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I’ve had reasons for going through old newspapers, and recently I subscribed to Newspapers (dot) com so I would have access to The Call, a newspaper established in 1919 in Kansas City and intended for a Black audience in the Missouri/Kansas area and beyond. The archived issues start in 1932, so that’s where I had to start.
At first my searches weren’t terribly efficient. It took me a wee moment to figure out how to look at specific editions, but while I was floundering with the standard name search, I also read the rest of the papers that turned up. Lindberg baby kidnapping in real time. Al Capone’s messages from Leavenworth. (“Let me out and I’ll help with the Lindberg search.”) The woman who was thought to be 129 years old. A woman who witnessed Quantrill’s raid in Kansas. The unfortunate funeral in a private house in Baltimore where the floor collapsed, taking coffin, piano, and mourners to the cellar and breaking a gas line along the way.
And that’s when I discovered the work of Oliver Wendell Harrington, who sometimes signed his work as “Old” Harrington or “Ol” Harrington or “Ollie” Harrington. He did many, many political cartoons during his very long career, but the first I saw of his work was a comic strip, “Jive Gray”.
This strip appeared above the actual ongoing storyline strip for a while.
Jive Gray was supposed to have been an air ace in the War, turned news reporter, and based on an actual flyer. He did seem to get himself into a fair number of situations, because of course, otherwise there would be nothing to read.
This is the best I found that isn’t behind a paywall. The clips above are from The Call newspaper, but that’s accessed through the paid service of Newspapers (dot) com.
I don’t want to push the fair use too far, so I’ll link to other sources, where you can read about his life and see some political cartoons. I haven’t found a compilation of the Jive Gray storyline, though. It stopped abruptly in 1951. The top of this page is general boilerplate. The part about Ollie Harrington and Jive Gray starts below the line. You can see political cartoons on this page, including a very early Jive Gray strip. And here is a perspective of Jive Gray and Old Harrington in depth.
Oliver Harrington moved abroad, eventually ending up in East Berlin, where he requested asylum. He continued his work for many years from there, and that’s where he died in Berlin in 1995.
I read Terry and the Pirates growing up in the 1950s, but I’d never heard of Jive Gray. I think he deserves a wider audience.
