Swing (Feb-Dec 1951)

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CAPERS BY CAPP 391 scarce. To put in the time, Capp started sketching the surrounding landscape. A strange, young, hillbilly came plodding along the road. "Whatcha — a — a — doin?" he asked. "Embalming this landscape for posterity," replied Capp. "That don't make sense," said the hillbilly. Capp looked at the sketch. 'T be lieve you're right," he agreed. "FU tell you what. If you'll pose for a sketch, I'll give you one." "Sounds like foolishness to me," said the Kentuckian. "But — all right." Capp finished the drawing, handed it to the hillbilly, who disgustingly remarked, "It don't look nothin' like me." Which was true. What Capp had done was substitute his own face and his own abundant crop of hair which he lets grow long, and used the body of the hillbilly. "The body part is all right," drawled the youth, "but the rest is just plain ugly." He refused the sketch; Capp kept it. CAPP returned north, to resume the training which was to lead him into profitable fields. After high school, he got a job in a gasoline station. Now 18, he definitely did something about his longing for studying art. He enrolled at The Academy of Fine Arts, The Designer's Art School, The Philadelphia Museum of Fine Arts, and Boston University, in quick succession. Capp earned money to pay registration fees by doing odd jobs. "I stalled off paying tuition as long as I could," he relates, "until the bursar's patience was exhausted. Then I'd be forced to leave, and repeat the process at another school." The temptation to follow classicism was great. Finally, Capp, with a port' folio of sketches and railroad fare, quit the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and boarded a train for New York. He arrived in Grand Central Station with exactly $6 in his pock' ets. He got a job with United Press, doing all sorts of menial jobs, which meant everything from wiping the big boys' pens dry, to running out for their sandwiches and coffee. Twenty-one-year-old Capp was almost resolved that he was doomed to failure. Catherine Wingate Cameron, a classmate in Boston, encouraged him. He married her in 1929, stayed in Boston, where they went broke together. Shortly after being married, he and his wife went back to New York, where Al had an interview with Wilson Hicks, then editor of the Asso' ciated Press Feature Service. Hicks needed someone to take over Mr. Gil' feather, an already established cartoon strip. Hicks hired Capp, who thereby became the nation's youngest cartoon' ist. Capp was not a success. "The strip was so awful," says Capp, "I couldn't even stand it my self." Capp, however, lasted nine months. There is some conjecture as to whether he was fired or quit. Back he went to the Museum School of Fine Arts, in Boston, for more study. He earned coffee and cakes by doing illustrations for the Boston Sunday Post and various magazines and news