Writer Thurber, cartoonist Ireland crossed paths at paper
In the early 1920s, two great careers briefly intersected at the Columbus Evening Dispatch.
James Thurber was a young reporter trying to find his niche in the writing world, and he would often hang out in the office of Dispatch cartoonist Billy Ireland, talking and watching the older man create his full-page masterpieces.
By 1925, though, Thurber was gone, off to make his mark on bigger stages. His celebrated career as an author and humorist included essays, books and plays — many of which drew upon experiences he had growing up in Columbus.
Ireland stayed at The Dispatch for the rest of his life, using his platform not only to entertain, but to provide political and social commentary and crusade for causes.
In a way, Thurber’s fame helped put Columbus on the map, while Ireland was content to map Columbus.
Both left legacies in the city today; Thurber by way of one of his family’s houses being restored and turned into a literary center, best known nationally for awarding an annual prize to an American humorist.
And Ireland, most visibly by the presence of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum at Ohio State University, but also in ways that perhaps even lifelong Columbus natives don’t realize.
Thurber was born in Columbus in 1894, and his family moved around a lot.
He graduated from East High School in 1913 and attended Ohio State off and on for the next five years, although he never graduated (the school awarded him a posthumous degree).
From 1913 to 1917, his family lived in the house at 77 Jefferson Ave., now known as the Thurber House.
In 1920, he was hired at The Dispatch, much to the chagrin of hard-bitten city editor Norman “Gus” Kuehner, who had worked his way up from copy boy without the benefit of a college education, and his reaction to Thurber’s hire was, “Geez, another college grad.”
Kuehner rode the young reporter hard, according to Bob Hunter, a former Dispatch columnist who wrote the book “Thurberville” in 2017.
“Kuehner hated Thurber’s stuff because it was so flowery,” Hunter said. “He would read something Thurber wrote, tear it down the middle, drop it in the garbage and say, `I don’t like this stuff.’”
If that sounds ironic, considering Thurber later won a Caldecott Medal and a Tony Award for his writing, it came down to a difference between oldschool newspaper journalism and a writer who loved words and crafting every sentence.
“All the people who worked with Thurber in that period said he wasn’t suited for the newspaper business,” Hunter said. “He was a really good writer, but he was wordy and sensitive.”
Still, Thurber was given some plum assignments in his Dispatch career, including writing a front-page story about the first football game played at Ohio Stadium in 1922.
It is clear from reading Thurber’s report how much he was caught up in the emotions of the moment, in the historic opening of the massive, 65,000-seat stadium.
“For there had come and gone before the eyes of unprecedented thousands a brilliant pageant,” he wrote, “filled with tumult and shouting, the music of bands and the light of changing colors, the fire of new enthusiasm and the fever of an epic in the making, which has not been before and cannot quite ever be again.”
William Ireland was born in 1880 in Chillicothe, and his talents got him a job at The Dispatch in 1898 just after graduating from high school.
By 1908, he was given his signature full-page canvas on Sundays, called, “The Passing Show.” It featured multiple panels (up to 12) that were a mix of humor, political commentary and often, social or moral statements.
Lucy Shelton Caswell is a former professor at Ohio State, author of the book “Billy Ireland” and founding curator of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum. She said when she did the first edition of the book in 1980 (another edition was published in 2007), she spoke to people who remembered Ireland’s Sunday staple.
“They told me, `Oh yeah, we used to wait and see what Billy had to say on Sunday,’ because to be featured in `The Passing Show’ was hot stuff.”
He used the platform to advocate for raising money to build Ohio Stadium,
for example. He also would use it to ridicule the Ku Klux Klan, which at the time operated openly in Columbus.
Thurber thought so much of Ireland that he wrote a chapter about him titled “Boy from Chillicothe” in his 1952 book, “The Thurber Album.”
“Thurber wrote that Billy laughed the Klan out of existence in the 1920s,” Caswell
said. “This was courageous of him; he was standing for the values that he believed in the place he wanted to live.”
Indeed, Caswell said Ireland’s talents attracted job offers from around the country. Rumor had it, she said, that famed publisher William Randolph Hearst offered to build a color printing press in Columbus if Ireland agreed to syndicate his work nationally.
Ireland turned them all down, preferring to be a bigger fish in a smaller pond. He worked at The Dispatch until he died of a heart attack at age 55 in 1935.
“He always said he wanted to be able to get home to Chillicothe easily,” Caswell said. “I think he really felt like he was in a place where he could make a difference.”
By the 1970s, the Thurber house was in disrepair, and an alliance of city institutions (including The Dispatch and Ohio State) rallied to restore it.
It opened in 1984, and since has hosted literary talks, book and poetry readings, author visits, and starting in 1997, it has sponsored the Thurber Prize for American Humor (won by Jon Stewart, David Sedaris, and Trevor Noah, among others).
Thurber House Executive Director Laurie Lathan said she realizes that younger people may not have heard of Thurber, who died in 1961. She said her staff is currently brainstorming for a “rebranding,” in a way that might raise awareness of this Columbus native among young people.
“In 2021, during this pandemic, we need humor now more than ever,” Lathan said. “So during this time, we’re focusing on the humor aspect of Thurber. Hopefully we’ll find something that will resonate and help a younger generation cultivate a love of reading and writing.”
Thurber often returned to his hometown to visit family, and some of his better-known stories are set here, most notably, “The Night the Ghost Got In” (which took place in 1915 in the Thurber House) and “The Day the Dam Broke” about East Side residents panicking and fleeing an imaginary dam breaking during the Flood of 1913 (which inundated the West Side but spared the East).
The library and museum now named for Ireland was founded in 1977, but was housed in the basement of Mershon Auditorium and not very visible. That changed in 2009, when a $7 million donation from the Elizabeth Ireland Graves Foundation spurred a $21 million renovation and move to its current home in Sullivant Hall.
It has become a renowned center not just for cartoon art, but for comic books, manga, and graphic novels. It also made the city a hub for the genre.
In 2015, Caswell, along with Columbus cartoon artist Jeff Smith (author of the “Bone” series) and Smith’s wife, Vijaya Iyer, started the Cartoon Crossroads Festival in Columbus.
As impressive as that legacy may be, Caswell has a different take on Ireland’s imprint here. One of the causes his cartoons championed was environmentalism, which was not a mainstream movement in the 1920s and `30s.
He campaigned for cleaning up the Scioto River and its banks, which were blighted by industry.
Seventy-five years after Ireland’s death, in 2010, the city started on a fiveyear project, the Scioto Mile, which yielded today’s 175-acre greenspace, including eight parks, along the river Downtown.
“He worked with city leaders for many years to clean up that shore, and it was a hard slog,” Caswell said. “I smile every time I go by there and see people sitting in the swings. He would be thrilled now to see that gorgeous park area.” kgordon@dispatch.com @kgdispatch