Al Capp
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_____. “Unforgettable Li’l Abner,” Reader’s Digest, June 1978.
_____. “Why I Am Not Rich,” Saturday Evening Post, March 1974.
_____. “Why Watergate?” Spectator, April 21, 1974.
Capp, Cathy [sic]. “Cathy Capp Says Dad Is Okay Guy,” Boston Globe, January 2, 1953.
Casey, Phil. “Capp-turing Laughter and Applause,” Washington Post, June 17, 1969.
Cooper, Morton. “Profile of a Character,” Modern Man, October 1958.
Cornell, John. “Yokel Boy Makes Good,” Los Angeles Times, July 21, 1940.
Cremmen, Mary. “Take a Lesson from Al Capp,” Pageant, March 1950.
Crist, Judith. “Horror in the Nursery,” Collier’s, March 27, 1948.
Crowther, Bosley. “The Screen: Li’l Abner,” New York Times, December 12, 1959.
Dobson, Gwen. “Al Capp—No One Is Neutral,” Oakland Tribune, July 5, 1970.
Doherty, John Stephen. “The Ribald Humor of Al Capp,” Climax, July 1959.
Domeier, Douglas. “Al Capp, Art Linkletter Speak Out for America,” Dallas Morning News, February 16, 1970.
Donald, Leroy. “With Turn of Shovel, Dogpatch Is More Than Paper and Ink,” Arkansas Gazette, October 4, 1967.
Du Brow, Rick. “Al Capp Will Be Featured in Hour-Long NBC Special,” Memphis Press-Scimitar, February 4, 1970.
Edgar, James. “Joe Palooka: Richest Pug in the World,” Maclean’s, August 1, 1950.
Fiddick, Peter. “Perennial Wiseguy,” Guardian, January 2, 1971.
Flanagan, James B. “Daly in Lions’ Den with Capp, Condon,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, June 14, 1965.
Flowers, Paul. “Cartoonist Al Capp a Dinosaur,” Memphis Commercial Appeal, August 22, 1971.
Freeman, Donald. “Al Capp on GOP Switch, ‘Hillbillies’ and Lawsuits,” San Diego Union, June 25, 1970.
Furlong, William. “Recap on Al Capp,” Saturday Evening Post, Winter 1971.
Galton, Lawrence N. “Al Capp: His Hillbilly Characters Are American Institutions,” Pageant, December 1945.
Gerrard, Michael. “Fascism’s Foe from Dogpatch,” Columbia Daily Spectator, December 4, 1969.
Goldberg, Hyman. “2 Daisy Maes Fight for Their Creator’s Favor,” New York Mirror, June 8, 1947.
Goldstein, Kalman. “Al Capp and Walt Kelly: Pioneers of Political and Social Satire in the Comics,” Journal of Popular Culture, Spring 1992.
Grobel, Lawrence. “The Playboy Interview: Goldie Hawn,” Playboy, January 1985.
Halbrooks, John. “Al Capp: Curmudgeon Emeritus,” Ambassador, June 1978.
Haney, Daniel Q. “Li’l Abner Retires, Takes All Dogpatch with Him,” Kansas City Star, November 13, 1977.
Harris, Harry. “Al Capp and Ustinov Square Off on Merv Griffin ‘Love-In’ Show,” Philadelphia Inquirer, May 1970.
Hazen, David W. “Meet Li’l Abner’s Real-Life Pappy,” Oregonian, January 16, 1938.
Heckman, Richard. “An Interview with Al Capp,” Boston, February 1964.
Hicks, Wilson. “Discoverer Remembers a Promising Pair,” Life, December 7, 1959.
Howard, Edwin. “Blam! That’s Capp: Students Go Zap!” Memphis Press-Scimitar, November 12, 1969.
Inge, M. Thomas. “Li’l Abner, Pogo, and Friends: The South in the American Comic Strip,” Southern Quarterly, Winter 2011.
Irwin, Virginia. “Al Capp and His Fertile Imagination,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 14, 1949.
Jennes, Gail. “Falling Popularity, Bad Health and a Family Tragedy Persuade Al Capp to Erase ‘Li’l Abner,’ ” People, October 24, 1977.
Jiler, George H. “Li’l Abner, Born Here 5 Years Ago, Heads for Movies,” Bridgeport Post, August 13, 1939.
Jones, Pat. “Happy Job for Marryin’ Sam,” Arkansas Gazette, October 29, 1968.
Kahn, E. J., Jr. “OOFF!! (SOB!) EEP!! (GULP!) ZOWIE!!!—I,” New Yorker, November 29, 1947.
