At age 15, he traveled the midwest, finding employment with a foot surgeon, selling baking powder, patented eggbeaters and pictures, plus working as a medicine show barker in a street carnival.

As he recalled, he left "to work on and at such things as selling enlarged pictures, soliciting for a corn doctor, and for one delirious season carrying on with a medicine show.

Comics historian Rick Marschall praised Tuthill's work, "Seldom has there been a strip (Moon Mullins comes to mind) registering a sustained, masterful indictment of petite-bourgeois sensibilities and preoccupations as did The Bungle Family.

Tuthill's strips from 1919 to 1926 were created in his home studio at 4537 Tower Grove Place in St. Louis, eventually moving to Ferguson, Missouri outside St.

[1][3] His son, Harold Tuthill, who worked for 47 years as a St. Louis Post-Dispatch sports writer, died of a heart ailment in 1988 at the age of 82.