Hey everybody. Tracy here with news about some live appearances we have coming up. Saturday July seven, I will be at History Camp Boston where I will be part of the History Podcaster panel. And then the next day, Sunday, July eight, at two pm, Holly and I both will be doing a live podcast at Adams National Historical Park in Quincy, Massachusetts, where our show will be John Quincy and Luisa Catherine Adams Abroad. This is an outdoor show and it will happen rain or shine, and we're coming back to Convention Days in Seneca Falls, New York. Our show is at four pm on Saturday, July twenty one in the historic Wesleyan Chapel. You can get more information about all of these shows with links to buy tickets where applicable at missed in History dot Com. Click on live shows in the menu. Welcome to steph you missed in History class from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and today we're starting a two parter, so heads up this one. We'll take two episodes. We're going to talk about a person who has been on my list for almost exact amount of time that Tracy and I have been on the show. He got on my list almost immediately, uh, and I just never got around to impartially because I knew he was going to take a couple episodes for me to feel like we've covered enough of his life, even so, I think we could have done more. But lately he has been on my mind a lot because of the work I have been doing on our other podcast, Drawn, which is about animation, because he influenced so much of the media that we consume in the century, including work by people like Maury Sendec and Walt Disney. And as I was doing interviews for Drawn, that show is very interview heavy. Every time name windsor McKay's name came up, the people that I was speaking with universally lauded his incredible skill and drive within the animation industry. He's really regarded as not just an icon, but almost in um you know, like saintly guys. He's really really admired. Uh. And whether you have heard of him before or not, if you have watched any animation made in the US after nineteen or frankly, if you have ever read a comic strip you have benefited to some degree from his influence. McKay was born Zenus Windsor Mackay on September twenty six, although the year and the place of his birth are not consistently reported. Depending on where you look, you might see his place of birth reported as Ontario, Canada or Spring Like Michigan. His parents married in West Zora, Ontario, in eighteen sixty six, and they moved to Michigan not long after that. So the year that comes up in connection to Canada is eighteen sixty seven, and for Michigan it's eighteen seventy or seven anyone. And there are no records that have been found to support any of this. Yeah, the records in Spring Like Michigan, their records office had a fire, so there's not much there, and there was never anything found in Ontario. And even though they were living in Michigan already, there has been speculation that his mother may have wanted to travel home to be with her family when she had her baby. So we just don't know. His age is going to come up again later. The legend of Windsor start as an artist is actually tied to a little bit of a family tragedy. Allegedly, one night, the mackay family home burned to the ground and Windsor, once he was safely settled at a neighbor's house, used a nail that he had found to etch an image of the house on fire on a frosted window pane, and that was the beginning of his drawing obsession, something which McKay would later say he did exclusively to please himself rather than anyone else who might look at his work. While he may have only wanted to make himself happy with his drawings, he was also never really attached to any of them. That's probably served him really well later on as a cartoonist and an animator. He once wrote quote, I never saved my drawings. I would give them away if anybody wanted them, or would throw them away. I do want fences, blackboards in school, old scraps of paper, slates, sides of barns. I just couldn't stop. He later said that his drawing was only about fifteen percent talent and about eighty five hard work. Yeah, if you subscribe to the practice makes perfect ideology. He was constantly practicing, so from the time he was really really young. So it is a little bit hard to discern what was his just natural talent versus what was his constant flexing of those muscles. And even from a very young age, Mackay was aware of the importance of observation for an artist. He made a point to really look at the world around him and try to remember as much detail as he could so that he could easily recall realistic images when he was drawing, and this method served him incredibly well. Even as a young child. People noted how accurate his drawings were in terms of perspective and proportion. He just almost always got it exactly right, and he was just doing so from memory, without a subject or a model in front of him. In his father didn't see a future for winds Or in art, and he later expressed some regret for not having sent him to art school. Instead. His parents sent him to business college, but business school did not really hold his interest. Instead, he would take a train from Ipsilante, where the school was, to Detroit and he would draw pictures for money in a curiosity museum called Wonderland. It's one of those museums full of wax figures and taxidermy and a cyclorama and a menagerie. He drew pictures of museum visitors and sold them for a quarter, and then he split his take with the museum fifty fifty. He never finished business school, but his classmates were impressed with his steady flow of cash and it's exciting life that he seemed to be living, traveling as an artist while also skipping school. Yeah he uh. At one point said this really fun thing about how the best way to sell a drawing of someone was to make it really flattering. So, especially when women or girls were in the museum and wanted to have their picture drawn, he would draw them looking like themselves, but like a prettier version of themselves, and those ones always solved, which, of course I mean flattery of the subject has been working for artists for a long time. But while he was in Ipsilanti, McKay did get a bit of an art education, though certainly not through the business school and not quite in a formal way. Instead, an art professor at Michigan State Normal named John Goodison offered to give the young artist private lessons. It was becoming really apparent that while Windsor McKay's parents might not have wanted their fun to pursue a career in art. A career in art really seemed like a foregone conclusion. McKay had a reputation enough that he attracted the interest of a professor from a local college to offer to educate him. So like this, this was not something that he was going to walk away from, and he was really eager to learn anything and everything that Goodison taught him, from art history to technique in his own work, and his art teacher was convinced that Windsor had a great career ahead of him. The lessons in perspective and composition that Goodison taught the young artist informed his work for the rest of his life. And it was also during this time with Goodison that McKay started doing really fast sketch work from memory on blackboards and that skill. Keep it in mind, because it eventually proved very lucrative. But in the more immediate sense, McKay's work with Goodison made one thing really clear. He could not bear the thought of a business career. Art was the only path that he was willing to walk, So with Goodison's encouragement, he left Ipsilante and moved to Chicago to study at the Art Institute but this is one of those areas of his life, and there are a number of them where the actual events that took place are real fuzzy. McKay never actually enrolled in school, though what exactly stopped him is a little bit unclear. Instead, he started working at National Printing and Engraving Company, which made commercial