38 Facts About Billy DeBeck

William Morgan DeBeck was an American cartoonist.

Billy DeBeck is most famous as the creator of the comic strip Barney Google, later retitled Barney Google and Snuffy Smith.

Billy DeBeck drew with a scratchy line in a "big-foot" style, in which characters had giant feet and bulbous noses.

William Morgan Billy DeBeck was born on April 15,1890, on the South Side of Chicago, where his father, Louis Billy DeBeck, was a newspaperman employed by the Swift Company.

The elder Billy DeBeck was of French descent, and the name Billy DeBeck was originally spelled DeBecque.

Billy DeBeck's mother, Jessie Lee Morgan, was of Irish and Welsh descent, and had lived on a farm and was a schoolteacher.

Billy DeBeck sold cartoon drawings during this time to finance himself, at first in 1908 for the Chicago Daily News.

Billy DeBeck's cartoons showed the influence of John T McCutcheon and Clare Briggs, whom he had admired in his youth; he had the skill to draw in the more fastidiously cross-hatched style of a Charles Dana Gibson, copies of whose drawings he sold as originals.

Billy DeBeck soon left Show World for better opportunities at Youngstown Telegram in Ohio as an editorial cartoonist, then again at the Pittsburgh Gazette-Time in late August 1912.

Billy DeBeck later contributed cartoons to the New York City humor magazines Life and Judge.

Billy DeBeck later stated the examples "were terrible" as he "had been doing political cartoons for the Pittsburgh Gazette, and the comics were new" to him.

Billy DeBeck returned to Youngstown and married Marion Louise Shields there in 1914.

The school was not a success, and Billy DeBeck returned to Chicago and joined the Chicago Herald in December 1915.

Billy DeBeck worked on a strip called Finn an' Haddie for the Adams Newspaper Service on the side.

Billy DeBeck's creations were first adapted to film when an animated version of Married Life appeared in a Seattle Sunday Times newsreel in 1917.

Billy DeBeck created a number of other features, especially for the sports section, while his antics made him something of a local celebrity.

When Billy DeBeck introduced the horse, he introduced a little-used technique into the strip: continuity.

Billy DeBeck kept readers on the edges of their seats with uncertain suspense: sometimes Spark Plug actually won a race.

Billy DeBeck brought in Sweet Mama, which initially created a stir, and certain papers dropped the strip, but after the phrase swept the nation, the strip's popularity only increased.

In 1923, Billy DeBeck Rose penned a Tin Pan Alley pop hit called "Barney Google ".

Billy DeBeck enjoyed traveling, deep sea fishing, golf and playing bridge.

Billy DeBeck was acquainted with such celebrities as Babe Ruth, Lowell Thomas and Damon Runyon.

Billy DeBeck was a refined city gentleman, an avid golfer, world traveler, and bon vivant.

Billy DeBeck wanted to create a rural down-home character with whom depression-era audiences could relate.

Lasswell recalls his "big tour with Billy" and the copious notes DeBeck took of Hillbilly phrases, while Lasswell drew sketches of backwoods characters, critters and scenes he already knew.

Billy DeBeck sent him to apprentice with some of the great illustrators, to study at the Art Students League in New York, and to walk the streets of the city with a sketchbook to capture the movement, personalities and situations he saw.

Billy DeBeck gained a growing interest into the culture of Appalachia in the 1930s and amassed a library on the subject that he later donated to Virginia Commonwealth University.

Just as the strip's circulation was starting to flag, Billy DeBeck introduced Snuffy in a storyline in which Barney inherited an estate in the mountains of North Carolina.

Billy DeBeck had a studio apartment on Park Avenue in New York, and homes in Great Neck in New York and St Petersburg in Florida.

Billy DeBeck's last signed daily strip appeared July 4,1942, and his last Sunday the following August 2.

On November 11,1942, Billy DeBeck died at the age of 52 in New York City, with his wife at his bedside.

In 1943, Mary Billy DeBeck donated to the Ringling School of Art all of her husband's art supplies, including drawing tables, reams of drawing paper, hundreds of colored pencils, lamps, drawing boards, inks, drawing pens, artist smocks, etching plates, and an etching press.

Billy DeBeck remarried, and died February 14,1953, aboard National Airlines Flight 470, a DC-6 that fell into the Gulf of Mexico during a thunderstorm on a flight from Tampa to New Orleans.

Billy DeBeck's drawing style falls in the "big-foot" tradition of American comic strips such as The Katzenjammer Kids, Hagar the Horrible, and Robert Crumb.

Billy DeBeck put Barney Google through great changes throughout his twenty-three-year run on the strip, changing situations and characters frequently.

Billy DeBeck included authentic expressions such as "plime-blank" and "a lavish of", and included explanations of dialect unfamiliar to his readers.

Billy DeBeck made the annual presentation of engraved silver cigarette cases, with DeBeck's characters etched on the cover, to the winners.

In 1954, after her death, the Billy DeBeck Award was renamed the Reuben Award after Rube Goldberg, and all of the earlier winners were re-awarded Reuben statuettes.