_____. “OOFF!! (SOB!) EEP!! (GULP!) ZOWIE!!!—II,” New Yorker, December 6, 1947.
Katkov, Norman. “Li’l Abner’s Pappy,” Saga, November 1955.
Kraus, Dick. “The Story of Al Capp,” Calling All Boys, December–January 1947.
Kutner, Nanette. “Li’l Abner’s Mistuh Capp,” Esquire, April 1957.
Laas, William. “A Half-Century of Comic Art,” Saturday Review of Literature, March 20, 1948.
Lauritz, Phyllis. “Friends A-Feudin’ in So-Called Funnies; More Takeoffs Lurking in Fertile Minds,” Oregonian, August 29, 1957.
Leeming, Frank. Jr., “Dogpatch in Arkansas,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 1, 1968.
Liston, Carol. “Capp in Wrong Party to Oppose Kennedy,” Boston Globe, June 25, 1970.
Long, Barbara. “A Day at the Buckleys: Big Blight at Great Elm,” Village Voice, September 17, 1970.
Maeder, Jay. “Spitting on Pictures: Funny Papers, 1955,” New York Daily News, September 18, 1998.
Maitland, Leslie. “Dogpatch, U.S.A., Joins World of Fine Arts,” New York Times, April 16, 1975.
Mann, D. L. “Al Capp,” Open Road, December 1952.
Mannes, Marya. “Junior Has a Craving,” New Republic, February 17, 1947.
Manning, Annabel. “My Grandfather Draws Li’l Abner,” Jack and Jill, April 1973.
Marschall, Richard. “Al Capp: The Last Interview with Comics’ Master Satirist,” Comics Journal 54 (March 1980).
Marschall, Rick. “Saying Something About the Status Quo: Al Capp, Master Satirist of the Comics,” Nemo, April 1986.
Matthews, Gail. “Interview with Al Capp,” Yankee, April 1965.
Mattingly, Ignatius G. “Some Cultural Aspects of Serial Cartoons,” Harper’s, December 1955.
McCabe, Charles. “Old at 30?” San Francisco Chronicle, June 4, 1970.
McMaster, Jane. “Capp’s Position on Strip Opinion Draws Dissent,” Editor & Publisher, June 24, 1950.
_____. “Editor, Capp Disagree on Opinions in Strips,” Editor & Publisher, June 10, 1950.
_____. “ ‘Li’l Abner’ Sideline Is Shmoopendous,” Editor & Publisher, July 16, 1949.
Metz, Tim. “Leftists (for Once) Feel Satire’s Sting,” Wall Street Journal, March 31, 1970.
Nuhn, Roy. “Farewell to Li’l Abner and Daisy Mae,” Antique Trader Weekly, August 30, 1978.
Oppenheim, Carol. “Al Capp’s Denizens of Dogpatch Run Out of Time,” Chicago Tribune, November 13, 1977.
Ownes, Wayne. “ ‘Expert on Nothing’ Has Many Opinions,” Lake Charles American Press, April 16, 1970.
Peak, Mayme Ober. “Movie Mammy Yokum Has Plenty of Sock,” Boston Globe, August 11, 1940.
Perkin, Robert L. “Al Capp Has Turned into Inc. Enterprise,” Rocky Mountain News, May 30, 1954.
Quinn, Sally. “Appreciating Agnew,” Washington Post, November 13, 1970.
Rivers, Larry. “Al Capp Talks to Larry Rivers,” Interview, June 1975.
Rodell, Fred. “Everybody Reads the Comics,” Esquire, March 1945.
Seidenbaum, Art. “Liberals Fret: Is Li’l Abner Turning Against Them, Too?” Milwaukee Journal, April 4, 1967.
Shenker, Israel. “Al Capp, Harbinger of the Age of Irreverence, Gives Up Cartoon but Not Irascibility,” New York Times, November 11, 1977.
Sheppard, Eugenia. “The Morning After,” New York Post, April 18, 1975.
Storin, Matthew V. “Al Capp May Run Against Kennedy,” Boston Globe, June 19, 1970.
Sugar, Andy. “On the Campus Firing Line with Al Capp,” Saga, December 1969.
Toffler, Alvin. “The Playboy Interview: Al Capp,” Playboy, December 1965.
Wechsler, James A. “Non-Comic Strip,” New York Post, May 23, 1969.
_____. “Secrets of ‘Success,’ ” New York Post, February 15, 1973.
Whiting, Thelma. “ ‘Acid Al’ Capp Talks Politics,” Daily Hampshire Gazette, August 13, 1970.
