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A Happy Boyhood. As any reader of The Thrill That Comes Once in a Lifetime might guess, H. T. Webster had a happy boyhood. He spent it in Tomahawk, Wis. (pop. 3,365) where his dad ran the drugstore. Tomahawk (the way Webster remembers it) was a little town afloat in a forest where deer and small game were plentiful, the lakes and streams were stiff with fish, you could run onto the tracks of bear often enough almost to believe you had seen them and killed them, and school was no more interesting than it is in most other places. Webbie used to hide a .38 in his pocket going to school, and fire it off during recess.
From seven on, he liked to draw. He was not an artist; he was a cartoonist from the start. He liked best to draw Weary Willie tramps with baggy clothes so "you could conceal your lack of knowledge of anatomy." By the time he was 15 or so, Webster subscribed to a mail-order cartooning course, and was the only student to finish the course — the school folded shortly afterwards. That was the end of his formal training.
$7 to $70. He dreamed of some day becoming Charles Dana Gibson's office boy, and cartooned for the Chicago Daily News in 1903 at little more than office boy's pay: $7 a week.
For three years, he drew front-page political cartoons for the Chicago Inter-Ocean — a fellow toiler with another famed U.S. humorist, Ring Lardner. And for two years more, at a phenomenal $70 a week, he drew for the Cincinnati Post.
He had saved up enough money by 1911 ($700) to realize a childhood desire: a trip around the world. With George A. (Why We Behave Like Human Beings) Dorsey he made the second steamboat trip in history up the Yangtze Gorges to the then inconspicuous city of Chungking. The Chinese along the rim knocked off work and crowded the banks, in a friendly way, "to watch us drown." The Chinese also liked to line up, at a courteous distance, to watch the foreigners handle knives & forks. One suppertime a missionary's wife, annoyed at their staring, slung a glass of water in their faces. Webster, a gentle man, still colors up when he remembers it: "I had to control myself as hard as I ever did in my life, not to give her a piece of my mind." The round-the-world trip ended in New York, and Webster ended — in time — on that Parnassus of Midwestern newspaper men, the New York World. Webster, along with any number of employes and readers, still remembers the death of Pulitzer's World in 1931 as nothing short of tragic.
Since then he has worked for the Herald Tribune, and through the Tribune Syndicate his daily cartoons are published in some 60 papers, his Sunday Milquetoast strip in 20. Their combined circulation is around ten million,, not counting uncountable" millions who read their papers at second hand. Webster's probable income: about $80,000 a year.