In May 1890, Strain was named as a stockholder and secretary treasurer of the newly opened Watagua Lumber Company in nearby Johnson City.

They had begun the year with the birth of their youngest son, Christopher, on January 3, and then suffered the trauma of the death of their oldest child, their daughter Caroline on November 26.

[7] The brothers were raised in "an iconoclastic, intellectual household" where their family entertained such guests as Theodore Roosevelt and Rudyard Kipling.

[9] Raised riding horses, he went on to attend the military academy The Manlius School in DeWitt, New York, and in 1917 joined the U.S. Cavalry[10] as a second lieutenant.

[9] The Major's public criticism of Army command in an open letter to President Warren G. Harding, and his accusations against senior officers, led to countercharges, hearings, and a lawsuit against West Point Superintendent General Fred W.

[13] He additionally ghost wrote six adventure novels about air hero Bill Barnes for Street & Smith Publications.

[11] Concurrently, in 1925, he founded Wheeler-Nicholson, Inc.[9][12] to syndicate his work, which included a daily comic-strip adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's novel Treasure Island, with art by N. Brewster Morse.

[8][22] While contemporary comics "consisted ... of reprints of old syndicate material", Wheeler-Nicholson found that the "rights to all the popular strips ... had been sewn up".

[25]A tabloid-sized, 10-inch by 15-inch, 36-page magazine with a cardstock, non-glossy cover, New Fun #1 was an anthology of "humor and adventure strips, many of which [Wheeler-Nicholson] wrote himself".

[8] The features included the talking animal comic "Pelion and Ossa" and the college-set "Jigger and Ginger", mixed with such dramatic fare as the Western strip "Jack Woods" and the "yellow peril" adventure "Barry O'Neill", featuring a Fu Manchu-styled villain, Fang Gow.

Issue #6 (Oct. 1935) brought the comic-book debuts of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the future creators of Superman, who began their careers with the musketeer swashbuckler "Henri Duval" (doing the first two installments before turning it over to others) and, under the pseudonyms "Leger and Reuths", the supernatural-crimefighter adventure Doctor Occult.

Newsstands were reluctant to stock a magazine of untested new material from an unknown publisher, particularly as other companies' comics titles were perceived as being "successful because they featured characters everyone knew and loved".

Artist Creig Flessel recalled that at the company's office on Fourth Avenue, "The major flashed in and out of the place, doing battles with the printers, the banks, and other enemies of the struggling comics".

"Dick Woods" artist Lyman Anderson [fr], whose Manhattan apartment Wheeler-Nicholson used as a rent-free pied-à-terre, said, "His wife would call [from home on Long Island] and be in tears ... and say she didn't have money and the milkman was going to cut off the milk for the kids.

[8] However, wrote comics historian Gerard Jones: In early 1938, Harry Donenfeld sent him and his wife on a cruise to Cuba to 'work up new ideas'.

[8] While studying at the École Supérieure de Guerre in Paris, France, after World War I, Wheeler-Nicholson met Elsa Sachsenhausen Björkbom.

[citation needed] Douglas married on September 2, 1955, by which time Wheeler-Nicholson and his wife were living in Bayside, Queens, New York City.