A Curious Man Page 5

  Setting course for New York, then—with little money, no confirmed job, lugging just a portfolio of drawings and the names of a few contacts—was not only Ripley’s first gutsy adventure, but would forever loom as the boldest. He was twenty-one.

  He said good-bye to his family, boarded an eastbound train, then dozed in his wooden seat as one American panorama linked with another: San Francisco to Sacramento, Ogden to Cheyenne, Kansas City to St. Louis, Louisville to Nashville to Cincinnati, where he felt snowflakes touch his face for the first time.

  During the dirty two-week crossing he imagined himself enacting a modern version of his parents’ cross-country journey, but in reverse. Eating from butcher carts and warming himself near the coal stove, he rolled farther north and east toward an uncertain future.

  After safely making his way across the country, Ripley got off the train lugging a battered trunk containing all of his possessions: some clothes, an extra suit, his baseball glove, and a flat-pack portfolio of drawings. Tucked deep in his pants pocket was $15, the last of his cash.

  One look around told him that he was not in New York. He had accidentally disembarked one stop too soon, in New Jersey. It was cold, it was nighttime, and he had no idea how to cross the Hudson River. Swimming as his father had during his cross-country journey was no option—Ripley couldn’t swim. Looking confused and lost, he caught the attention of a man who offered to guide Ripley into Manhattan via the newly opened train tunnel that ran beneath the Hudson.

  “You’re a real westerner, and I like your style,” the man said.

  Emerging from the subterranean tube onto the streets of midtown Manhattan, Ripley gawked at the skyscraper forest and the humming, starlit city. Ripley’s new buddy helped him find a cheap, closet-sized hotel room to stash his trunk, and at dinner introduced him to two friends. One claimed to be an insurance man, the other a judge. Ripley thought the judge’s gnarled, cauliflower ear looked suspiciously like the ear of a boxer.

  When the insurance man pulled out a pair of dice and suggested they shoot a friendly game, it finally dawned on Ripley that the yokel was being scammed. He explained that he couldn’t play—“All my m-money is in ch-checks,” he stammered—but offered to meet them again at nine o’clock the next morning. He excused himself and scurried back to his hotel, where he propped a chair against the door and hardly slept. At seven a.m., he arose and checked out—a precarious entry to a new life.

  WITH INCOMING SHIPLOADS of immigrants and a rising literacy rate, New York journalism was thriving, sustained by dozens of news publications. Atop the heap loomed Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, an innovative and cartoon-friendly newspaper that was the first stop in Ripley’s job search. At the domed Pulitzer building—among the tallest of New York’s sky pokers—he sought out Ned Brown, who in Reno had offered to help him find a job.

  BELIEVE IT!

  In 1895, the World launched the seminal Hogan’s Alley cartoon, whose barefooted star character in an oversized yellow shirt earned him the nickname “The Yellow Kid.” In his New York Journal, William Randolph Hearst created his own yellow-kid cartoon, a blatant knockoff that stoked the feud between him and Pulitzer. Their subsequent attempts to outsensationalize each other in print birthed the term “yellow journalism.”

  But the World had been in turmoil since Pulitzer’s death a few months earlier, and wasn’t hiring. For days, Ripley visited other newspapers, struggling with his portfolio on slushy, snow-slick sidewalks but unwilling to trust himself to the decade-old subways. Feeling as low as he could remember, he began wondering if he’d made a mistake. It didn’t help that he had no overcoat.

  Ripley finally asked a street-corner newsboy for directions to the Globe and Commercial Advertiser, and was soon lost in the street maze of Greenwich Village, yet another complication in his already sloppy introduction to the streets of New York.

  One of the city’s oldest papers, founded in 1797 by Alexander Hamilton and first edited by Noah Webster (of dictionary renown), the Globe and Commercial Advertiser had sunk into relative obscurity, a quaint, thin rag sometimes called “the old-time Globe.” Editor Henry J. Wright and his staff were struggling to change that perception, in part with eye-grabbing cartoons meant to offer the immigrant and working class a more exciting alternative to the dull-gray text that remained the dominant style of the city’s papers.

