Word: websters
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Right to Left. H. T. Webster insists that Milquetoast is a self-portrait. Short of perhaps Joseph Stalin, it would be difficult to think of any man who looks less like Milquetoast than his creator. Webster carries all of his 6 ft. 3 in. without either the cringing or the exaggerated erectness of the man who is uneasy in this world. His face is handsome, ruddy and unlined, his blue eyes are direct and uncomplicated...
...Happy Boyhood. As any reader of The Thrill That Comes Once in a Lifetime might guess, H. T. Webster had a happy boyhood. He spent it in Tomahawk, Wis. (pop. 3,365) where his dad ran the drugstore. Tomahawk (the way Webster remembers it) was a little town afloat in a forest where deer and small game were plentiful, the lakes and streams were stiff with fish, you could run onto the tracks of bear often enough almost to believe you had seen them and killed them, and school was no more interesting than it is in most other places...
From seven on, he liked to draw. He was not an artist; he was a cartoonist from the start. He liked best to draw Weary Willie tramps with baggy clothes so "you could conceal your lack of knowledge of anatomy." By the time he was 15 or so, Webster subscribed to a mail-order cartooning course, and was the only student to finish the course - the school folded shortly afterwards. That was the end of his formal training...
...crowded the banks, in a friendly way, "to watch us drown." The Chinese also liked to line up, at a courteous distance, to watch the foreigners handle knives & forks. One suppertime a missionary's wife, annoyed at their staring, slung a glass of water in their faces. Webster, a gentle man, still colors up when he remembers it: "I had to control myself as hard as I ever did in my life, not to give her a piece of my mind." The round-the-world trip ended in New York, and Webster ended - in time - on that Parnassus...
Since then he has worked for the Herald Tribune, and through the Tribune Syndicate his daily cartoons are published in some 60 papers, his Sunday Milquetoast strip in 20. Their combined circulation is around ten million,, not counting uncountable" millions who read their papers at second hand. Webster's probable income: about $80,000 a year...