This week I thought I should show both Jimmie’s and Greg’s first published works. The story of Jim’s first comic is better known, since it got him his job. Here is how it was explained by Greg in the introduction to from Birdseye Center (1965):
So in 1910 at the age of nineteen, he arrived in Toronto and began searching for a job that would lead artwards. How he got into the shop of Rolph, Clark, Stone, the engraving and printing establishment, no one remembers. Living in a rooming house on Shuter street in downtown Toronto, he worked cheerfully on what must have seemed a pretty hopeless task for a young man with a talent tingling within him. Rolph, Clark, Stone had a big contract to produce immigrant settlement maps of Saskatchewan for the Canadian Pacific Railway. Jimmie’s job was to rule squares showing sections, half-sections, and quarter-sections of Western land, township by township.
Those sections or quarter-sections already bought or occupied had to be shaded with diagonal lines drawn across them. The empty squares were for sale. Jimmie drew the diagonal lines.
For six months, he worked at this engrossing task. Of the six daily newspapers in Toronto at that time (morning: Globe, Mail & Empire, and World; evening: Telegram, News, and Star), Jimmie’s favorite was the youngest and liveliest, the Star. Among the things that caught his eye was a controversy raging on the editorial page between the editor and a farm hand from down around Cobourg. The editor would write an editorial exalting the joys of rural life. A day or two later, the hired man would come back with a letter to the editor challenging the editor to come down to the country and take his job while he came up and edited the paper the way it ought to be edited. Recently off the farm, Jimmie was so tickled with this little battle, so like what some day was to transpire in Birdseye Center, that, one evening he sat down in his rooming house and drew a cartoon showing the editor, in a large editorial style hat, milking a cow in obvious distress. He mailed it to the Star.
Then followed the days of “what-iffing” to which young men of nineteen are subject. What if they printed his cartoon? What if they sent for him and said, “Mr. Frise, would you like a job here as a cartoonist?” What if…
Jimmie bought the noon edition of the Star each day. Day after day, no cartoon. A week went by. Ten days. No cartoon. The what-iffing died away. Then, on a Friday, after six months of diagonal line drawing, Jimmie got his pay cheque with a brief enclosure. Rolph, Clark, Stone had completed the CPR map contract, and Jimmie’s services were no longer required.
Jimmie retired to his rooming house. Well, it had been a good try anyway. To go back to polishing horses and feeding pigs no longer appealed to him, after his taste of the great city, with kindly billiard academies on every hand, and thousands of people, not dozens, to look at every day. He bought all three evening papers that Friday. They were one cent each. He took them to his room and searched the want ads. But search as he would, there was nothing that appeared to lead towards art or drawing or even to the income that might let him save a few dollars to go to an art school, of which there were a couple at that time in Toronto.
Nothing. He went to sleep dreaming of Scugog Island and a small farm. Saturday, he slept in. At noon he went out for a sandwich and bought the Star. He took it back up to his room on Shuter street. He turned first to the want ads. He studied them carefully, hopelessly. He fell asleep. When he woke it was nearly 5 P.M. Jimmie sat up and opened the paper at the front page, glanced at the news, turned casually to the editorial page. AND THERE IT WAS!
His little cartoon. Jimmie could scarcely believe his eyes. It was not like a miracle. It was a miracle. He snatched on his jacket and hat and rushed down to the Star office in the old building at 18 King Street West. Of course, being Saturday, it was all closed up. Last edition, about two P.M.
It was a long, long weekend for Jimmie. That paper was worn to pieces. He showed it to his landlady. (He had only a week’s rent paid in advance.) He found some of his Rolph, Clark, Stone pals and showed it to them. Sunday was a long day, full of prayer, though no church. Jimmie was not much of a church-goer.
Monday morning, eight o’clock, Jimmie was at the Star office. He showed the paper to the elevator man, Mr. Pyburn. Mr. Pyburn said that the gentleman in charge of the editorial page would be in any minute. So Jimmie stood in the corridor until he got the signal from Mr. Pyburn. He followed the small dapper gentleman into the elevator and up to his office.
“Excuse me,” said Jimmie, “but are you the gentleman I see about this….”
He held out the paper, cartoon exposed.
“Well, well,” said the Editor-in-Chief. “So you are Mr. Jas. Frise! We have been hunting all over town for you for the past ten days. All the art schools, the publishing houses, everywhere. …”
“I… uh…” said Jimmie.
“You forgot,” said the Editor-in-Chief, “to give us your address with your letter and drawing.”
That is how Jimmie joined the Star.