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Only a few, like Webster, still try to stick to the comic strip's old and worthy function: holding a mirror to a recognizable U.S. life. The late Clare Briggs's Mr. and Mrs., as an appreciation of marriage, made books like Cass Timberlane .look as naive as Daisy Ashford. Harry J. Tuthill's remarkable Bungle Family, almost alone among comics, dared to gaze steadily at the plain, awful ugliness and clumsiness to which the domesticated human animal is liable. When you have counted these —and Frank King's mild, wholesome Gasoline Alley, Chic Young's Blondie, J. R. Williams' homely cowhands and mechan ics in Out Our Way, and Gluyas Williams' middle-aged suburbanites — you have about exhausted the field. Yet, characteristically, Webster disagrees with the critics who think today's sexed-up, thrill-happy comics are a menace to adolescent morals. Says he : "I used to hide my dime novels. Eventually I made the discovery that good books were better. I don't think it matters a hoot." The Quiet Life. During the 1920s Webster was a member in good standing of that ultra-American generation of writers and actors and cartoonists and illustrators which focused around the offices of the World and The Players and The Dutch Treat Clubs. He has long since receded to the blander pleasures of upper-middle-class suburbia in Stamford, Conn, and —with a mild sheepishness about the stylish address, and sincere enough murmurs about the Websters' susceptibility to colds— winters in Palm Beach. For years the Websters were enthusiastic theatergoers; now they wonder whether anything is as much worth coming into town for as the last show they saw, Oklahoma! Webster used to play poker every Friday night through Sunday morning, in a room in the old Waldorf-Astoria. The concentration was such that once, when food was sent up, and he chomped a mouthful of broken glass in his lettuce, Webster spat it out without a murmur rather than interrupt the game.
After giving the matter "profound thought," he got married in 1916 (all of two weeks after meeting pretty Ethel Worts) and gave up poker for bridge. "The thought of life without poker," he remembers, seemed fantastic, "but when I gave it up it was like recovering from leprosy." He is a skillful bridge player — though it is safe to say he has taken in more money drawing cartoons about it.
He lives like a man who wants his thrills to come oftener than once in a lifetime. He feels about fly fishing a good deal the way Lucius Beebe feels about trains, and always keeps well ahead in his work in order to be free to accept a banker friend's annual invitation to fish his private stream in Canada.
Next to becoming a cartoonist, he al ways wanted most to be a clown. When he was grown and married, he got his wish. He made several tours with Ringling Bros., one with his wife and the late cartoonist Clare Briggs. (Even now, when the circus comes to Bridgeport, the Websters dress up and ride in the parade.) Ethel Webster became a good enough bareback rider to receive, and reluctantly turn down, a professional offer. She is also pretty certainly the only non-professional woman ever to ride down Manhattan's Fifth Avenue on the nape of an elephant (on the occasion of Mrs. Hearst's Milk Fund Drive, in 1921).