I had never heard of a cartoonist named Bo Brown. But when I came across some of his original pen drawings among some papers I picked up at one of my auctions, I knew I had something good. The cartoonist’s name and address were stamped in red on each of the 25 or so loose white pages, which are undated. He lived in Jenkintown, PA.
The edges on most of the 8 1/2 X 11 pages were torn and folded, but the drawings and text were clean. So, like the journalist that I am, I Googled Bo Brown. This is what I found in Wikipedia and other sources:
Robert F. “Bo” Brown’s cartoons appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, the New Yorker and about 600 other local, regional and national publications. He created a syndicated cartoon strip called “Such Is Life” in 1936. He received the National Cartoonist Society’s Gag Cartoon Award for 1981. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1928.
He was a student in the university’s law school in 1930 when he sold two cartoons to the Saturday Evening Post, and did so well that he took a leave from Penn to pursue cartooning. With the help of his wife Marge, he sold more than 30,000 cartoons over his career.
He also created the cartoon character Professor Quagmire that ran from 1946-1971 in the Pennsylvania Gazette, the alumni magazine for the university. Here’s an article about the cartoon. Brown died at the age of 90 in August 1996. He had met his last deadline two weeks before.
Read what Brown has to say about his life as a cartoonist (click his name).
