Percy Lee Crosby was an American author, illustrator and cartoonist best known for his comic strip Skippy.
27 Facts About Percy Crosby
1.
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Percy Crosby was born in Brooklyn, New York, prior to the 1898 incorporation of the five boroughs of New York City.
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Percy Crosby grew up in Richmond Hill, in what would be the borough of Queens but at the time was considered part of Long Island.
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Percy Crosby's father, Thomas Francis Crosby, the son of Catholic immigrants from County Louth, Ireland, was an amateur painter who ran an art supply business.
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Percy Crosby quit high school during his sophomore year to take a job as an art department office boy at editor Theodore Dreiser's magazine The Delineator.
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Percy Crosby was quickly promoted to artist, but the job ended after one issue.
7.
Percy Crosby next became a sports columnist and illustrator at The New York Globe.
8.
Percy Crosby won the $75 prize and saw his cartoon appear in every newspaper in New York City.
9.
The painter and League president Gifford Beal, recognizing Percy Crosby's talent, invited him to spend the summer in Cape Cod, where Percy Crosby made the acquaintance of Edwin Dickinson, Edward Hopper, Eugene O'Neill and other habitues of the Provincetown, Massachusetts artists colony.
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Percy Crosby concurrently became a prolific contributor to Life, where several of his cartoons featured a child named Timmy, who became the prototype for Skippy Skinner when Percy Crosby pitched art director Frank Casey about a regular feature.
11.
Percy Crosby retained the copyright, a rarity for strip artists of the time.
12.
Percy Crosby published a Skippy novel and other books; there were Skippy dolls, toys and comic books.
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From 1928 to 1937, Percy Crosby produced 3,650 Skippy strips, ten books of fiction, political and philosophical essays, drawings and cartoons, as well as numerous pamphlets, while mounting a dozen exhibitions in New York City, Washington, DC, London, Paris and Rome of his oils, watercolors and other paintings and drawings.
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Percy Crosby later dated the torch singer and stage-musical actress Libby Holman and became friends with such actresses as Colleen Moore, Elsie James and Marilyn Miller.
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Percy Crosby fell in love with the secretary assigned to him, Vassar graduate Agnes Dale Locke, and the two were married on April 4,1929.
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Life dropped him when Percy Crosby agreed to do humorous cartoons only if the magazine agreed to publish his political work as well; the rival magazine Judge obliged.
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Percy Crosby fired editorial broadsides at the gangster Al Capone.
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The previous year, Percy Crosby had begun drinking again, and his behavior became increasingly erratic.
19.
Percy Crosby's marriage suffered, and after a violent episode in February 1939, Crosby left for Florida for two weeks.
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Years of expensive litigation followed, which Percy Crosby's heirs have continued into the 2000s.
21.
Percy Crosby's beloved strip Skippy suffered; as his biographer, Jerry Robinson, wrote:.
22.
In December 1948, Percy Crosby was committed to the psychiatric ward of Bellevue Hospital after attempting suicide following the death of his mother.
23.
Percy Crosby's confinement was authorized by Arthur Soper, an uncle of Crosby's wife.
24.
Percy Crosby's estranged daughters Barbara and Joan had graduated from Vassar College, and Carol from the Rhode Island School of Design, without having known of their father's whereabouts; son Skip had become a geologist.
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Percy Crosby had received infrequent visits from his two sisters, and from his cartoonist friend Rube Goldberg.
26.
On December 8,1964, after a heart attack that had left him in a coma for months, Percy Crosby died in the asylum on his 73rd birthday.
27.
Percy Crosby was buried in Pine Lawn Veterans' Cemetery on Long Island.