  When Ripley arrived at the Globe’s front door, daily circulation had been hovering for years around 100,000; the World reached six times as many readers. But Globe readership was growing fast, thanks largely to the front-page political cartoons of its popular and populist new artist, J. N. “Ding” Darling.

  Ripley was eventually led to the office of sports editor Walter St. Denis, a short-tempered Canadian who had been seeking a new style for his sports pages. St. Denis left Ripley waiting for more than an hour, but when Ripley finally got the chance to spread out his drawings, St. Denis liked what he saw, the mix of art and humanity. He called in Ding Darling for a second opinion.

  Darling’s initial opinion was that the lean, anxious, and disheveled young Ripley was dressed more for gardening than a job interview. Ripley wore a thick woolen army shirt and, due to the snow, had rolled up his trouser legs, exposing scuffed and worn-out shoes. Darling felt sorry for Ripley but was impressed by his cartoons and smitten by his innocence and eagerness.

  “The boy’s got something,” Darling finally told St. Denis. “Hire him for six months, and if he doesn’t make good, I’ll be responsible for his salary.”

  RIPLEY STARTED AT THE GLOBE, in the chilly first days of 1912, at $25 a week. He found a small room in a boardinghouse on West Sixtieth Street, a short walk to Central Park. Though Globe headquarters was at Globe Square in Greenwich Village, Ripley’s office would be in lower Manhattan atop the new Singer Building, built by the sewing-machine company in 1908 and briefly reigning as the world’s tallest building.

  In addition to Ding Darling (who would later win two Pulitzer prizes), Ripley’s new colleagues were an elite clan. The paper had recently hired such recognizable artists as H. T. Webster and H. A. MacGill, and would soon hire Carl “Bunny” Schultze, each of whom developed America’s earliest serialized daily comic strips. As in San Francisco, Ripley’s coworkers would be some of the most innovative artists in the business. The timing of his assimilation into this rare gathering couldn’t have been better.

  The Globe had recently partnered with Associated Newspapers, a newly formed syndicate (housed in the Singer Building) that distributed stories and cartoons to dozens of midsize papers. Syndication had proved to be a boon to newspapers and their cartoonists. Bigger papers got extra mileage from their cartoons by selling them to smaller papers, which in turn published cartoons that their staffs couldn’t otherwise produce. The upside for cartoonists was having their work exposed to a nationwide audience, and some of them were becoming the country’s first media celebrities. For Ripley, this meant his cartoons would be distributed nationally by Associated Newspapers and seen by hundreds of thousands of newspaper readers across the United States.

  So when Ripley’s name first appeared in the Globe’s pages—atop a cartoon about the boxer Abe Attell, on January 18, 1912—in a nicely poetic twist, it also appeared three thousand miles away, in the San Francisco Bulletin.

  THE GLOBE BILLED ITSELF as “New York’s Oldest Newspaper” but had lately begun acting like a scrappy upstart. Its editors had been hiring new talent and investing in new printing presses. It sold for a penny and most days devoted two full pages to sports. Ripley quickly became a steady presence on those pages, his cartoons appearing at least every other day, sometimes daily, always in the top center, swallowing the top fourth or more of the sports pages.

  In addition to drawing, Ripley began writing in earnest. He launched a series of illustrated stories about Olympic athletes headed to Sweden that summer. In a series called Hardest Battles of Ring Stars as Told by Them to Ripley, he interviewed boxers about their most grueling fights. H
e created a recurring cartoon character, Demon Dug, named for his brother but clearly based on his younger self. A mop-topped, dirty-faced, mischievous kid in knickers, Dug couldn’t stay away from the baseball diamond, lost his schoolbooks, played hooky, broke windows, and got dragged home by the ear by his mother.

  As a writer, Ripley developed an ease with the tough-guy language of the pugilist, describing one boxer as “a cold-blooded proposition [who] fought cruelly and unceasingly.” He also showed signs of wit. After winning a fight, one hard-drinking fighter was “in the best of spirits (and the best of spirits were in him).” It was no small achievement for an unproven newsman to hold his own among the Globe’s sports scribes, who ranked among New York’s best.

  BELIEVE IT!

  One of Ripley’s colleagues, Mark Roth, was sometimes credited with coining a new name for the New York Highlanders baseball team—the Yankees.