advertising posters and pamphlets, and at that point he lived in a boarding house with another young artist, Jules Garrion, and the two of them sort of traded knowledge. They both excelled in different areas of art, and they really shared their knowledge with one another. Those two also became freemasons together during this time, and McKay stayed a freemason for the rest of his life. McKay didn't stay in Chicago for long though, After two years he moved on to Cincinnati, but it's not clear why. So when he talked about himself, he liked to make it interesting, and as friends also tended to embellish things a lot when they talked about him. So a lot of McKay's life is clouded by these different versions of the story, and a lot of times not a lot of records to back that up, so it can be hard to unravel truth and half truth when trying to get to the details of his life. Yeah, particularly this early part before he was kind of a household name. McKay might have followed a job offered to Cincinnati. Uh, he was smart enough to know that he really kind of needed a little bit of a plan going into a new thing. But there is also a fun apocryphal story that in fact he was working for a traveling circus as a signmaker and that that's how he ended up in Cincinnati. We don't know if there's any truth to that either, but in any case, he ended up at another dime museum similar to the Wonderland that he had worked at in Detroit, most likely hired based on the growing reputation of his work. He wasn't making sketches for patrons this time around, but he was making posters and signs for the museum itself as a regular employee. And it was while he was working in the dime Museum that mckayson edison Vitoscope moving picture for the first time. In addition to his museum work, McKay also took jobs painting billboards and large street advertisements. This also became his first performance work. As an artist. One of the incredible skills that he possessed was the ability to draw a figure in its entirety in one single stroke. So as you can imagine, a man drawing figures eight to ten feet tall out in public in this incredible way would draw a crowd. People were awed by his skill, and stories of the man who painted these huge, lifelike drawings with no reference out on the streets of Cincinnati started to spread. Yeah, he would do this big sketch initially and then he would paint it in And he was also a small of stature person, so it really lent this extra drama to the situation. Like a guy who was only five feet drawing someone eight to ten ft in one single long line was just astonishing. And so it kind of got to the point where if he went out with his supplies to start on a billboard or assign a crowd would just gather to watch. Uh. And coming up, we're going to talk about some unique artistic endeavors that McKay was part of in Cincinnati. But first we're gonna pause for a little sponsor break. So McKay also, in addition to kind of becoming an accidental street performer. While he was painting, participated in a couple of more planned performance art pieces in Cincinnati that were conceptualized by his employer on his billboard work, Philip Morton. For one of these, they staged a battle from the Spanish American War on barges out in the river, but onlooker started stoning the barge representing the Spanish on which both McKay and Morton were serving as actors, and both of the men were injured. There are stories of them getting back to shore with like cuts on their faces and arms from having rocks and garbage thrown at them. A tugboat eventually had to be signaled to pull the barge that McKay was on off of a collision course with the bridge. Like the whole performance art piece really went south. But while he was certainly becoming a well known figure and a producer of art in Cincinnati, perhaps the most important thing that happens to McKay while living there was meeting maud Lenore dufour after just seeing her walk into the museum with her older sister Josephine one day while he was working, McKay is said to have rushed up to his office to change out of his painter's garb and into a nice suit so that he could go up to this young woman who had captivated him from the first time that he saw her licking his absolute best. Yeah, he was a snappy dresser, So he had his suit upstairs and had changed into something a little grubbier to do work with his paint and art supplies, and so he wanted to go back to his fancy ensomb before he met this young lady. And Windsor and Maud hit it off, and they began dating immediately, And it was really quite shortly after their courtship began that they rode to Covington, Kentucky to get married before a Justice of the peace in an elopement. This gets a little weird here because Maud was a full decade younger than Windsor. She was only fourteen at the time and he was twenty four. So while it initially sounds very romantic sounding by today's standards, it's kind of scandalous and even a little bit icky to think about. But to further compound confusion over the age gap, it appears that Windsor Mackay, who was already known to lie about his age, had lost track of his real date of birth entirely. Uh, he may not have realized just how far apart they were in years, or another theory is that he fudged it even more to make the difference in their ages a little less scandalous. Yeah, people did get married a little younger on average then, but still in the eighteen nineties, the the median age for women was more like twenty two. Not yeah, I mean, I certainly like I look back on some old family records and there are certainly people that got married at at fifteen and sixteen, but it was not that was still really young. So while McKay had seemed really eager to marry Maud, he did have some ambivalence about actually being a husband. So as a young man, he had spent his young adult years doing whatever he wanted and pursuing his art above everything else, so being a responsible family man felt confining, especially because Maud's mother also lived with them at the same time. Though the couple stayed together and maybe to hang on to a sense of freedom, McKay moved the family from home to home, and the first twelve years of their marriage, the McKay's had ten different addresses. Yeah, there's a lot of uh theorization and discussion when you look at biographies of him that he was a little bit unhappy with this arrangement just in terms of being married, and it wasn't always smooth sailing. But at the same time, any of the letters or notes that he wrote to his wife and his family were very loving, and he was generally believed to have been really quite dedicated, but he still had that part of him that just yearned to be out on his own and able to do whatever he wanted. Maud and Windsor welcome his son Robert on June one. The McKay's had been married for five years at that point, and their surprise, they got pregnant again almost immediately. They had a daughter, Mary and Elizabeth on August. And throughout all of this the artist continued in his jobs at the museum and the billboard company. Eventually McKay got into newspaperwork, largely because the papers that sold ads for the Dime Museum didn't have any artists on hand who were willing to draw the bizarre artwork that was needed for these ads, so McKay was asked to do the art himself. He learned an entirely new skill set to do so. While he was talented and accomplished as an artist, the tools of the trade and the parameters of work were a lot different when a piece of art was going to be printed in a paper versus being printed as a poster. So he had to learn how to draw his art for a larger size to be reduced for the paper, and to pay really careful attention so that his lines and the image wouldn't just be a mess when they were reduced down for the paper. Yeah, there were also just different supplies involved that he had to get used to using. But McKay, always a quick and eager learner, impressed the leadership of the Commercial Tribune, which was the