Whitman, Howard. “Li’l Abner Makes a Killing,” Coronet, November 1941.
Wilson, M. J. “Millionaire Capp Tackles College Militants,” San Fran
cisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle, August 23, 1970.
Woodley, Richard. “Cappital Punishment,” Esquire, November 1970.
Manuscripts
Capp, Al. Autobiographical fragments. Loose pages, including three false starts to the longer autobiographies listed below.
_____. “Gus and Alvin.” Five typed, unpublished autobiographical fragments, presented as short stories.
_____. Untitled autobiography—1. 79-page typescript on yellow legal paper.
_____. Untitled autobiography—2. 80-page typescript on yellow legal paper.
Caplin, O. P. Dogpatch Road. A memoir written by Capp’s father. 498-page typescript.
Documents
Federal Bureau of Investigation Files on Al Capp, Cartoonist, Cambridge, Massachusetts. n.d.
State of Wisconsin Circuit Court, Eau Claire County: State of Wisconsin, Plaintiff, vs. Al Capp, Defendant, February 11, 1972.
United States Senate: Report of Proceedings: Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws of the Committee on the Judiciary: Mass Communications, December 17, 1958.
Plays
Caplin, Elliott. A Nickel for Picasso. A two-act, loosely biographical play, focusing on Al Capp’s childhood accident and its aftermath, offered as a fictional account. Capp and his parents are given especially strong portrayals. n.d.
Film/DVD
Imagine: John Lennon. Directed by Andrew Solt. Written by Sam Egan and Andrew Solt. Released by Warner Bros. on October 7, 1988.
Untitled. Unreleased black-and-white footage of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s confrontation with Al Capp in Montreal, provided by Will Peirce. n.d.
Recordings
Al Capp on Campus. Folkways Records No. FC 7353, 1959.
Plate Section
Alfred G. Caplin, before changing his name to Al Capp, age twenty-two, is drawing a “Mr. Gilfeather” panel cartoon at the Associated Press in New York in 1932. The mustache was short-lived and Capp never again sported facial hair.
Though he could afford to eat in fancy restaurants and often did, Al Capp also enjoyed diners and roadside cafes, as captured in this undated photo from the 1930s.
Undeterred by the early loss of his left leg, Al Capp loved to drive and was especially fond of new convertibles. In this photo from the early 1940s, he chauffeurs his daughters and their friends.
Capp assumed this jaunty pose around 1939. He was a chain smoker virtually his entire adult life, but the cigarette holder shown here was just a passing fad.
In mid-1940, during the shooting of the first Li’l Abner movie in Hollywood, Catherine (l), Al, and Al’s sister, Madeline, enjoyed a side trip to Yosemite National Park. While in California, Capp began a torrid love affair with singer Nina Luce, an affair that Madeline helped her brother keep secret.
While in Hollywood for the filming, Al Capp met many celebrities, including Lucille Ball. At a party that year thrown by composer George Antheil, Ball was flirting with Capp and repeatedly put her hand on his leg. Nina Luce, Capp’s lover at the time, disapprovingly looked on, then said to Antheil, “I hope she doesn’t get a splinter!”
Nina Luce and Al Capp in 1941. The two fell deeply in love in 1940 in Hollywood. Soon afterward, Nina left her singing career to be near Capp in Boston. Three months later, she fled to Texas, but Capp assiduously pursued her for another full year.
Tillie Caplin in 1943, with her four children and two oldest granddaughters. Back row: Elliot, Jerome (Bence), and Alfred. Bottom: Julie, Tillie, Madeline, and Cathie.
Actress Dorothy Lamour poses for Capp in this 1943 publicity shot.
During World War II, Al Capp provided a variety of public services. This 1943 photo shows him with an army poster in which Li’l Abner teaches soldiers the importance of saluting.
Capp, ever the voracious reader, at a New York City newsstand in 1949.
Al Capp (r) and his brothers, Elliot (l) and Bence, formed Capp Enterprises, Inc. in the late 1940s to market the shmoo and other “Li’l Abner” trademarks. In this 1950 publicity photo, they examine samples of licensed merchandise.
At a 1950 publicity shoot for a March of Dimes crusade against polio, Al Capp balances on his prosthetic leg to simulate kicking an inflatable kigmy toy.
Capp strikes a pensive pose in this 1950 publicity photo.
This undated and previously unpublished photo is the only known example where Al Capp’s single bare leg is visible.
Catherine, Al, and his daughters, Cathie and Julie, relaxing aboard a transatlantic cruise ship, likely the Isle de France, in the mid-1940s.