  Globe veterans were impressed by Ripley’s prolific output, even if they found him quiet and a little odd. Sportswriter Sid Mercer considered him “a plain lad” and columnist Herb Corey called him the “trembling artist.” But Ripley attracted a loyal patron in Associated Newspapers’ founder, George Matthew Adams, a minister’s son from Michigan who felt Ripley was “unspoiled … a modest chap.”

  Baseball continued to dominate his cartoons, his arrival in New York coinciding with the start of the preseason. His apartment was close to the Ninth Avenue El, which delivered him to the northern tip of Manhattan, home to the Polo Grounds and the New York Giants, whose pugnacious fireplug of a manager, John McGraw, was now part of Ripley’s sports beat. Instead of just drawing cartoons and portraits of McGraw, though, what Ripley really wanted was to play for him.

  AN ENDURING HIGHLIGHT of Ripley’s pre-celebrity legacy was that after his modest success in California’s bush leagues he came within striking distance of a professional baseball career. Ripley would perpetually claim that after arriving in New York he immediately went chasing that other life dream.

  The story goes like this: In February of 1912, Ripley joined the Giants for a train ride to Marlin, Texas, to cover spring training workouts for the Globe. When coaches learned Ripley had played semi-pro ball, they invited him to work out with the team. One coach thought Ripley showed “considerable promise and ability,” and McGraw allegedly told Ripley that with a few years in the minors he might become a big-league prospect. During a scrimmage, Ripley was called in to pitch, and in one reporter’s retelling McGraw called Ripley “the best curve-ball pitcher I’ve seen in a long, long time.”

  The story continues: Ripley reared into his windup, whipped his arm forward, and felt a sharp snap. His arm had broken in a ninety-degree fracture, a jagged edge of bone actually poking through the skin. In less gruesome versions, his arm “shattered,” though sometimes it was just a broken finger. Later reports would claim that Ripley signed a minor-league contract with the Giants, then broke his arm. Yet, while there is an impressive picture of Ripley wearing a Giants uniform and swinging a bat, his name doesn’t appear in any Giants statistics or record books, or in any news stories about spring training from 1912 to 1914. The writer Damon Runyon saw Ripley at the Giants’ training camp in Texas one year and remembered him more as a poker player than a pitcher.

  Ripley loved the story of his flirtation with pro ball—as would future PR men, honing the Ripley legend—even if they all overreached in the retelling. Regardless of the true version, the results were the same. Ripley viewed the injury as “a godsend” and “a great thing” because it forced him to choose between competing career paths. “It ruined me as a baseball player,” he’d say. “And it made me a cartoonist.”

  SOMETIME DURING HIS first year at the Globe, Ripley’s editors decided it was time for their young artist—who had continued to sign his cartoons “Rip” or “Ripley”—to have a real first name. “We can’t have a ‘LeRoy’ in the sporting department,” Walter St. Denis said.

  “LeRoy” apparently wasn’t masculine enough for a sports cartoonist/reporter, so Ripley willingly adopted his middle name, Robert. He became Bob or Rip to his new East Coast friends, still Roy to his mother and siblings, who must have been shocked to receive a letter containing the first “By Robert Ripley” clipping. He’d soon reclaim LeRoy for his middle initial, becoming Robert L. Ripley.

  Soon after adopting his new name, Ripley was given an unexpectedly plum assignment, which the Globe announced in January of 1913 in a large headline across the top of the sports page: RIPLEY IS OFF FOR EUROPE TODAY. Beneath that appeared a six-column Ripley self-portrait, with slightly underexaggerated buckteeth, wearing a plaid cap and striding across the ocean, a pencil in one hand and sketch pad in the other. In a balloon, Ripley asks Europe, “Well, whatcha got?”

  At the time, overseas travel was rare, expensive, and risky. Crossing the Atlantic was an astonishing perk for a rookie staffer and an inexperienced traveler. It was also a reflection of the editors’ trust in Ripley’s ability to turn his overseas travels into a series of entertaining stories and cartoons. Ripley was thrilled, and hoped his first taste of the world beyond America’s shores would not only provide material for a unique new style of cartoon but also guide him toward his eventual big idea.

