Gag a Day

It was a party Jiggs would have mightily enjoyed. Into the lofty grand ballroom of Manhattan's Waldorf-Astoria, shirt-sleeved waiters, sweating, bumping against chairs and calling hoarse warnings, ferried outsize trays of corned beef & cabbage. Powers models swirled among the 1,031 guests, handing out clay pipes. On the stage, aging Funnyman Arthur ("Bugs") Baer cracked wise, a line of Bloomer Girls pranced through a dance routine, Bing Crosby crooned Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral, and then Morton Downey sang it again.

When it was over, the guest of honor, a fat, button-nosed oldster who is regarded by his cronies as the spit & image of Jiggs, hustled back to work. George McManus was a little worried at taking two hours for lunch, even if Mr. Hearst was paying the bill.

Millionaire in Chains. The Waldorf-Astoria luncheon celebrated a comic-strip milestone: McManus had started Bringing Up Father in the old New York American exactly a third of a century ago. Its durability was a monument to the public's tolerance of a stereotype endlessly repeated, and to Publisher Hearst's taste in comics. Most readers were under the impression that Jiggs had never changed in all the years they had read it. But it wasn't so: the women's dress styles in Jiggs had advanced to circa 1928, and Jiggs himself looked quite different from his first appearance in 1912.

Silk-hatted Jiggs had made McManus a well-dressed millionaire--and had chained him to a seven-day week. In Manhattan last week to attend the lunch and to sign a contract for a series of Maggie & Jiggs movies, McManus borrowed an office. There he and assistant "Zeke" Zekley scratched away to keep up to date on the daily and Sunday strips for which more than 400 newspapers in 32 countries pay him more than $100,000 a year.

Nobody who reads Bringing Up Father can be sure whether Jiggs is a first name or a last (McManus doesn't know either), or how Jiggs made his money (McManus thinks he must have been an Irish contractor, since so many of his friends are hod carriers and steel workers). But of some things they may be sure, like their parents before them: Jiggs can't stand his wife's friends, lives in daily fear of her well-aimed rolling pin and crockery, but will never hit back. And there will never be a continued story in Jiggs. Says McManus: "I give 'em a gag a day."

Corn, but No Beer. The first strip McManus did for Hearst was a slapstick called The Newlyweds. Last year old Mr. Hearst got to remembering it--even though he couldn't remember its name--and ordered the artist to resume "that strip with the baby." So, since January, the Sunday Jiggs strip has had Snookums and the Newlyweds at its top. Hearst once told McManus that "rushing the growler" was out, since subscribers in dry states might be offended to see the characters lugging cans of beer.

"Then W.R. went on a trip," said McManus. "I kept on with the beer. Pretty soon came a wire from Kansas: 'I told you to take out the liquor.' Sometimes I think all he looks at is the comics."

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