[2] Baldridge's career in art began when the 10-year-old Cyrus was accepted as the youngest student at Frank Holme's[3] Chicago School of Illustration.

In his studio, Baldridge sat with students three times his age to do life drawings, and under Holme's direction went into the streets to make the detailed sketches meant to become newspaper illustrations.

He learned to count and remember the number of buttons on a policeman's jacket, and the sad faces of tenement children, and then return to the studio to include them in finished illustrations.

He became a superb rider while training in the Illinois National Guard Cavalry and with that skill worked as a cow hand on the 6666 Ranch in Texas for a summer.

[4] Called to Mexico as a member of the National Guard, he was on the Mexican/American border in 1916 to repulse Pancho Villa, and in 1917, he joined the French Army as a stretcher bearer.

Baldridge was the chief artist on staff that included Harold Ross, founder of The New Yorker, Alexander Woollcott, drama critic for the New York Times, and others who later achieved considerable fame.

His work appeared in virtually every issue of Stars and Stripes from March 1918 until the end of the War in November 1918, and portrayed the full range of emotions of soldiers facing death at the Front.

a nightmare of horror: a red vision of machine guns and dead men, inspiring only a feeling of disgust for the cold efficiency with which it was accomplished.

"[6] Baldridge's reputation as an illustrator was launched in the United States when his battlefield drawings appeared on many covers of Leslie's Weekly and Scribners.

Formed by John Dos Passos, Walter Lippman by other liberal intellectuals, it was the only Post to stand against the conservative leadership of the American Legion.

Mild in tone and taking its ideas from the words of Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson and the Constitution, the booklet became the target of an attack by the American Legion leadership.

Liberal thinkers like John Dewey and University of Chicago president Robert Maynard Hutchins gave Baldridge their support, but conservatives and, particularly, the Hearst newspapers loudly denounced it.

In the end, the booklet lost the support of the American Legion, but, selling in the thousands, it generated enormous discussion of important issues—starting with freedom of speech.

[They] can lodge with equal comfort in the Ritz or the nearest haystack and move from one to the other with the readiest adaptability.Their travel was not tourism but was designed to help comprehend the great questions of the world.

Baldridge frequently worked for Opportunity, a journal of the Urban League, and he beautifully illustrated several books by African American authors.

For a short time in the 1920s he worked with Watanabe Shozaburo in Tokyo and the 1930s he used what he had learned to producing a number of fine woodblock prints, etchings and drypoints.

He illustrated many books and articles with oriental themes the foremost of which were the stunning 1937 reissue of Hajji Baba of Isfahan by James Morier and the 1941 Translations from the Chinese by Arthur Waley.

Baldridge was elected president of the Williard Straight Post five times and he was especially proud of a small booklet he wrote and illustrated for the Legion called Americanism: What is It.

It was distributed free by the Legion to thousands of schools, until the right wing leadership got wind that Thomas Jefferson was on the rise forced its withdrawal.

Profits from Time and Chance, combined with several years of earnings from well-paid work with the Information Please Almanac, made it possible for him and Caroline to retire to Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1951.

In the thirty years between his retirement and his death, he hiked virtually the whole of northern New Mexico, sketching with charcoal or water colors, and returning home to complete his work in oils.

The plan of the couple had been for Caroline to write while Cyrus painted during their years of "retirement", but from the time they arrived in New Mexico, she suffered from a block to the great abilities that made her so successful in New York.