Leapin’ Lizards! Depressing news today-the sun will not come out tomorrow for Little Orphan Annie. Actually June 13th will be her last newspaper strip and the curly red-haired girl’s future in any other media is uncertain, though we hope for the best. Below is an unpublished piece of original art from my collection by Annie’s papa, Harold Gray. And below, too, is an interesting 1970 essay by Lil Abner’s Al Capp on Little Annie’s Harold Gray. Both cartoonists had a decidedly conservative bent.

I love how Capp says Gray told him to buy a house in the country and build a wall around it “to fight off bums.”. When I first settled in New York it was up in the “sticks” in Westchester County and my house was a half a block from a solid stone home Gray had owned with TWO GIANT stone walls around the whole estate!

Gray said, “Annie is tougher than hell with a heart of gold and a fast left, who can take care of herself because she has to. She’s controversial, there’s no question about that. But I keep her on the side of motherhood, honesty, and decency.” Annie won’t be around to fight with heart for those virtues any longer. Annie the little orphan beat the Great Depression, World War II and hippies and bums but she couldn’t lick the dying of newspapers and newspaper comic strips. We all stare out blankly, just like Annie with her pupil-challenged eyes, in sad disbelief…

AL CAPP ON HAROLD GRAY AND LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE:

I met Harold Gray for the first—and only—time over 30 years ago. He was, even then, a legend. I was but a rumor that had just gotten started.

He said: “I know your stuff, Capp. You’re going to be around a long time. Take my advice and buy a house in the country. Build a wall around it. And get ready to protect yourself. The way things are going, people who earn their living someday are going to have to fight off the bums.”

I remember that I was shocked, and a bit amused at his words. But not surprised. Gray was known to us liberal young snots (and to those who had passed snothood but felt young, and were lauded as liberals, because they went on thinking as snottily as we did) as a bitter old man. He was, then, in his fifties. I was, then, nearing thirty. I am ten years older today than Gray was then. I knew we had nothing to fear from the “bums.” I had been on the bum myself. In the thirties, there weren’t many chances for anyone to earn a living, and almost none for a kid with one leg. When a chance did come along, I grabbed it, and held on for dear life. I knew that bums were eager not to be bums, and that, far from imperiling those who wanted to earn a living, they were eager to join them.

But bums have changed. And my attitude toward Harold Gray has changed.

I bought a house in the country, as he advised me to. I didn’t build a wall around it.

In the last five years, it has been broken into, several times. I live on a pleasant, historic street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There have been two attempts to rob it in the last few years, one attempt at rape in our garage. One car was stolen from our garage. Most of the homes on my street have been broken into during the last few years. One, four times.

There have been in the last few years, murders, muggings, and molestings in our neighborhood. It is no longer safe to walk on my street after dark.

There are four people employed in my studio, in mid-town Boston. This year, two have been mugged.I have made no “preparation” to defend myself, as Gray advised. I rely on the authorities for that, like everyone else. And, like everyone else, I don’t go out much.

It has taken me thirty years to realize what a superior understanding of our even-then developing ruling class, the bums, Gray had. They aren’t the unemployed or the rejected, as we liberal young snots thought.

Read your front page this morning. It will be full of the crimes they committed last night. Crimes which required health, strength, and energy. Then turn to the back pages and read about the jobs they scorn, under “Help Wanted. No Experience Necessary.”

If it’s an average day, you will find that for every one who sticks up a cabdriver, snatches a purse, or robs a candy store, there are two jobs waiting.

Every day, today, hundreds of thousands of us are taking Harold Gray’s advice. We are fleeing from our cities, buying homes in the country, and preparing to protect ourselves.

Harold Gray was a sharper observer of American trends, a truer prophet of America’s future than Walter Lippmann.

He created characters that have endured longer than Upton Sinclair’s. He drew better pictures, in his seventies, than Picasso did.

If he was that good, you may ask, why wasn’t HE a political pundit, a revered novelist, or a master of modern art, as they were—instead of a cartoonist?

The answer is he WAS all that, as a cartoonist.

And more.

Because more of the world was affected by his political prophecy, transfixed by his story-telling, and compelled by his art than all the Lippmanns, Sinclairs, and Picassos who were his contemporaries.

If Gray’s attitudes were old-fashioned in his time, so too, then, are personal dignity, manners, and respect for law today. And now ask yourself this: Can any new society be built without those attitudes?

-Al Capp

Bonus: In 1998 I commission Irwin Hasen, the Dondi artist and Tex Blaisdell, the then Annie artist to do the above drawing for my book “Weird But True Toon Factoids”. It was based on something I think I read in Mad magazine to the effect that between them Dondi and Little Orphan Annie could have one good eye. .-)

-C. Yoe (in the funny papers!)