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World.

The Sunday comics didn’t arrive in Kingsport until 1924, when the Kingsport Times expanded from a semi-weekly to a daily, and added FOUR BIG COLOR PAGES OF COMICS to the Sunday paper, an enticement for Mom and Pop to subscribe.

The first four color Sunday funnies were “Slim Jim,” “The Kelly Kids,” “Mutt and Jeff” and “S’Matter Pop."

The first Sunday comics in the Kingsport Times - Oct. 5, 1924

By the time Bill Barnett arrived in 1940 he had to read 15 comic strips beginning on the front page of the Sunday funnies with “Captain Easy,” and continuing through such fondly-remembered strips as “Alley Oop” and “Our Boarding House” (Major Hoople) and such long-forgotten strips as “The Nut Bros., Ches and Wal” and “Babe ‘n’ Horace.”

The funnies that Bill Barnett read on WKPT during the first episode of "Uncle Bill Reads the Funnies" on Aug. 18, 1940:

 

When I think of the Sunday funnies of my childhood, back in the fifties, I think of “Dick Tracy” and “Little Orphan Annie” and “Snuffy Smith.” Those were the three comics that ran on the front page of the Kingsport Times-News’ Sunday funnies section then.

I liked “Dick Tracy,” I didn’t care for “Orphan Annie” and I didn’t understand much of “Snuffy Smith’s” ongoing war with them revenooers. But I read them because I read every comic in the Sunday funnies, many of which weren’t even supposed to be funny.

The Katzenjammer Kids were barely funny, same for The Little King.

Blondie and Dagwood had their moments, especially episodes with Mr. Dithers.

And Beetle Bailey, now that was funny.

My two favorites when I was a kid were Mandrake the Magician and The Phantom. Adventure strips.

Dick Tracy in 1967 Times News

While digging through the archives to research these old comic strips, I came across a fascinating full-page ad from 1953. “You Be the Editor” it was titled. It was really a ballot.

“The editors of the Kingsport Times News would like for you to be editor for a few minutes. During the past several years the newspaper has been adding features - and dropping some - hoping that we are pleasing the most important people in the world, our readers…. In order to find out what our readers are reading, or what they are not reading, the Kingsport Times News is asking for your help. We are asking that you check each feature that you read regularly, once in awhile, or never.”

The comics were among the many items listed.

There were 29 comic strips in the Sunday color comics: Dick Tracy, Orphan Annie, Henry, Katzenjammer Kids, Little King, Alley Oop, Captain Easy, Brick Bradford, King of Royal Mounted, Blondie, Snuffy Smith, Boots, Right Around Home, Annie Rooney, Buz Sawyer, Our Boarding House, Li'l Abner, Believe It Or Not, Mickey Mouse, The Phantom, Tillie the Toiler, Maggie and Jiggs, Toots and Casper, Flash Gordon, Polly, Steve Canyon, Mandrake, Prince Valiant and Out Our Way.

Some I remember as if they were in today’s comics. Others I have no clue about.

Martha Wayne? Rip Kirby? Rusty Riley? Who were they?

But Mandrake. And Phantom. And Pogo. And Li’l Abner. And Dick Tracy.

They were my favorites.

I had a Mandrake the Magician poster on my college dorm wall; Mandrake is running and the word-balloon reads, “Hold On Lothar, I’m Coming.”

Lothar was Mandrake’s manservant.

The Phantom was a mysterious character often referred to by the other characters as “Oh Ghost Who Walks.”

Pogo’s philosophical utterings were way over my grade school head. It would be years before I appreciated his most famous quote, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

 

1950 ad for 9 new comics!

 

Two Kingsport Times-News legends died earlier this month.

Mary Kiss started at the newspaper in 1950, straight out of the University of Michigan journalism school. She preferred the news side of the business and wrote thousands of stories about the courts and the police before retiring in 1991.

Mary Kiss writing in 1950 as Mary Clement before she married Alvin Kiss. 

Pete Dykes worked for the newspaper from 1952 till 1962, mostly in advertising. But he was also a talented artist and for seven years drew “Around Town,” a popular weekly cartoon panel that highlighted the events of the past week. After he left the Times-News, he founded the weekly Kingsport Post in 1962 – the publication lasted 54 years, no small achievement when he was going up against the much bigger, established daily, the Times News.