paper that had asked him to do this, so much so that they offered him a full time job. And at that point, he had been at the Dime Museum for eight years and he was kind of reluctant to leave. He felt the loyalty to them, But thankfully, when he discussed it with his boss, his boss encouraged him to take that new job, but no hard feeling in the mix because it was going to be a move up and he had a family to look after, and the Tribune wanted McKay to work as an artist reporter, illustrating stories and drawing cartoons. If you look at McKay's work from this time as an illustrator, it's really astonishing. He was able to capture moments for these stories with almost the same level of detail that you would see in a photograph. In crowd scenes like capturing parades, the details on all the buildings are very carefully rendered, and the people in the crowd are drawn in a lot of detail, right to the point that it would be impossible to put any more detail into the images. Receding perspective. Yeah, there's one in particular where there's a crowd of people watching a parade, and he even draws all of the hats on the people until it's just like the point where they would be thoughts, Like, everything is really really detailed, and his sense of perspective that he had learned under Goodison was serving him so beautifully because they looked peccable in terms of how they were laid out. And McKay also started working as a freelancer for the humorist magazine Life during this time. As we go on, you will hear over and over that he almost always had multiple jobs. Life was a satirical magazine with spectacular art, and McKay was actually a fan of many of their regular artists. Heads up, just in case this peaks anyone's interest and you want to go looking for work from this magazine. There is a lot of racist humor in it, including some of McKay's work. Many of McKay's cartoons during this time focused on the relationship between the US and the Philippines, which the US had gained control over with the signing of the Treaty of Paris. In a larger paycheck lured mackay away from the Commercial Tribune to the Cincinnati Enquirer in nineteen hundred, and he quickly rose to be head of the art department. He drew hundreds of cartoons for the paper and the three years that he worked there. Among the most significant were his illustrations for a series called A Tale of the Jungle Imps by Felix Fiddle On that byline is part of the title. The series depicts animals deciding to change their physicalities to try to outwit three impish children of the jungle who are taunting them. For example, and one of them the imps, tickle a giraffe's nose until the giraffe sneezes, So then the giraffe has a group of skilled monkeys make him a longer neck, so when the imps approached him, he picks one up by the hair shakes it flings him around to teach him a lesson. The Jungle Imps series ran for most of the three calendar year and was immensely popular. Yeah, these were based on ratings by someone else, but they basically explain evolution in a really bizarre way, where animals consciously make the decisions to evolve so that they could stop being teased by these children. But by the time the last of that series was publishing, McKay had actually already moved on to another job. In h three, McKay started working at the New York Herald as a cartoonist, so similar to his previous job move, he turned to his boss for advice when the Herald had made him this offer, and his editor at the Cincinnati Inquirer told him that to take the position if the Harold would agree to pay for his move to New York, which it did. So this move was something of a shock for the family. They had had this lovely house in Cincinnati, but then when they moved to New York, they first had to stay in a hotel, but they wanted a house like they had had before. And eventually, after feeling overwhelmed by the options in the city, particularly Maud, she did not really love their options for living in Manhattan, they moved into a home in Sheep's Head Bay, Brooklyn. Starting in November of three, McKay started churning out illustrations for the New York Harold and the Evening Telegram, which was also owned by The Heralds publisher James Gordon Bennett Jr. His work ranged from the political to social commentary to unique illustrations depicting like a horse show that he covered as a journalist. Instead of just making straight drawings of these horses, he drew them from unusual angles, so he created a really stylized look to the story. The idea of the comic strip was just getting legs in the US at this point, influenced in part by previous podcast subject Rodolph top Fur, and McKay was quick to start experimenting with it. He wanted, like many artists of the time to secure a regular syndicated strip, and he wanted the income and notoriety that would come with it. This is kind of a time when being a popular cartoonist was kind of like being a famous actor today. The newspaper industry had been in steep competition to lure readers with comics, and McKay stepped into the New York scene just as this was starting to hit its fever pitch. For the first half of nineteen o four, When's They're tried out a number of comics, including Mr Goodenough, who was about a wealthy gent who decided to be more energetic and lively in his life, but his efforts to do it always end in disaster. Another was Furious Finish of Foolish Philip's Funny Frolics. All those fs are really phs. They featured two clowns and a show girl, harkening back to the Museum and the circus art that he had done earlier in his career, and Windsor McKay was just about to hit his stride as a cartoonist. But before we get into the details of his early successes in that medium, we're gonna pause for a little sponsor break, so while McKay had started trying some things, but they didn't quite catch on. Starting in mid nineteen o four, he created two comic strips for the paper that became very successful. The first was Little Sammy Sneeze Starting, a little boy who, over the course of five frames in each installment, had a sneeze build up in a situation where sneezing would be inconvenient or inappropriate. The six panel would always feature the unfortunate aftermath of the sneeze that Sammy just couldn't suppress. The title of the comic was framed on either side every week with the phrases he just simply couldn't stop it, and he never knew it was coming. Sammy and his Sneezing Problem debuted on July. Sammy's Adventures evidenced a certain level of darkness in McKay's comedic sensibilities, and one strip, Sammy is visiting the country and watching a farmhand milk a cow as the sneeze starts building up. When it finally lets loose, the cow bolts, kicking the man that's milking her, and then the man kicks Sammy in the rump. I feel like this goes back to some of Rudolph toppers. Yes, spankings, Yes, like the cycle of violence that just continues from one character to another. Yeah, and another of them. Sammy is riding in a crowded trolley with his mother, and as the sneeze builds up, the passengers or gossiping and reading their papers, his sneeze sends the whole car into complete chaos, with hats flying off of people a dog escaping from its owner. The last panel is simply as mother leading Sammy away and saying I shall never take you with me again. Yeah it's uh. It struck me as really somber and sad. Uh. The second strip that McKay created in nineteen o four was Dream of the rare Bit Fiend. So rare Bit, also some sometimes called Welsh Rabbit, is a dish that in fact contains no rabbit at all, but it is a rich cheese based sauce that served over toast. It's sometimes a little bit spicy, it's always very very rich. And because it has long been a popular wives tale that rich food causes strange dreams, the entire concept of this comic was that it depicted the dreams of someone who absolutely loved the dish and ate it before bedtime. So in one strip, a man dreams that he begins to grow antlers, and he is initially dismayed and his