Cowboy Cartoonist

Every weekday 20,000,000 Americans rustle through the back pages of their newspapers to read a single-frame comic that looks as though it might have been drawn by a gifted, quizzical schoolboy. It is called Out Our Way and it is published in more newspapers (725 daily; 230 Sunday) than any other comic in the world. Unlike most U. S. comics, it has no continued story, no gags, no grotesque exaggerations, no scenes set in fantastic eras of the distant future or past.

Often it is pathetic rather than funny. The people it depicts are simple, worried U. S. proletarians: weedy, bedraggled cowhands, tintypical Americans of a generation ago. Some of them (the shambling, baggy Negro Big Ick, the fiddle-case-footed shop foreman "Bull of the Woods," the blowzy, ingeniously self-thwarting moppet "Worry Wart") are as real to newspaper readers as their own cousins. Its homely humanity, bleak realism, and salty, Mark Twainish humor have attracted the attention of Americana-collecting highbrows, have earned for its author the title "Will Rogers of the Comic Strip."

No product of the bustling, big-town press room, Out Our Way is penned day after day on an isolated ranch near Prescott, Ariz., by a lanky, grey-eyed cattle rancher named James Robert Williams. There, dressed in old blue jeans and riding boots, Jim Williams rides with his ranch hands over 45,000 acres of juniper-dotted Arizona range country, wrangling, bulldogging, branding, rounding up about 600 head of white-faced Hereford cattle.

Between roundups, Rancher Williams sticks close to his natty, tile-roofed ranch house, pokes about his green alfalfa fields, hunts a little, and thinks up ideas for Out Our Way. When he has a batch of drawings finished (he has a hard time keeping ahead of his deadline) he ships them off in a swanky Cadillac 40 miles over rutted dirt roads to Prescott, where they are mailed to the NEA syndicate headquarters in Cleveland, Ohio.

Jim Williams himself seldom goes to town, hasn't visited a big city in nearly ten years, principally because he hates to change from his blue jeans to store clothes. Last week, while city readers were chuckling over his latest pictures of Big Ick and Worry Wart, Jim Williams was busy with a branding iron, sizzling his K4 and Lazy C Bar brand into the hides of this spring's crop of heifers.

One thing that surprises most people about Jim Williams' cartoons is the scope of their subject matter. He can draw a machine-shop scene one day, a cattle ranch the next, then a small-town home of the early igoos, and get all his details right, make his characters true to life in each environment. Reason: Jim Williams has, at one time or another, lived or known all his characters himself.

Born 52 years ago in Nova Scotia, Jim Williams was taken as a baby to Detroit, where he grew up, spent one year half-heartedly studying art at Mount Union College. At 15, big and husky as a man, he quit school to roam the Southwest as ranch hand, camp cook, mule skinner, tattoo artist. He was a crack rider with the 15th Cavalry at Fort Sill, Okla. Mustered out, he married, smashed baggage at Chicago's old Northwestern railroad station, got a broken nose as a professional prize fighter, finally settled down as a machinist's assistant in the shops of Alliance (Ohio) Machine Co. His foreman at Alliance, the late Charles T. Williams (no relation), became the model of Bull of the Woods. Meanwhile, Jim Williams had been taking a course in cartooning from the International Correspondence School. All the drawings he submitted to the papers bounced back.

In 1922, with two children to support and his machinist job gone in a seasonal shutdown, Jim Williams did the hardest work of his life as a coal-heaver in a Detroit power plant, finally, in desperation, applied for a job as a policeman. Just as he had been accepted for the force, NEA decided it liked some of his drawings, asked him to go to Cleveland, offered him a contract to do a cartoon a day. At first Jim Williams' cartoons had hard sledding. Irate Cleveland dowagers wrote letters to the Cleveland Press, complaining that nobody wanted to see pictures of a lot of dirty machinists. But when 100,000 Cleveland shopworkers threatened to boycott the paper if Williams' cartoons were withdrawn, Williams' reputation was made.

With financial worries behind him, Jim Williams developed an uncontrollable nostalgia for Arizona, where he had spent his youth. When he discovered that he didn't have to stay in Cleveland to do his cartooning he sold a Cleveland home that had cost him $65,000, shopped around for a likely ranch, and finally settled down in the lonely, Southwestern cow country where he lives today. One reason he bought his ranch: four men had been killed on it, one is buried under the basement of his kitchen.

Today 52-year-old Jim Williams, top man of all NEA's cartoonists, can afford to live as he likes. Under his high-spending management, the ranch (it has never made a red cent) has become one of the show places of the region. But he is shyly conscious of being a little more prosperous than his neighbors, is afraid of being thought a showoff. Talkative and genial, he walks with the swivel-hipped, bowlegged, rolling gait of a cowboy, wears his heart on his sleeve, tells his most intimate business to anybody who happens to be around. A sure sucker for any kind of financial venture, he has lost enough money on bogus oil stock to keep many of his neighbors in beans for a lifetime.

Between ranching and cartooning, he sometimes finds time to try a little serious sculpture and watercolor painting. But most of his leisure he spends puttering about the ranch, building rock gardens, making inlaid silver ornaments, casting fancy doorsteps and fountains out of colored cement. At 52 Jim Williams is proud of his sinewy, paunchless figure, boasts that he weighs the same 168 lb. that he did when he was a cowpuncher at 15. Says he: "All my life my hands and body have earned me a living. I have kept them in good shape to this day."

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