"Cartoonist sees man's frailties, including those of himself" from the April 12, 1979 Door County Advocate
By HENRY SHEA
Cartoonist sees man's frailties, including those of himself
By HENRY SHEA
Not many country newspapers, which is what the Advocate calls itself, are lucky enough to have a staff cartoonist. Mostly, small weekly and bi-weekly papers, in search of humor, are content to buy syndicated material originated by some far-off news organization which provides canned "bright spots" which the editor hopes will find favor with its readers. Rarely do these cartoons touch on a topic which has any relevance to the local scene. This is where Roy Schmidt comes in. If he is not actually a staff cartoonist he is rapidly approaching that status on a free-lance basis.
Roy, whose "Door Dillies" are frequently seen in Advocate pages, has been cartooning since he was 12 or 14, and a farm boy outside Matteson, Ill. Through high school his biggest ambition was to turn out good imitations of the current comic strips, Mutt and Jeff, Barney Google, and the Katzenjammer Kids. In those days Matteson was a town of 700, nine miles from the city limits of Chicago. Nowadays most of its farmland has been gobbled up to provide for housing developments and industrial sites.
Roy Schmidt's impish smile betrays the humor that goes into his cartoons. —Shea
In, spite of his flair for cartooning Roy knew it was a difficult field to break into, and rewards were slow in coming. So the thing to do was to get a practical education which he proceeded to do at a Chicago business college. Later he managed some time at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts.
At the same time he was employed with his father and brother in a family paint and hardware business. It was in the 30's that he sold his first cartoons to the "American Humorist," a magazine now long defunct. He followed this with a series on safety subjects which he sold to a steel mill.
The 40's came and with them the threat of war and in the middle of the decade Roy found himself in the Army Air Corps with the rank of corporal and trained as a radioman on B-17 and B-29 bombers. After his training at Truax Field, Madison, he wound up in the Training Command at Alexandria Air Corps Base, Louisiana.
In 1946 he was married and he and his attractive wife Ruth made their first trip to Door county, staying at a resort, now only a memory, called "The Elms" near Sturgeon Bay. Part of the attraction were the convincing words of wife Ruth's sister, who had county property. Another attraction was local fishing, always a favorite sport of Roy's.
But it wasn't long before the brass at his air base discovered Roy's facility with pen and ink. So it was, literally, back to the drawing board, turning out cartoons on air safety and giving assistance in training.
V-J Day came and Roy was a civilian again, managing or owning a series of retail paint establishments in Chicago. The cartooning did not lie dormant, however. His work was now seen in the Chicago Tribune magazine, The American Banker, the only daily newspaper for bankers in the U.S., and Chicago FM Guide. He had taken a three year correspondence course with Famous Artists School, Westport, Conn., which he found valuable for it numbered several nationally known cartoonists among its staff of instructors.
Since it was difficult to find writers to supply "gags" around which cartoons could be framed he delved into this subject too. It was perhaps because of this that he did some humorous writing for paint trade journals.
One example was his resume of different types of customers. Among the characters who came to his attention as a paint dealer was the shadowy individual who drifted in on a rainy evening, inspected everything in the shop and drifted out again when the rain stopped, without having spent a cent.
Next was the harassed mother who brought her whole brood, all eight, on her paint buying excursions, leaving chaos behind. Then there was the scientific customer, the one who came armed with slide rule and calipers and who was super-positive that 8 7/16 yards of this wallpaper, no more and no less, is what he needed, ignoring the fact that a slight error with the scissors would throw his calculations completely off and cause him to rush back to the store to get another one-third roll.
Through it all the harassed paint manager smiles, does his best to be helpful and diplomatic. But these vignettes of human quirks are filed away, mentally, for future use in a cartoon.
Roy Schmidt is a serious looking man which lends some credence to the traditional view of clowns as serious, even sad people. You can be sure, though, that he is smiling, even chuckling inside, at some of the inconsistencies he observes in humans.
Probably this is why he relies on himself for the humorous copy that accompanies his crisp drawings. Two areas of his life have been tapped locally for comic insights, fishing and bowling. For besides being a fisherman, Roy is a bowler. He's a member of the Apple Crust team in the Apple Turnover League at — you guessed it Apple Valley Lanes. He won't disclose his average but that's not important. After all he came here for retirement in 1974 and is no longer under the spell of the fiercely competitive spirit of the Big City.
Roy ascribes some of his talent to hereditary sources. His father was a skilled wood carver in the days when picture frames were ornate, gilt encrusted and hand-carved. One of the jobs which Roy most enjoyed, just before his retirement, was as advertising manager of Rittenhouse-Embree Company, a large Chicago lumber establishment with a number of yards. There he created layouts for newspaper advertising, sometimes wrote the copy, even occasionally adding his special touch with a spot cartoon.
What's ahead for Roy as he enjoys retirement? Well, not retirement, really. He is preparing cartoons for submission to various syndicates, hoping that living in a relatively small city has given him an approach that will be appreciated by other small town dwellers. He has roughed out a book on the art of cartooning that he hopes to see published eventually. And he wouldn't mind teaching cartooning, Say, at night school. So far nobody has asked him to do so, but he's hoping. Meanwhile he sits at his miniature drawing board, in the neatest of surroundings, pondering some of the oddball things people do and converting the thoughts into black and white.
[This article includes samples of his work which were published in American Banker, Chicago FM Guide, Shoe Service, Chicago Tribune Magazine, and Omnibus. Because most or all of them are still copyrighted (having not first been published in the Advocate, which was intentionally left uncopyrighted at the time), I did not include them in this post. You can see them at https://archive.co.door.wi.us:443/jsp/RcWebImageViewer.jsp?doc_id=1e8fc801-90a4-4104-8e86-19a1ea0947dc/wsbd0000/20170120/00000925&pg_seq=32 . The example below was originally for the Advocate, so it is public domain.]
https://archive.co.door.wi.us:443/jsp/RcWebImageViewer.jsp?doc_id=1e8fc801-90a4-4104-8e86-19a1ea0947dc/wsbd0000/20170120/00000925&pg_seq=32 (same as above)
Courtesy of the Door County Library Newspaper Archive
Articles by Henry Shea
https://doorcounty.substack.com/t/henry-shea
Other artist profiles
https://doorcounty.substack.com/t/artist-profiles