concern grows. His wife and baby and even pets also start to grow antlers. But just as he starts to become comfortable with the idea, there's a moment where he's looking at nature and he's like, no, nature is beautiful, antlers are great. Uh. He is awakened from this nap, And in another the main character is dreaming that he's a sketched fashion model, but that the artist keeps smudging the drawing and leaving ink blurs on him. And as he continues to complain about the pen and ink artist creating him, he becomes slowly engulfed by smears and blotches of ink, and the character becomes convinced that he will be torn up and thrown on a fire. And the final panel is the dreamer awakening and swearing that he will never eat rere bit again. I will tell you this if you ever watched a lot of Looney Tunes. This makes me wonder if this was not a direct inspiration for UH that cartoon Duck a muck where Daffy Duck is yelling at the animator and he gets drawn into all kinds of crazy situations because it it vibes very similarly, McKay actually had to sign a different name to these rarebit strips. He could use his own name, because his editor wanted to keep this child oriented art of sneezing Sammy separate from the Rabbit comedy, which was aimed at an adult audience. McKay was really irritated by this requirement, so he started to sign the name Silas on the rabbit strips, which was the name of the trash collector and Harold Square, where the newspaper offices were. They also asked readers to send in their own dreams in the paper for inclusion into the strip. Yeah, it was definitely ah. I like that. He was like, fine, I'll use the garbage man's name. It wasn't like he wanted to honor the garbage man. He just wanted to kind of stick it to his editor in a weird way. But he used the name Silas as his secondary moniker forever after that, and even as McKay was producing Sammy Sneeze in the rare bit fiend on a regular schedule. He was also still fulfuit fulfilling his other duties at the paper as an illustrator. He also continued to test out new strips. He started one called The Story of Hungry Henrietta in January nineteen o five, and it featured a little girl that began as a three month old infant and then showed her growing up over the strips six month run. It provided a commentary on parenting, as Henrietta's parents always gave her food instead of affection when she appeared upset, and the main character, Henrietta, became a compulsive eater, and all that work started to grind on him. He was making sixty dollars a week and he loved working at the Herald, but McKay also knew that he deserved more. In nineteen o five, he wrote a very direct letter to his boss outlining the breakdown of his work each week and the quality of that work, and pointing out that the artists at other publications were giving were given much longer lead times for their work, and they were assigned fewer things, and they were making twice what he made. The letter came back with the letters okay in the top right and a silly drawing which would annoy me. But mackay got his race. He was bumped up with seventy five dollars a week, and later on he would negotiate more than double that when his contract was renewed based on the ongoing success of uh strip we're talking about next time called Little Nemo. Yeah, he really was just like banging stuff out at a shocking rate, partially because he was so fast, but even then he was like, my quality suffers because I am turning out like ten pieces of content for you every week when normal artists are getting to assigned to them. And part of it he brought in himself though, because he was always doing two or three jobs at least at a time, so it was an interesting time for him. He created another adult audience strip for the Evening Telegram under the pseudonym Silas, and that was called A Pilgrim's Progress by Mr Bunyan. Again, that byline is part of the title, and this was a comic strip interpretation of John Bunyan's spelled a different way by the way Christian allegory of the same name, although of course that does not have the Bye, Mr. Bunyan Byeline uh that was published in six Considering McKay's fascination with dreams that we already saw in rere bit Fiend and that will fuel other work in the future, it is probably no surprise that he drew inspiration from a book that was written entirely as a dream. The next year, Windsor McKay would create his most popular comic strip, and we are going to talk about that and his work in animation in our next episode. Yeah, we're about to get to some really fun stuff and the person that get me probably choked up. It is really fun to go back and look through his early comics because they hold up. They are still very funny and very weird and surreal. And his artwork is beautiful, Like the style of it is so elegant and unique. Even when he's drawing like Sammy Sneeze is kind of drawn to look like kind of a UM. He is not an appealing looking child. I will put it away, but the artwork itself is still really lovely. Okay, So I have a little bit of listener mail. I'm doing a choosy on this one, um, because we have multiple fabulous little postcards and we haven't done a postcard catchup in a bit. But I also want to start with an email that we got from our listener Lisa, and that is about our episode on Ephesis, and Lisa writes, hello, y'all. I just listened to the Ephesis episode and Holly mentioned that going to the Amphitheater was on her bucket list. A few years ago, I got the chance to go on a college trip through the Mediterranean. The college choir paired with a class on early Christianity, and one of the stops was in Ephesis. The ruins were really cool. I kept trying to read the ancient inscriptions with my very limited ancient Greek. It did not work. But per the subject line of her letter, because this was in part a music trip, when we got to the Amphitheater, we sang a few pieces. Apparently amphitheaters at the time were constructed in such a way that if you stood just in the right spot, everyone in the audience could hear you without the need to yell, even from way in the back of the twenty thousand seat Amphitheater. According to the religions professor that was on the trip, that construction still holds up several thousand years later. It was a really amazing experience, even though the Turkish officials staffing the site came and told us off for singing. Thank you so much for your great podcast. What an amazing experience that must have been. I can't imagine what that would be like, one because I can't sing to begin with, but two because that had to be a little bit surreal. Uh. It probably felt a little like you're singing through time at that point. Uh. The other mail that I wanted to acknowledge and I have trouble reading it, but I will explain why. It is from our listener Grace, who sent us an absolutely beautiful postcard from Tokyo Disney, and the reason that it is hard to read. Her writing is spectacular. However, it looks like she mailed it from the Tokyo Disney resort and they put a big, fat like stamp on it. Perhab scars almost all of the writing because it's dark blue, and so it's hard to read. But um, she is. It's a really lovely thirty fifth anniversary card and it is spectacularly beautiful and very colorful, so it seems like a good one to read On today's episode since uh you know, animation is is largely in debt to Windsor McKay, which we will talk about more as we said on the next episode. If you would like to write to us, you can do so at History Podcast at house to works dot com. You can find us across the spectrum of social media as missed in History, where it missed in History dot com, where you will find every single episode of the podcast that has ever existed before Tracy and I were ever here, and then show notes for the ones that Tracy and I have worked on. So come and visit us and missed in History dot com and we can all explore history together. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit hawstaff works dot com.