I knew them both and, as we used to say in the fifties, they were swell people.

Mary, Pete and Bill Barnett all worked together in the early fifties.

With the death earlier this year of Margy Clark, I think all of the Times-News Old Guard are gone.

A Sunday Knoxville Journal? you may be asking.

By the time I got to Knoxville in '69, the Journal was published mornings six days a week. No Sunday paper; Sunday was the province of the News-Sentinel.

But there was a Sunday Journal in 1940 and Bill Barnett worked on it. It cost a nickel (soon to rise to a dime).

The last Sunday Knoxville Journal was published Sunday Sept. 29, 1957. Here is the front page with the announcement that this was the last one:

 

World's Greatest Bowler Comes to Kingsport

"World's Greatest Bowler" Jimmy Smith in 1927

Bowling arrived in Kingsport in December 1920 with the opening of the new Community Y, which featured a dormitory, a swimming pool, a gymnasium, a reading room, billiards tables and three bowling lanes! The lanes came from Cincinnati, took three weeks to assemble and cost $4,000.

Bowling was an immediate hit and proved so popular among Y members that a month later the board of the Y decided to open up the lanes to women, designating every Thursday as Ladies Day. No men or boys would be allowed on the lanes or in the pool or gymnasium anytime on Thursday.

And with bowling came bowling leagues with the local industries fielding teams. The final of the first Industrial League season was held March 11, 1921 with the Clinchfield Portland Cement Plant team lead by H.O. Bunn taking on the boys from Mead Fibre. (Mead, led by George MacNaughton, won. High score was 192 by the cement plant’s Charles Vance.)

Even Kingsport High started a team to compete with other local high schools.

Kingsport's Community Y in 1921

Then challenges took off. In one issue of the Kingsport Times the Sockmakers of the Kingsport  Hosiery Mill challenged the team from J. Fred Johnson’s Big Store. It seemed every day one team was challenging another to find out who was best by meeting on the Y lanes. There were even internecine challenges: the Grocery Department of the Big Store challenged employees from the rest of the company to a match.

The highest individual score reported during that first year of bowling in Kingsport belonged to Conrad Miller of Clinchfield Portland Cement who rolled a 232 game. (Miller would marry Ruth Dodd, making him Bobby Dodd’s brother-in-law.)

 Soon the Times began carrying a bowling column written by B.O. Ling.

Obviously that was a pseudonym (bo-ling, bowling). But in his two-year tenure Mr. Ling did manage one major accomplishment: he got the World’s Greatest Bowler to come to Kingsport for an exhibition.

Jimmy Smith in Chicago in 1905

 The World’s Greatest Bowler by universal acclamation was Jimmy Smith of Brooklyn who had declared himself such in 1906 after defeating Johnny “Little Wizard” Voorhies of New York in a best-of-eleven match. Smith, whose real name was Jimmy Mellilo, declared he would take on any and all challengers. And he did, always coming out on top.

Until 1921 when Jimmy Blouin of Blue Island, Illinois defeated him in a 60-game match.

Smith kept billing himself as the World’s Greatest Bowler, for touring purposes, but there were other challengers. So by the time he came to Kingsport he should have been billed as One of the World’s Greatest Bowlers.

In the years leading up to his 1927 appearance in Kingsport, when accurate records were beginning to be kept, he averaged 211 over 12,000 games and recorded 16 perfect 300 games, said to be the most of any bowler.

 

The big announcement of Jimmy Smith’s appearance in Kingsport came in the Feb. 27, 1927 edition of the Kingsport Times:

GREATEST BOWLER OF TIME WILL BE HERE ON MARCH 31

Jimmy Smith, Holder of Unusual Records in Bowling Circles, to Give Exhibition on Y Alleys Next Month

B. O. Ling says "Make no other engagements for Thursday night, March 31; get this date firmly fixed in your mind and mark it up in your date book. This is the night that Jimmy Smith, the greatest bowler of all time, the one who has rolled more perfect scores than any other known bowler, will give an exhibition in Kingsport. Some of Kingsport's best bowlers will be picked to show their skill against him, and a large crowd is expected to root for the local boys.”

