(5 of 9)
To Al, as to all the children, this scrounging existence seemed normal enough at the time. But when he was nine everything ceased to be normal: an accident befell him that marred and made his life. While hooking a ride on an ice truck, he slipped, and was run over by a streetcar. His left leg had to be amputated. It was two years before he relaunched himself into the world on a wooden leg.
"I was indignant as hell about that leg," he says. "It was hard to handle, and it squeaked." But neither the wooden leg, the limp with which he still walks, nor his chronic state of poverty kept him from growing into a brash, fast-talking, reckless, restless youth. Perhaps they even helped.
Wheedler in a Haystack. During his teens, he often vanished from home without a dime, to make long, ride-thumbing expeditions. Once, with a boyhood chum named Don Munson, he got as far south as Memphis. During the early stretches of the journey they got along by dint of Capp's ability to wheedle free hamburgers, and by Munson's deftness at snatching milk bottles from porches. But later they wandered through the Cumberland Mountains, sleeping in haystacks and living on the hospitality of farmers.
The ignorance and kindness of the people who took them in touched off the first, vague stirrings of Li'l Abner. Capp had already decided to become a cartoonist. "I heard that Bud Fisher (the creator of Mutt & Jeff) got $3,000 a week and was constantly marrying French countesses," he says. "I decided that was for me."
When he got home, he kept his mother's dining-room table littered with embryo cartoons, and cajoled neighbors' daughters into posing for portraits—usually alienating them forever by drawing them with pop eyes, big noses and teeth like alligators. In anticipation of fame, he sported an ancient camel's hair coat and a derby hat. He also developed a flair for cultivating "dopes who owned cars" and for dazzling pretty girls (located by consulting high-school annuals in public libraries) by telephone.
When he was 19, the family moved to Boston, and Al attended art schools. He went to three of them in rapid succession, and was thrown out of each for nonpayment of tuition. Then, seething with frustration and a belligerent faith in his own potentialities, he limped out to the highway and thumbed a ride to New York.
Six Months in the Wrong Room. He lived in "airless rat holes" in Greenwich Village, turned out advertising strips at $2 apiece and scoured the city hunting for jobs. Finally, the Associated Press agreed to pay him $50 a week to draw one of their stock cartoons—a one-panel imitation of Major Hoople called Colonel Gilfeather. Capp lasted only six months. But by the time he was fired he had discovered—by working 16 hours a day—what he needed to learn to become a professional.