Hey everybody. Tracy here with news about some live appearances we have coming up. Saturday July seven, I will be at History Camp Boston where I will be part of the History Podcaster panel. And then the next day, Sunday, July eight, at two pm, Holly and I both will be doing a live podcast at Adams National Historical Park in Quincy, Massachusetts, where our show will be John Quincy and Luisa Catherine Adams Abroad. This is an outdoor show and it will happen rain or shine, and we're coming back to Convention Days in Seneca Falls, New York. Our show is at four pm on Saturday, July twenty one in the historic Wesleyan Chapel. You can get more information about all of these shows with links to buy tickets where applicable at missed in History dot Com. Click on live shows in the menu. Welcome to steph you missed in History class from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and today we're starting a two parter, so heads up this one. We'll take two episodes. We're going to talk about a person who has been on my list for almost exact amount of time that Tracy and I have been on the show. He got on my list almost immediately, uh, and I just never got around to impartially because I knew he was going to take a couple episodes for me to feel like we've covered enough of his life, even so, I think we could have done more. But lately he has been on my mind a lot because of the work I have been doing on our other podcast, Drawn, which is about animation, because he influenced so much of the media that we consume in the century, including work by people like Maury Sendec and Walt Disney. And as I was doing interviews for Drawn, that show is very interview heavy. Every time name windsor McKay's name came up, the people that I was speaking with universally lauded his incredible skill and drive within the animation industry. He's really regarded as not just an icon, but almost in um you know, like saintly guys. He's really really admired. Uh. And whether you have heard of him before or not, if you have watched any animation made in the US after nineteen or frankly, if you have ever read a comic strip you have benefited to some degree from his influence. McKay was born Zenus Windsor Mackay on September twenty six, although the year and the place of his birth are not consistently reported. Depending on where you look, you might see his place of birth reported as Ontario, Canada or Spring Like Michigan. His parents married in West Zora, Ontario, in eighteen sixty six, and they moved to Michigan not long after that. So the year that comes up in connection to Canada is eighteen sixty seven, and for Michigan it's eighteen seventy or seven anyone. And there are no records that have been found to support any of this. Yeah, the records in Spring Like Michigan, their records office had a fire, so there's not much there, and there was never anything found in Ontario. And even though they were living in Michigan already, there has been speculation that his mother may have wanted to travel home to be with her family when she had her baby. So we just don't know. His age is going to come up again later. The legend of Windsor start as an artist is actually tied to a little bit of a family tragedy. Allegedly, one night, the mackay family home burned to the ground and Windsor, once he was safely settled at a neighbor's house, used a nail that he had found to etch an image of the house on fire on a frosted window pane, and that was the beginning of his drawing obsession, something which McKay would later say he did exclusively to please himself rather than anyone else who might look at his work. While he may have only wanted to make himself happy with his drawings, he was also never really attached to any of them. That's probably served him really well later on as a cartoonist and an animator. He once wrote quote, I never saved my drawings. I would give them away if anybody wanted them, or would throw them away. I do want fences, blackboards in school, old scraps of paper, slates, sides of barns. I just couldn't stop. He later said that his drawing was only about fifteen percent talent and about eighty five hard work. Yeah, if you subscribe to the practice makes perfect ideology. He was constantly practicing, so from the time he was really really young. So it is a little bit hard to discern what was his just natural talent versus what was his constant flexing of those muscles. And even from a very young age, Mackay was aware of the importance of observation for an artist. He made a point to really look at the world around him and try to remember as much detail as he could so that he could easily recall realistic images when he was drawing, and this method served him incredibly well. Even as a young child. People noted how accurate his drawings were in terms of perspective and proportion. He just almost always got it exactly right, and he was just doing so from memory, without a subject or a model in front of him. In his father didn't see a future for winds Or in art, and he later expressed some regret for not having sent him to art school. Instead. His parents sent him to business college, but business school did not really hold his interest. Instead, he would take a train from Ipsilante, where the school was, to Detroit and he would draw pictures for money in a curiosity museum called Wonderland. It's one of those museums full of wax figures and taxidermy and a cyclorama and a menagerie. He drew pictures of museum visitors and sold them for a quarter, and then he split his take with the museum fifty fifty. He never finished business school, but his classmates were impressed with his steady flow of cash and it's exciting life that he seemed to be living, traveling as an artist while also skipping school. Yeah he uh. At one point said this really fun thing about how the best way to sell a drawing of someone was to make it really flattering. So, especially when women or girls were in the museum and wanted to have their picture drawn, he would draw them looking like themselves, but like a prettier version of themselves, and those ones always solved, which, of course I mean flattery of the subject has been working for artists for a long time. But while he was in Ipsilanti, McKay did get a bit of an art education, though certainly not through the business school and not quite in a formal way. Instead, an art professor at Michigan State Normal named John Goodison offered to give the young artist private lessons. It was becoming really apparent that while Windsor McKay's parents might not have wanted their fun to pursue a career in art. A career in art really seemed like a foregone conclusion. McKay had a reputation enough that he attracted the interest of a professor from a local college to offer to educate him. So like this, this was not something that he was going to walk away from, and he was really eager to learn anything and everything that Goodison taught him, from art history to technique in his own work, and his art teacher was convinced that Windsor had a great career ahead of him. The lessons in perspective and composition that Goodison taught the young artist informed his work for the rest of his life. And it was also during this time with Goodison that McKay started doing really fast sketch work from memory on blackboards and that skill. Keep it in mind, because it eventually proved very lucrative. But in the more immediate sense, McKay's work with Goodison made one thing really clear. He could not bear the thought of a business career. Art was the only path that he was willing to walk, So with Goodison's encouragement, he left Ipsilante and moved to Chicago to study at the Art Institute but this is one of those areas of his life, and there are a number of them where the actual events that took place are real fuzzy. McKay never actually enrolled in school, though what exactly stopped him is a little bit unclear. Instead, he started working at National Printing and Engraving Company, which made commercial