When Sports Pages Were Fun – Dec. 1950

Regular readers of this blog might remember that I’m a big fan of the Toronto Maple Leafs (which I wrote about back here and here). So it’s not too surprising that I was happy to see the above illustration of Toronto Maple Leaf center Max Bentley, which ran on the sports page of the Lorain Journal back on December 7, 1950.

The main reason I posted this is because it was a reminder of when sports pages used to be fun to look at and we looked up to our sports heroes. Not only was there comprehensive coverage of all sports at the national level, with articles along with the scores, but there were also all of the local scores in bowling, etc., mixed in with the liquor ads.

Best of all, there were sometimes little cartoons of the team mascots in battle, and little syndicated features that profiled athletes. In this case, the profile of Max Bentley was a panel created by artist Alan Maver and provided by King Features Syndicate.

Here’s another Alan Maver sport panel with a hockey theme.

Clipping of a Alan Maver hockey panel from 1955
featuring Montreal Canadiens great Jean Beliveau

By the way, there’s a fine selection of original paste-up art of many of Maver’s sports panels from the 1930s right into the 1980s on eBay right now. They show an artist at the very top of his craft, and are very affordable.

And here’s the artist himself (sorry about the Historic Images watermark).

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I did a write-up on another syndicated newspaper feature, “Scott’s Scrapbook,” back here. I also wrote about "Ask Andy" and “Cappy Dick."