The Gumps
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The Gumps were a popular comic strip about an ordinary family by Sidney Smith. The strip ran from February 12, 1917 until October 17, 1959.
The Gumps were utterly ordinary: chinless, bombastic blowhard Andy, his wife Min (short for Minerva), their son Chester, the rich Uncle Bim and the annoying maid Tilda. The idea was envisioned by Captain Joseph M. Patterson, editor and publisher of the Chicago Tribune, who was important in the early histories of Little Orphan Annie and other long-run comic strips. Patterson referred to the masses as "gumps" and thought a strip about the domestic lives of ordinary people and their ordinary happenings would appeal to the "gumps." He hired Smith to write and draw the strip, and it was Smith who breathed life into the characters.
As one of the earliest continuity strips, The Gumps was extremely popular, with newspaper readers anxiously following the convoluted storylines. Smith had Andy run for Congress in 1922 and for President in 1924 and in practically every succeeding election, one of the first of many comic strip and cartoon characters to run for office. In 1929, when Smith killed off Mary Gold, she was the first major comic strip character to die, and the Tribune had to hire extra staff to deal with the many phone calls and letters from stunned readers.
The strip and its merchandising (toys, games, a popular song, toys, games, playing cards, food products) made Smith a wealthy man. On his way home from signing a $150,000 a year contract in 1935, he crashed his new Rolls-Royce and died. Patterson replaced Smith with sports cartoonist Gus Edson, but Edson's version was not as popular. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, actor Martin Landau was a comic strip artist and one of his jobs was as assistant to Edson on The Gumps.
The Gumps not only launched a craze for continuity strips, it also had a huge influence on the history of radio broadcasting, as detailed by broadcast historian Elizabeth McLeod in the "Andy Gump to Andy Brown" section of her popular culture essay, Amos 'n' Andy -- In Person (http://www.midcoast.com/~lizmcl/aa.html) and her book, The Original Amos 'n' Andy: Freeman Gosden, Charles Correll, and the 1928-43 Radio Serial (McFarland, 2005).
WGN was a Chicago Tribune radio station, where Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll signed on as staffers in 1925. WGN executive Ben McCanna believed that a dramatic serial could work on radio just as it did in newspapers. When he approached Gosden and Correll to adapt The Gumps to radio, they declined and instead devised their own characters for the 1926-27 radio serial, Sam 'n' Henry. After reworking these characters for Amos 'n' Andy in 1928-29, while borrowing certain elements from The Gumps, they were on their way to becoming millionaires, and the radio serial format they created soon became the model for many other radio dramas.
At WGN, The Gumps finally came to radio in 1931, followed by a four-year run on CBS from 1934 to 1937 with scripts by Irwin Shaw. Dorothy Denvir was heard as Min, with Agnes Moorehead, in her first radio role, portraying Min during the last two years of the series.
External links
- Toonopedia (http://www.toonopedia.com/thegumps.htm)
- Meet the Gumps (http://scoop.diamondgalleries.com/scoop_article.asp?ai=2277&si=126)