advertising posters and pamphlets, and at that point he lived in a boarding house with another young artist, Jules Garrion, and the two of them sort of traded knowledge. They both excelled in different areas of art, and they really shared their knowledge with one another. Those two also became freemasons together during this time, and McKay stayed a freemason for the rest of his life. McKay didn't stay in Chicago for long though, After two years he moved on to Cincinnati, but it's not clear why. So when he talked about himself, he liked to make it interesting, and as friends also tended to embellish things a lot when they talked about him. So a lot of McKay's life is clouded by these different versions of the story, and a lot of times not a lot of records to back that up, so it can be hard to unravel truth and half truth when trying to get to the details of his life. Yeah, particularly this early part before he was kind of a household name. McKay might have followed a job offered to Cincinnati. Uh, he was smart enough to know that he really kind of needed a little bit of a plan going into a new thing. But there is also a fun apocryphal story that in fact he was working for a traveling circus as a signmaker and that that's how he ended up in Cincinnati. We don't know if there's any truth to that either, but in any case, he ended up at another dime museum similar to the Wonderland that he had worked at in Detroit, most likely hired based on the growing reputation of his work. He wasn't making sketches for patrons this time around, but he was making posters and signs for the museum itself as a regular employee. And it was while he was working in the dime Museum that mckayson edison Vitoscope moving picture for the first time. In addition to his museum work, McKay also took jobs painting billboards and large street advertisements. This also became his first performance work. As an artist. One of the incredible skills that he possessed was the ability to draw a figure in its entirety in one single stroke. So as you can imagine, a man drawing figures eight to ten feet tall out in public in this incredible way would draw a crowd. People were awed by his skill, and stories of the man who painted these huge, lifelike drawings with no reference out on the streets of Cincinnati started to spread. Yeah, he would do this big sketch initially and then he would paint it in And he was also a small of stature person, so it really lent this extra drama to the situation. Like a guy who was only five feet drawing someone eight to ten ft in one single long line was just astonishing. And so it kind of got to the point where if he went out with his supplies to start on a billboard or assign a crowd would just gather to watch. Uh. And coming up, we're going to talk about some unique artistic endeavors that McKay was part of in Cincinnati. But first we're gonna pause for a little sponsor break. So McKay also, in addition to kind of becoming an accidental street performer. While he was painting, participated in a couple of more planned performance art pieces in Cincinnati that were conceptualized by his employer on his billboard work, Philip Morton. For one of these, they staged a battle from the Spanish American War on barges out in the river, but onlooker started stoning the barge representing the Spanish on which both McKay and Morton were serving as actors, and both of the men were injured. There are stories of them getting back to shore with like cuts on their faces and arms from having rocks and garbage thrown at them. A tugboat eventually had to be signaled to pull the barge that McKay was on off of a collision course with the bridge. Like the whole performance art piece really went south. But while he was certainly becoming a well known figure and a producer of art in Cincinnati, perhaps the most important thing that happens to McKay while living there was meeting maud Lenore dufour after just seeing her walk into the museum with her older sister Josephine one day while he was working, McKay is said to have rushed up to his office to change out of his painter's garb and into a nice suit so that he could go up to this young woman who had captivated him from the first time that he saw her licking his absolute best. Yeah, he was a snappy dresser, So he had his suit upstairs and had changed into something a little grubbier to do work with his paint and art supplies, and so he wanted to go back to his fancy ensomb before he met this young lady. And Windsor and Maud hit it off, and they began dating immediately, And it was really quite shortly after their courtship began that they rode to Covington, Kentucky to get married before a Justice of the peace in an elopement. This gets a little weird here because Maud was a full decade younger than Windsor. She was only fourteen at the time and he was twenty four. So while it initially sounds very romantic sounding by today's standards, it's kind of scandalous and even a little bit icky to think about. But to further compound confusion over the age gap, it appears that Windsor Mackay, who was already known to lie about his age, had lost track of his real date of birth entirely. Uh, he may not have realized just how far apart they were in years, or another theory is that he fudged it even more to make the difference in their ages a little less scandalous. Yeah, people did get married a little younger on average then, but still in the eighteen nineties, the the median age for women was more like twenty two. Not yeah, I mean, I certainly like I look back on some old family records and there are certainly people that got married at at fifteen and sixteen, but it was not that was still really young. So while McKay had seemed really eager to marry Maud, he did have some ambivalence about actually being a husband. So as a young man, he had spent his young adult years doing whatever he wanted and pursuing his art above everything else, so being a responsible family man felt confining, especially because Maud's mother also lived with them at the same time. Though the couple stayed together and maybe to hang on to a sense of freedom, McKay moved the family from home to home, and the first twelve years of their marriage, the McKay's had ten different addresses. Yeah, there's a lot of uh theorization and discussion when you look at biographies of him that he was a little bit unhappy with this arrangement just in terms of being married, and it wasn't always smooth sailing. But at the same time, any of the letters or notes that he wrote to his wife and his family were very loving, and he was generally believed to have been really quite dedicated, but he still had that part of him that just yearned to be out on his own and able to do whatever he wanted. Maud and Windsor welcome his son Robert on June one. The McKay's had been married for five years at that point, and their surprise, they got pregnant again almost immediately. They had a daughter, Mary and Elizabeth on August. And throughout all of this the artist continued in his jobs at the museum and the billboard company. Eventually McKay got into newspaperwork, largely because the papers that sold ads for the Dime Museum didn't have any artists on hand who were willing to draw the bizarre artwork that was needed for these ads, so McKay was asked to do the art himself. He learned an entirely new skill set to do so. While he was talented and accomplished as an artist, the tools of the trade and the parameters of work were a lot different when a piece of art was going to be printed in a paper versus being printed as a poster. So he had to learn how to draw his art for a larger size to be reduced for the paper, and to pay really careful attention so that his lines and the image wouldn't just be a mess when they were reduced down for the paper. Yeah, there were also just different supplies involved that he had to get used to using. But McKay, always a quick and eager learner, impressed the leadership of the Commercial Tribune, which was the paper that had asked him to do this, so much so that they offered him a full time job. And at that point, he had been at the Dime Museum for eight years and he was kind of reluctant to leave. He felt the loyalty to them, But thankfully, when he discussed it with his boss, his boss encouraged him to take that new job, but no hard feeling in the mix because it was going to be a move up and he had a family to look after, and the Tribune wanted McKay to work as an artist reporter, illustrating stories and drawing cartoons. If you look at McKay's work from this time as an illustrator, it's really astonishing. He was able to capture moments for these stories with almost the same level of detail that you would see in a photograph. In crowd scenes like capturing parades, the details on all the buildings are very carefully rendered, and the people in the crowd are drawn in a lot of detail, right to the point that it would be impossible to put any more detail into the images. Receding perspective. Yeah, there's one in particular where there's a crowd of people watching a parade, and he even draws all of the hats on the people until it's just like the point where they would be thoughts, Like, everything is really really detailed, and his sense of perspective that he had learned under Goodison was serving him so beautifully because they looked peccable in terms of how they were laid out. And McKay also started working as a freelancer for the humorist magazine Life during this time. As we go on, you will hear over and over that he almost always had multiple jobs. Life was a satirical magazine with spectacular art, and McKay was actually a fan of many of their regular artists. Heads up, just in case this peaks anyone's interest and you want to go looking for work from this magazine. There is a lot of racist humor in it, including some of McKay's work. Many of McKay's cartoons during this time focused on the relationship between the US and the Philippines, which the US had gained control over with the signing of the Treaty of Paris. In a larger paycheck lured mackay away from the Commercial Tribune to the Cincinnati Enquirer in nineteen hundred, and he quickly rose to be head of the art department. He drew hundreds of cartoons for the paper and the three years that he worked there. Among the most significant were his illustrations for a series called A Tale of the Jungle Imps by Felix Fiddle On that byline is part of the title. The series depicts animals deciding to change their physicalities to try to outwit three impish children of the jungle who are taunting them. For example, and one of them the imps, tickle a giraffe's nose until the giraffe sneezes, So then the giraffe has a group of skilled monkeys make him a longer neck, so when the imps approached him, he picks one up by the hair shakes it flings him around to teach him a lesson. The Jungle Imps series ran for most of the three calendar year and was immensely popular. Yeah, these were based on ratings by someone else, but they basically explain evolution in a really bizarre way, where animals consciously make the decisions to evolve so that they could stop being teased by these children. But by the time the last of that series was publishing, McKay had actually already moved on to another job. In h three, McKay started working at the New York Herald as a cartoonist, so similar to his previous job move, he turned to his boss for advice when the Herald had made him this offer, and his editor at the Cincinnati Inquirer told him that to take the position if the Harold would agree to pay for his move to New York, which it did. So this move was something of a shock for the family. They had had this lovely house in Cincinnati, but then when they moved to New York, they first had to stay in a hotel, but they wanted a house like they had had before. And eventually, after feeling overwhelmed by the options in the city, particularly Maud, she did not really love their options for living in Manhattan, they moved into a home in Sheep's Head Bay, Brooklyn. Starting in November of three, McKay started churning out illustrations for the New York Harold and the Evening Telegram, which was also owned by The Heralds publisher James Gordon Bennett Jr. His work ranged from the political to social commentary to unique illustrations depicting like a horse show that he covered as a journalist. Instead of just making straight drawings of these horses, he drew them from unusual angles, so he created a really stylized look to the story. The idea of the comic strip was just getting legs in the US at this point, influenced in part by previous podcast subject Rodolph top Fur, and McKay was quick to start experimenting with it. He wanted, like many artists of the time to secure a regular syndicated strip, and he wanted the income and notoriety that would come with it. This is kind of a time when being a popular cartoonist was kind of like being a famous actor today. The newspaper industry had been in steep competition to lure readers with comics, and McKay stepped into the New York scene just as this was starting to hit its fever pitch. For the first half of nineteen o four, When's They're tried out a number of comics, including Mr Goodenough, who was about a wealthy gent who decided to be more energetic and lively in his life, but his efforts to do it always end in disaster. Another was Furious Finish of Foolish Philip's Funny Frolics. All those fs are really phs. They featured two clowns and a show girl, harkening back to the Museum and the circus art that he had done earlier in his career, and Windsor McKay was just about to hit his stride as a cartoonist. But before we get into the details of his early successes in that medium, we're gonna pause for a little sponsor break, so while McKay had started trying some things, but they didn't quite catch on. Starting in mid nineteen o four, he created two comic strips for the paper that became very successful. The first was Little Sammy Sneeze Starting, a little boy who, over the course of five frames in each installment, had a sneeze build up in a situation where sneezing would be inconvenient or inappropriate. The six panel would always feature the unfortunate aftermath of the sneeze that Sammy just couldn't suppress. The title of the comic was framed on either side every week with the phrases he just simply couldn't stop it, and he never knew it was coming. Sammy and his Sneezing Problem debuted on July. Sammy's Adventures evidenced a certain level of darkness in McKay's comedic sensibilities, and one strip, Sammy is visiting the country and watching a farmhand milk a cow as the sneeze starts building up. When it finally lets loose, the cow bolts, kicking the man that's milking her, and then the man kicks Sammy in the rump. I feel like this goes back to some of Rudolph toppers. Yes, spankings, Yes, like the cycle of violence that just continues from one character to another. Yeah, and another of them. Sammy is riding in a crowded trolley with his mother, and as the sneeze builds up, the passengers or gossiping and reading their papers, his sneeze sends the whole car into complete chaos, with hats flying off of people a dog escaping from its owner. The last panel is simply as mother leading Sammy away and saying I shall never take you with me again. Yeah it's uh. It struck me as really somber and sad. Uh. The second strip that McKay created in nineteen o four was Dream of the rare Bit Fiend. So rare Bit, also some sometimes called Welsh Rabbit, is a dish that in fact contains no rabbit at all, but it is a rich cheese based sauce that served over toast. It's sometimes a little bit spicy, it's always very very rich. And because it has long been a popular wives tale that rich food causes strange dreams, the entire concept of this comic was that it depicted the dreams of someone who absolutely loved the dish and ate it before bedtime. So in one strip, a man dreams that he begins to grow antlers, and he is initially dismayed and his concern grows. His wife and baby and even pets also start to grow antlers. But just as he starts to become comfortable with the idea, there's a moment where he's looking at nature and he's like, no, nature is beautiful, antlers are great. Uh. He is awakened from this nap, And in another the main character is dreaming that he's a sketched fashion model, but that the artist keeps smudging the drawing and leaving ink blurs on him. And as he continues to complain about the pen and ink artist creating him, he becomes slowly engulfed by smears and blotches of ink, and the character becomes convinced that he will be torn up and thrown on a fire. And the final panel is the dreamer awakening and swearing that he will never eat rere bit again. I will tell you this if you ever watched a lot of Looney Tunes. This makes me wonder if this was not a direct inspiration for UH that cartoon Duck a muck where Daffy Duck is yelling at the animator and he gets drawn into all kinds of crazy situations because it it vibes very similarly, McKay actually had to sign a different name to these rarebit strips. He could use his own name, because his editor wanted to keep this child oriented art of sneezing Sammy separate from the Rabbit comedy, which was aimed at an adult audience. McKay was really irritated by this requirement, so he started to sign the name Silas on the rabbit strips, which was the name of the trash collector and Harold Square, where the newspaper offices were. They also asked readers to send in their own dreams in the paper for inclusion into the strip. Yeah, it was definitely ah. I like that. He was like, fine, I'll use the garbage man's name. It wasn't like he wanted to honor the garbage man. He just wanted to kind of stick it to his editor in a weird way. But he used the name Silas as his secondary moniker forever after that, and even as McKay was producing Sammy Sneeze in the rare bit fiend on a regular schedule. He was also still fulfuit fulfilling his other duties at the paper as an illustrator. He also continued to test out new strips. He started one called The Story of Hungry Henrietta in January nineteen o five, and it featured a little girl that began as a three month old infant and then showed her growing up over the strips six month run. It provided a commentary on parenting, as Henrietta's parents always gave her food instead of affection when she appeared upset, and the main character, Henrietta, became a compulsive eater, and all that work started to grind on him. He was making sixty dollars a week and he loved working at the Herald, but McKay also knew that he deserved more. In nineteen o five, he wrote a very direct letter to his boss outlining the breakdown of his work each week and the quality of that work, and pointing out that the artists at other publications were giving were given much longer lead times for their work, and they were assigned fewer things, and they were making twice what he made. The letter came back with the letters okay in the top right and a silly drawing which would annoy me. But mackay got his race. He was bumped up with seventy five dollars a week, and later on he would negotiate more than double that when his contract was renewed based on the ongoing success of uh strip we're talking about next time called Little Nemo. Yeah, he really was just like banging stuff out at a shocking rate, partially because he was so fast, but even then he was like, my quality suffers because I am turning out like ten pieces of content for you every week when normal artists are getting to assigned to them. And part of it he brought in himself though, because he was always doing two or three jobs at least at a time, so it was an interesting time for him. He created another adult audience strip for the Evening Telegram under the pseudonym Silas, and that was called A Pilgrim's Progress by Mr Bunyan. Again, that byline is part of the title, and this was a comic strip interpretation of John Bunyan's spelled a different way by the way Christian allegory of the same name, although of course that does not have the Bye, Mr. Bunyan Byeline uh that was published in six Considering McKay's fascination with dreams that we already saw in rere bit Fiend and that will fuel other work in the future, it is probably no surprise that he drew inspiration from a book that was written entirely as a dream. The next year, Windsor McKay would create his most popular comic strip, and we are going to talk about that and his work in animation in our next episode. Yeah, we're about to get to some really fun stuff and the person that get me probably choked up. It is really fun to go back and look through his early comics because they hold up. They are still very funny and very weird and surreal. And his artwork is beautiful, Like the style of it is so elegant and unique. Even when he's drawing like Sammy Sneeze is kind of drawn to look like kind of a UM. He is not an appealing looking child. I will put it away, but the artwork itself is still really lovely. Okay, So I have a little bit of listener mail. I'm doing a choosy on this one, um, because we have multiple fabulous little postcards and we haven't done a postcard catchup in a bit. But I also want to start with an email that we got from our listener Lisa, and that is about our episode on Ephesis, and Lisa writes, hello, y'all. I just listened to the Ephesis episode and Holly mentioned that going to the Amphitheater was on her bucket list. A few years ago, I got the chance to go on a college trip through the Mediterranean. The college choir paired with a class on early Christianity, and one of the stops was in Ephesis. The ruins were really cool. I kept trying to read the ancient inscriptions with my very limited ancient Greek. It did not work. But per the subject line of her letter, because this was in part a music trip, when we got to the Amphitheater, we sang a few pieces. Apparently amphitheaters at the time were constructed in such a way that if you stood just in the right spot, everyone in the audience could hear you without the need to yell, even from way in the back of the twenty thousand seat Amphitheater. According to the religions professor that was on the trip, that construction still holds up several thousand years later. It was a really amazing experience, even though the Turkish officials staffing the site came and told us off for singing. Thank you so much for your great podcast. What an amazing experience that must have been. I can't imagine what that would be like, one because I can't sing to begin with, but two because that had to be a little bit surreal. Uh. It probably felt a little like you're singing through time at that point. Uh. The other mail that I wanted to acknowledge and I have trouble reading it, but I will explain why. It is from our listener Grace, who sent us an absolutely beautiful postcard from Tokyo Disney, and the reason that it is hard to read. Her writing is spectacular. However, it looks like she mailed it from the Tokyo Disney resort and they put a big, fat like stamp on it. Perhab scars almost all of the writing because it's dark blue, and so it's hard to read. But um, she is. It's a really lovely thirty fifth anniversary card and it is spectacularly beautiful and very colorful, so it seems like a good one to read On today's episode since uh you know, animation is is largely in debt to Windsor McKay, which we will talk about more as we said on the next episode. If you would like to write to us, you can do so at History Podcast at house to works dot com. You can find us across the spectrum of social media as missed in History, where it missed in History dot com, where you will find every single episode of the podcast that has ever existed before Tracy and I were ever here, and then show notes for the ones that Tracy and I have worked on. So come and visit us and missed in History dot com and we can all explore history together. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit hawstaff works dot com.