Andy is here in today’s OurLittleCorner.
The other day I got an email from a friend who mentioned something about Ripley’s Believe It or Not. I hadn’t thought about those old newspaper panels for eons, but just seeing that name in the email conjured up long forgotten feelings of excitement (or is it titillation?) that I experienced as a kid.
This started me wondering what it was about Ripley’s Believe It or Not that so enthralled me those many years ago. Was I a patsy for a fake news huckster? Would viewing these stories through the lens of today’s political correctness make me appalled at having been so enthralled?
My interest piqued, I began poking around on the web for answers to these questions. What I found was not quite what I had expected.
For starters, Robert Ripley grew up in Santa Rosa which is not far up the road from our home in Glen Ellen. He aspired to be a cartoonist and contributed cartoons to his high school newspaper and yearbook. In 1908, when he was just 17 years old, he managed to get a illustration published in Life Magazine for which he was paid eight dollars (a sizable chunk of cash in those days).
After high school Ripley moved to San Francisco and began contributing as a sports cartoonist for local newspapers. In 1910 he shared a reporting assignment for the San Francisco Chronicle with Jack London (of Call of the Wild fame). They covered the “Battle of the Century” between boxers Jim Jeffries (aka the “Great White Hope”) and Jack Johnson (the Black heavyweight champion at the time).
Wikipedia claims that “it was one of the most eagerly anticipated boxing matches of all time, with betting odds significantly favoring Jeffries, who had come back from retirement for the fight.” I have to admit that I was surprised at the overt racist rhetoric in the press at the time. Jack London referred to Jim Jeffries as “the chosen representative of the white race.” But what I found particularly disturbing was a NY Times editorial:
As interesting as this may be, I have no idea of what, if anything, Ripley wrote (or drew) about the match. But it’s pretty much agreed that Jack London encouraged Ripley to go to New York to find more opportunities for his sports illustrations. And it was in New York that Ripley’s cartoons began to receive both local and national attention in syndication.
But what really catapulted him to fame were some panels he created during a lull in the sports season when he needed material to publish. According to KleefeldOnComics.com, “Ripley decided to dash off an illustration detailing unusual human feats he had read about, including a man who had held his breath for over six minutes; he called it Champs and Chumps.” He later named it Believe It or Not and by 1926 he made it a regular cartoon feature. “Readers became fanatical about Ripley’s odd collection of arcane facts and both the syndicated strip and its author grew into worldwide sensations.”
Just how “fanatical” his fans were is impressive even by today’s social media standards. At the height of his popularity during the Depression his daily Believe It or Not cartoons appeared in 300 newspapers and were read by many millions of people. And, he reportedly received up to 3,500 letters per day from fans hoping to get their stories selected for the the Believe it or Not series. Interestingly, among those thousands of letters was one containing a sketch by a 15-year-old boy named Charles Schulz that featured a little dog that could eat pins and tacks. Ripley included that sketch in one of his panels; it was Schulz’s first published piece and that little dog later became “Snoopy” of Peanuts fame.
Ripley died in 1949 but his syndicated column continued for years with other artists. This was kind of a bummer for me to learn because it meant that most of those those panels from my childhood memories were actually created by someone else.
None of this answers the question of why I and so many others were so fascinated with these cartoon panels. One source that I found insightful in regards to this question was a piece posted on the NPR web page entitled Photos: Believe It Or Not, Ripley’s Rich History which reported on the archive of photos Ripley used for his panel drawings. The article suggests that beyond the natural human propensity to gawk at the bizarre, these photos represent a more basic human quality:
…like photos of sideshow freaks, these images are about the exceptional. But unlike photos of freaks, they don’t serve to remind the viewer that we are normal. They remind us that each of us, even the most ordinary, has the ability to be extraordinary.
And I love the comment in the NPR article about a photo of a hand-tailored 850-pound ball of string that William T. Washington poses with in 1933: “When it comes right down to it, is there anything more American than a world record-aspiring ball of string? Or the sincerity in the presentation of the man who created it?“
So when all is said and done, I would suggest first that it would be inaccurate to consider Ripley’s Believe It or Not to be an early form of “fake news.” Even though some of his panel entries were questionable, keep in mind that he did have an “or Not” caveat – and he didn’t call his publications “Believe It or Else.” And second, the multitudes of fans that mailed Ripley their personal Believe It or Nots were in a sense pursuing the American dream. A dream of being recognized for being extraordinary in some way.
As a final word, allow me to share an example from Ripley’s Believe It or Not that has to do with food (this is a food blog after all). It’s about a “Mr. and Mrs. Frederick Butsky” who “vowed on their wedding day to always eat from the same plate. They have never dined otherwise in 49 years.”
Ann and I may cook together and we always eat our meals together at the table, but, believe it or not, we never eat from the same plate. And don’t intend to.