Al Capp often self-referentially placed himself into “Li’l Abner” strips, something almost no other cartoonist of his era did. (But then, no other cartoonist had his high public profile, either.) These previously unpublished and unfinished self-caricatures show how he roughly penciled an image before adding inked line work with pen and brush.
Publicity photo of Capp to promote the ABC-TV program Do Blondes Have More Fun?, which aired in August 1967.
His grandchildren were the emotional core of Al Capp’s later years, as epitomized by this 1964 image taken by Michael Pierce, a professional photographer who was married to the Capps’ youngest daughter, Cathie.
In April 1964, Otto Caplin’s children threw a surprise eightieth birthday party for him in New Haven, Connecticut. From left: Bence, Madeline, Alfred, Otto, and Elliot. Four months later Otto died.
After a career of overwhelmingly adulatory publicity, Capp’s last hurrah in the press was his lampooning of folk singer Joan Baez as the repulsive Joanie Phoanie in 1967. Capp’s increasingly strident political remarks and an eruption of sex scandals soon permanently turned public opinion against him.
Vice President Spiro Agnew shakes Al Capp’s hands in Washington, D.C., in November 1970 as Martha Mitchell, wife of Attorney General John Mitchell, looks on. Within three years, all three men fell hard: Agnew resigned in disgrace, John Mitchell was caught up in the Watergate scandal (later serving prison time), and Capp never recovered from headlines exposing his secret sex life.
President Richard Nixon shares a laugh with Al Capp in the White House in November 1970.
Capp (top left) and his attorneys leave the Eau Claire, Wisconsin, courthouse on February 1, 1972, after Capp pled guilty to reduced charges of attempted adultery. Though he received only a $500 fine, the satirist never recovered from the cumulative bad press and the moral hypocrisy the case exposed. Hundreds of newspapers soon dropped “Li’l Abner.”
Sunday panels from Ham Fisher’s “Joe Palooka” dated October 29, 1933, ghosted by his assistant Alfred Caplin. The question of which man created Big Leviticus, the hillbilly in the red shirt, was at the heart of a bitter lifelong feud between the two cartoonists.
Al Capp created hundreds of colorful characters over four and a half decades to supplement Dogpatch’s Yokum clan, the cornerstone of the epic comic strip. Two dozen recurring cast members are pictured here.
When crusading psychiatrist Dr. Fredric Wertham (Seduction of the Innocent) and others lobbied against the perceived evils of comic books during the late forties and early fifties, Al Capp responded with this satiric 1948 Sunday strip. To underscore the message, he had the page reprinted multiple times in “Li’l Abner” comic books.
In 1937, the ever-ambitious Capp created and wrote a second syndicated comic strip, “Abbie an’ Slats,” but he struggled to maintain script deadlines for artist Raeburn Van Buren. Finally, in 1945, Capp’s brother Elliot took over the writing of the series. Pictured here is a comic book edition.
From the late 1930s to the early 1950s, comic books were hugely popular in America. “Li’l Abner” newspaper strips were routinely recycled into this inexpensive format, first by other publishers, and eventually by Capp Enterprises’ own Toby Press.
Bumbling detective Fearless Fosdick—Li’l Abner’s “ideel” and the star of Capp’s periodic strip-within-a-strip was popular enough to sometimes take o
ver the cover of “Li’l Abner” comic books.
Dogpatch USA opened its doors in Arkansas in 1968, making Al Capp the only cartoonist besides Walt Disney with his own theme park.
Al Capp conveniently settled his lawsuit against United Feature Syndicate and wrested control of “Li’l Abner” merchandising rights just as the nation’s phenomenal love affair with the shmoo began in 1948. He and his brothers (Capp Enterprises, Inc.) were very successful in marketing the property, but one license, for Proctor & Gamble’s “Name the Shmoo” ad campaign, backfired. Some subscribing newspapers loudly complained that such exploitation diluted the value of the strip they were buying.
Al Capp’s prominence in the culture during his lifetime cannot be overstated. During one five-year period, he and his characters were featured as cover stories in three of America’s most popular magazines. He was a longtime regular guest on The Tonight Show and other TV talk venues, and, in addition to his enormously popular comic strip, the tireless Capp was for a while both a syndicated radio commentator and a newspaper columnist.
The appearance of the shmoo in “Li’l Abner,” starting in August 1948, generated an overwhelming demand for merchandise, only a small fraction of which is pictured here. Over one hundred shmoo products from seventy-five different manufacturers were produced within a year of the character’s inception, all of it licensed through Capp’s family-run corporation.