One of them that I remember from when I was a kid was Cappy Dick.
(Cappy Dick didn’t run in the Lorain Journal. It was in the comics section of the Sunday Plain Dealer, which my parents used to buy before the Journal launched its own Sunday edition in the late 1960s.)
So what was Cappy Dick? It was a feature designed specifically for kids that contained an assortment of small cartoons with puzzles, useful tidbits of information, simple tricks and suggestions for activities using things found around the house to have fun. The strip's mascot was the kindly, pipe-smoking sea captain after whom the feature was named.
There was also a weekly coloring contest with prizes awarded to local winners in each city, as well as one at the national level who received a pretty nice grand prize.
Here are a few samples of the feature.
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| March 16, 1965 |
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| June 10, 1973 |
Here’s an article that ran in the Arizona Daily Star on December 1, 1979 that profiles some of the local winners. It reveals the secret of their success!
The article also tells a little bit about the man behind Cappy Dick: cartoonist George Cleveland. “He started it during World War II, when he thought kids needed something special to do,” it notes. “The character Cappy Dick looks like Cleveland’s father. He made the character a ship captain for fun."
Here’s a more detailed look at the man from an article published in the Chicago Tribune at the time of his passing. As it notes, “He did not have children of his own, but with his mental-exercise comics, he found a way to be someone special to hundreds of thousands of preteens.
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| From the Chicago Tribune of May 2, 1985 |
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For more on Cappy Dick, visit this link, which will take you to a blog written by a gentleman named Matt Tauber. Matt wrote a nice piece about his memories of the strip, and reveals an interesting connection between the Cappy Dick strip and a current one called Slylock Fox (which I read and find pretty amusing).