Percy Crosby
"[4] Humorist Corey Ford, writing in Vanity Fair, praised the strip as "America's most important contribution to humor of the century".
[6] His father, Thomas Francis Crosby, the son of Catholic immigrants from County Louth, Ireland, was an amateur painter who ran an art supply business.
[7] Crosby quit high school during his sophomore year to take a job as an art department office boy at editor Theodore Dreiser's magazine The Delineator.
After delivering sandwiches and working as a magazine salesman, he found a position as an editorial cartoonist for the Socialist newspaper the New York Daily Call.
[11] While continuing on this first strip, Crosby studied at Manhattan's Art Students League under such instructors as George Bridgman, Frank DuMond, Joseph Pennell and Max Weber.
[11] Back in New York, he fell in love with fellow League student Gertrude Volz, the artist-sculptor daughter of a well-to-do real-estate broker.
After being commissioned a second lieutenant in the Officer Reserve Corps in 1916 and being called to active service the following year, serving for a time as a jiujitsu instructor, he and Volz eloped and were married at the training camp in Plattsburgh, New York, on July 7, 1917.
[12] While in training, Crosby created a daily comic panel, That Rookie from the Thirteenth Squad, for the McClure Syndicate, writing and drawing it from the front in France while serving as a first lieutenant in the 77th Division, AEF.
[14] One such series, Always Belittlin', presaged Skippy with its star, a child with a striped shawl and a bonnet with a black pop-pom, whose thoughts consisted of the text's daily aphorism.
[15] This series and two others, Bugville and Bug Lugs, would eventually run as the supplemental topper feature accompanying the Skippy Sunday strip.
Usually wearing an enormous collar and tie and a floppy checked hat, he was an odd mix of mischief and melancholy who might equally be found stealing from the corner fruit stand, failing to master skates or baseball, complaining about the adult world, or staring sadly at an old relative's grave: "And only last year she gave me a tie."
[4] With its success, he befriended a pantheon of famed creators, including the author Marc Connelly, the humorist Robert Benchley, The New Yorker editor Harold Ross, Life magazine editor and future Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Robert E. Sherwood, and the cartoonists and painters George McManus, H. T. Webster and Guy Hoff.
[26] The couple would have four children: son Percy Jr., nicknamed Skippy,[27] the eldest, and daughters Barbara, Joan, and Carol, who were, respectively two, three and four years younger.
[26] With his wife and an agent handling his business affairs, Crosby oversaw a Skippy empire that included a radio show, three novels, a series of 34 posters for Standard Oil, and the aforesaid movie and a sequel, Sooky.
[32] Crosby's vitriolic editorials called the president "crazed for power", and referred to Roosevelt's Fireside Chats as "talking from the Moscow room of the Spite House".
[34] When the Internal Revenue Service brought a tax claim against Crosby and his corporation Skippy, Inc., for more than $67,000 in 1937, Crosby—who fought the decision for years, ultimately unsuccessfully—claimed it was in retaliation for his political writing.
A devastated Crosby moved back to Manhattan and eventually entered Presbyterian Hospital for an extended stay for exhaustion and an infection.
[36] About the same time, a California food packer, Joseph Rosefield, began to sell his newly developed hydrogenated peanut butter, which he labeled "Skippy" without Crosby's permission.
[38][39] His finances, dire due to tax claims, the divorce settlement, legal fees, and alimony, Crosby sold Ridgelawn for a fraction of its value; his 1,500-acre (610 ha) farm and other Virginia real-estate were awarded to his second wife.
[44] Crosby's estranged daughters Barbara and Joan had graduated from Vassar College, and Carol from the Rhode Island School of Design, without having known of their father's whereabouts; son Skip had become a geologist.