  Instead of traveling directly to Europe, Ripley first sailed through the Mediterranean and visited Egypt. In Giza, he toured the ancient pyramids and in a nearby sandlot noticed a group of men in long gowns playing something like baseball. Using a skinny bat, they had modified the game: eight men per team; eight outs per inning; one strike and you’re out. But they played as aggressively as any bush leaguer and were especially vocal in taunting opponents and umpires. Ripley pulled out his sketch pad and started working on a cartoon of Egyptian ballplayers wearing “headache towels,” as he called their turbans.

  As he continued on to Europe, he kept his reporter’s eye narrowly focused on sports. Either by habit or under editors’ orders, he seemed unwilling to expand his curiosity and test his pen on non-sports topics, unsure of his footing outside the familiar comforts of an arena or stadium.

  In Rome he visited the Coliseum, the alleged birthplace of professional boxing, where sixty thousand spectators once watched enslaved fighters pound each other with studded leather gloves called cesti. In Germany, he witnessed a bizarre sword-fighting contest called Mensur, in which duelers swiped at each other’s faces. The goal wasn’t so much to win as to suffer an opponent’s blade without flinching. The inevitable scars were borne with pride, scabbed badges of honor. After witnessing a duel, Ripley watched in awe as a doctor stitched the loser’s face together without eliciting a wince from the patient.

  In France he attended an oddly collegial boxing match at the Cirque de Paris. With plush seats and carpeting, it seemed more opera than prizefight. Only once did he venture outside the preplanned itinerary, putting his provincialism on full, unapologetic display. In Paris, he went looking for the boxer Georges Carpentier, whom he hoped to interview. “I wanta see Carpentier!” he told his taxi driver, certain that his request was delivered in “perfectly good English.” When the confused taxi driver responded in rapid-fire French, Ripley grew flustered and then angry. He began repeating his instructions, but louder. “CAR-pen-TEER!” he finally shouted.

  Eager to get back to English-speaking New York, he became emotional on the ship’s deck as he spotted the faint outline of the Statue of Liberty, the gargoyled spires and peaks of Manhattan. When the ship docked at Hoboken, New Jersey, Ripley suddenly realized he had no money left. He offered to help another passenger with his luggage so he could earn a dollar for the ferry ride to New York.

  THE GLOBE ANNOUNCED his return with another six-column cartoon of a caricatured Ripley hugging New York City and kissing the new Woolworth Building. Stacked behind him on the ship’s deck was a pile of “sketches.” Though the Globe offered no explanation for the bold overseas stint, a balloon quote above the cartooned Globe building suggested that his editors might have been eager to have their product
ive new artist back.

  “Hey,” it read. “Come on, get busy.”

  Ripley wasted no time, launching a months-long series of stories and cartoons that introduced readers to his take on Europe, and to his clever and curious mind.

  His first cartoon was accompanied by a story about the Egyptians he’d watched playing the game they called leep el tabe. “What a spectacle it was—a baseball game at the base of the pyramids!” He called the Coliseum “the Madison Square Garden of the Roman days” and the Cirque de Paris “the Madison Square Garden of Paris.” He described the pretty female ushers at the Parisian boxing match and the “terrible open gashes and streaming blood” of the Mensur fighters.

  His style was casual, colloquial, even a bit irreverent. He admitted to drinking beer in Germany and relied heavily on slangy contractions—y’know, dontcha, y’see. He sang the praises of Parisian women but revealed an uneasy distrust of most foreigners and their strange ways. He was the perfect yokel American, never mentioning that King George of Greece had been assassinated during his time abroad.

  It amounted to a remarkable series of global dispatches from a mere sports cartoonist, and an entertaining diversion for Globe readers. New York’s sportswriters and illustrators typically covered baseball, boxing, and horse racing, with lesser sports relegated to an occasional inch of type at the bottom of the page. To read about Egyptian baseball and German Mensur was, in the view of many readers, fascinating.

  In his first year and a half at the Globe, Ripley had developed a reputation as a cutting-edge journalist and a darn good read. He settled into a steady grind, scurrying across New York to cover games, scouring the city by foot and train, day and night, cranking out cartoons by the score. He averaged two dozen cartoons and/or columns a month through late 1913, expanding his scope to cover billiards, auto racing, horse racing, polo, tennis, and golf.