Comics and Crossword Puzzles

My parents subscribed to the Fort Dodge Messenger rather than the Des Moines paper. I would have preferred the Des Moines paper with its more imposing cartoon section, which for me at an early age was the most important part of the paper. Sometime when I was 8–10 years old I suppose the Messenger expanded its comic section but the added comics were not the well-known ones. I can recall only one of these, about an aviator named Scorchy Smith.

The Messenger did carry the Webster cartoons as well as a strip about a George Tuttle (?) and his wife Josephine (?) who were always carrying on sort of a verbal battle (brought on by George’s idiosyncratic actions). I didn’t appreciate at the time the subtle humor of these two cartoons.

My favorite cartoons at the time (in the Sunday papers which I garnered from Albert and Molly Rosene) were Popeye and Flash Gordon. I wonder if my unrealized aspiration to be a cartoonist dates from these exposures to cartoons.

Later in life my preferences shifted to such cartoons as Li’l Abner and Pogo. My introduction to Pogo as a cartoon was through a Shell colleague, one Werden Waring. I am not sure just what his position was at Shell but he was on the scene in San Francisco and later Emeryville after the engineering department was moved there. I think in the period just after WWII, Shell along with most companies was interested in building up their technical and engineering staff and welcomed just about anyone who could reasonably be expected to develop into a useful employee. I think Werden fell into this group but in his case he really didn’t find his niche in the organization and left Shell in the early to middle 1950s. Like many Shell employees he was an interesting individual with interesting ideas and outlook. I was never close to him so I lost all contact with him when he left Shell.

One additional thing about the Fort Dodge Messenger and that was that it carried a crossword puzzle. I can remember trying them, but I didn’t do them regularly — not consistently as is my present wont.