Editorial cartooning ‘took Wing’ with Illinoisan

Bill Knight column for 1-24, 25 or 26, 2019

An Elmwood, Ill., native remembered as a student prone to daydreaming and doodling went on to be a prominent newspaper cartoonist who also helped “Peanuts” creator Charles Schulz get started.

Frank Wing, who died 63 years ago this week, attended local schools where “he was regarded as one of the most unpromising members of the class,” reported the late historian Bill Adams. Teachers “said he did nothing but draw pictures.”

Indeed, Wing couldn’t seem to stop. While a youth, he sang with a church choir, and surviving Congregational hymnals featured Wing’s drawings.

After attending Grinnell College in Iowa, Wing taught at a rural school, and then began contributing to Peoria’s two daily newspapers. At the age of 26, Wing was hired as a cartoonist at the Journal in Minneapolis, where he lived the rest of his life.

There, at various Twin Cities newspapers, Wing was a staff artist drawing nostalgic cartoons titled “Yesterdays” from 1911 to 1947, plus illustrations of news events, and feature art accompanying stories.

“Wing’s crude, powerful and off-time cruel slice-o’-life comic ‘Yesterdays’ originated in the Minneapolis Journal about 1910,” wrote illustrator John Adcock in “Yesterday’s Papers.”

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune remembered Wing fondly.

“Frequently, he took his sketchpad into courtrooms to record trials, to public places, conventions and dinner meetings to catch the faces and character of people in all kinds of moods and poses. Always he treated his subjects with kindly humor and insight.”

Wing also syndicated his illustrations nationwide through the Chicago Tribune and Des Moines Register & Tribune, and he authored several books. including “Fotygraft Album” (1915), “Old 40 Dollars” (1916),” “Amiable Libels” (1916), “The Fambly Album” (1917),  and an anthology of his “Yesterdays” feature also titled “Yesterdays” (named one of the 100 best books of 1932 by writer William Lyon Phelps).

“Fotygraft Album” sold more than 100,000 copies and was praised by the likes of legendary newspapermen William Allen White and H.L. Mencken.

“Frank Wing has made a joyous piece of humor out of the old family photograph album,” White wrote, “and [he] has done it with loving and tender hands, and with the glad heart that shows in a merry countenance.”

Mencken said Wing’s art was “one of the keenest and most penetrating pieces of humor ever. What stupendous power of caricature, what sure and delicate touches ... exact and infallible humor.”

Outside the newsroom, Wing during the Great Depression became an instructor at Minneapolis’ Federal School, a correspondence program. According to “Charles M. Schulz: Li’l Beginnings,” by Derrick Bang, St. Paul native Schulz in 1941 took courses from Wing (who gave Schulz a C-plus in “Drawing of Children”).

Schulz took other classes there, and then was drafted during World War II. After the war, Schulz also became a teacher there, too, and he and Wing became friends. As Schulz’s mentor, Wing in the late 1940s encouraged Schulz to develop his child characters (which led first to “Li’l Folks,” and then “Peanuts”).

Described by one editor as “the man with the photographic pen,” Wing also became the first person to create a picture from a transmission sent by wire. The occasion was heavyweight boxing champion Gene Tunney’s 1925 bout with Minneapolis’ native Tommy Gibbons, and after Tunney’s 12th-round knockout of the challenger, an image of vertical and horizontal lines was telegraphed to Wing, who from the crude original assembled an illustration. Newspaper readers were stunned that a Twin Cities paper could carry a photo of something that happened the night before in New York.

Described by the Minneapolis Morning Tribune as “one of the most beloved figures in local newspaper history,” Wing entertained generations of readers when he died at the age of 81.

“With much insight and affection, cartoonist Frank Wing poked gentle fun at yesterday’s follies as much as reminding readers of its virtues,” the Star-Tribune said. “Frank Wing was our link with a less harried, more contemplative, more settled, more self-satisfied past. Even a youngster could sense the mood and appreciate the humor of Frank Wing’s pictorial reminiscences.”

Wing and his wife Armina, who died in 1961, are buried in his hometown.