Ten days later “B.O. Ling” noted, “The idea has been adopted of having the bowlers of the city decide who they want to bowl against Jimmy Smith on his visit here March 31. In addition, to Lewis Moore of Bristol’s Y.M.C.A. team and Louis Thornberry of Erwin’s Southern Potteries team, two bowlers of Kingsport will roll Jimmy a series of three games each. A ballot box will be ready at the local alleys tonight and every bowler in the city is urged to vote. On Friday night the ballot box will be opened and votes counted.”

When the ballots were tallied, the winners, voted best local keglers by their compatriots, were Al “Bones” McConnell and H.S. Boda, both, of the Kingsport Press team.

“B.O. Ling” wrote, “Bristol fans will be here in full force, as will the Erwin bowlers, to witness an exhibition that is seldom seen in a city of this size. Arrangements have been made and seating capacity will take care of all spectators. Indications point to the fact that many ladies will attend, as many of the fair sex of Kingsport have caught the bowling fever, and next year will no doubt see a ladies league occupying the local alleys in the afternoons.”

The big day arrived and our man “B.O. Ling” was there to cover it:

“Before the largest crowd ever gathered in the bowling room of the Community Y, Jimmy Smith didn’t fail to awe the fans, which included contingents from Bristol and Erwin joining the Kingsport crowd. He bowled with such ease and grace as to draw favorable comment from all who saw him.”

Smith easily defeated Bristol’s Moore 551 to 467, Erwin’s Thornberry 542 to 488 and Kingsport’s Boda 535 to 444.

But it wasn’t so easy against the 20-year-old Bones McConnell. The first game was a squeaker with McConnell nudging The Great One 187 to 185.

Jimmy Smith came back in the second game with an easy 189-179 victory, putting everything on the final game.

It started out tight but then McConnell rolled strikes in the ninth and tenth frames to finish at 190, routing the World Champion who fell off to 169.

The Kingsport Lad had bested the World’s Greatest.

This wasn’t Al McConnell’s only moment in the bowling spotlight. Six weeks later he won the Kingsport Times’ first City Bowling Championship and went on to win the city championship six years in a row.

In 1935 he led the Industrial League in scoring with a season average of 177.

McConnell would continue to reign as Kingsport’s top bowler until 1938 when he was unseated by Monty Reams of the Eastman team.

Al McConnell in 1948

Al “Bones” McConnell died in 1974 at age 68.

His obituary noted that he “began work at the Kingsport Press in January 1923 as an office boy and rose to become southern sales manager. McConnell was a founder of the Kingsport Elks Club, holding the number one card. He served as chairman of the Salvation Army advisory board, was a charter member of the Kingsport Civitan Club and six times city bowling champion.”

There was no mention of that glorious day in 1927 when he took on the World’s Greatest Bowler and beat him at his own game.

 

 

By 1955 Jimmy Smith was hawking his own line of bowling shoes

Other claimants to the title of World’s Greatest Bowler over the years:

1930 – Sykes Thoma (designated by St. Louis Star and Times)

1935 – “Chesty Joe” Falcaro (Corsicana, Texas Daily Sun)

1940 - Andy Varipapa (Allentown, Pa. Morning Call)

1945 – Billy “Haywire” Benda (Rock Island, Illinois Argus)

1950 – Ned Day (Deseret News, Salt Lake City)

1955 – Buddy Bomar (Dayton, Ohio Daily News)

1955 – Don Carter (Nashville Tennessean)

1960 – Don Carter (St. Louis Post-Dispatch)

1965 – Don Carter, Dick Weber, Buzz Fazio and Billy Hartwick (Akron Beacon Journal)

2021 – Pete Weber (Google: Who is the World’s Greatest Bowler?)

 

 

As many of you know I am a Championship Bowler (retired). On Saturday Dec. 31, 1960 David Good and I won the AJBC-sanctioned Warpath Lanes Christmas Tournament Junior Doubles. It is true that when the results were published in the Kingsport Times-News the next day, David and I were listed in second place, ten pins behind the team of Jim Beck and Joe Duncan. When David and I left the alley on Saturday afternoon, we had been declared the winners by ten pins. The win was somehow stolen from us during an unmonitored recount. The reader is left to draw his or her own conclusions.

 

David Good, back row, 4th from left, Vince Staten, back row, 5th from left (head in front of clock)

 

Look at all the leagues that were reporting scores to the Kingsport Times News in 1958:

 

(click on images to enlarge)

 By 1968 the Times News was publishing a regular bowling column: