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: