Robert Lee Thaves was born on October 5, 1924, in Burt, Iowa, where his father, John, published local newspapers.
[1] He enrolled in the Ph.D. program at the University of Southern California, but left before completing his degree due to the success of his business career.
He continued to be interested in cartooning, and developed the Frank and Ernest strip while working as an industrial psychologist, occasionally selling comics to publications such as the Saturday Evening Post, True, and Cosmopolitan.
Frank and Ernest's distributor, United Media, said that the strip was carried by more than 1,300 newspapers and read by 25 million people.
In a 1982 Frank and Ernest comic strip, Thaves wrote about Fred Astaire: "Sure he was great, but don't forget that Ginger Rogers did everything he did, backwards… and in high heels."
[3] Sometimes the quote is attributed to Ann Richards, who popularized the line in her 1988 Democratic National Convention speech, paraphrasing it as: "But if you give us a chance, we can perform.