Jimmy Hatlo

Jimmy Hatlo (1897-1963) was an American sports cartoonist who created the long-running comic strip "They'll Do It Every Time" in 1929. He worked on the strip until his death in 1963.His supplemental panel, "The Hatlo Inferno", ran from 1953 to 1958 in tandem with "They'll Do It Every Time". Hatlo's other strip, "Little Iodine", was adapted into a feature-length movie in 1946. Hatlo was recognized for his work with the National Cartoonist Society Newspaper Panel Cartoon Award for 1957 and 1959.

Hatlo was born James Cecil Hatlow in East Providence, Rhode Island, on September 1, 1897. His father, James M. Hatlow, a printer, had emigrated from the Orkney Islands. The original spelling of the family name became an inconvenience when, as a budding sports cartoonist, Hatlo fashioned a trademark signature with the "H" drawn as stylized goal posts and the "o" as a descending football. He shrank the "w" into a small apostrophe in the signature, but otherwise dropped it entirely.

When he was a small child the family moved to Los Angeles. As a young man Hatlo began doing incidental artwork and engravings for local newspapers, in an era when halftone reproduction of photographs was still limited.

Despite poor eyesight, after the United States entered World War I Hatlo went to Kelly Field, hoping to become an aviator. Instead he became a Spanish flu casualty and missed the war entirely.

Recovered, he relocated to San Francisco following the war and worked for both the San Francisco Call & Post and the "San Francisco Evening Bulletin". The papers later merged as the "San Francisco Call-Bulletin", part of the Hearst publishing empire. Hatlo at first drew "travelogues" for automobile advertising - illustrated maps that promoted auto travel (and thus, auto sales). But on the strength of his talent, he managed to work his way into editorial cartooning and then sports cartooning.

His break came when a shipment of panels from syndicated cartoonist Tad Dorgan failed to arrive in the mail. Hatlo was pressed into service to create something to fill the space. What resulted was "They'll Do It Every Time". It was an instant hit with the San Francisco audience. After several days, though, he began to run short on ideas. Various people - including Pat Frayne, Hatlo's managing editor at the time, and Scoop Gleason, his sports editor - later claimed credit for what happened next, but it may have been Hatlo himself who hit on the tactic of asking readers to submit their own ideas for the cartoons. Whatever the source, the gambit was a huge success. Hatlo picked the best submissions and credited each contributor by name, closing each cartoon with a box that read, "Thanx and a Tip of the Hatlo Hat to..."

"They'll Do It Every Time" became a fixture in the "Call-Bulletin". It wasn't long before it caught the attention of Hearst, a shrewd observer of comic art, and was picked up for distribution by Hearst's King Features Syndicate. Hatlo found himself with a national audience. The first book collection of the cartoon, a 100-page soft-bound from the David McKay Company in Philadelphia, appeared late in 1939. It was followed by two McKay hardcover collections during the 1940s - with the foreword to the first coming from no less than Damon Runyan.

In it, Runyan wrote that years before he had unsuccessfully tried to persuade his paper, the "New York American", to lure Hatlo away from San Francisco. He went on to say, "It is my opinion, that Hatlo is today one of the greatest cartoonists the newspaper business has ever produced. Certainly he is one of the most human, and humanness is the element that makes a great cartoonist... Hatlo's forte is mirroring every day people. He has marvelous insight into the minds and souls of folks we all know. He has a great ear for the common speech of the day. He knows our men and women as they are in their homes, in the street and under all conditions, the result of mingling with them and rubbing elbows with them. Hatlo pictures people as they are, not as they ought to be, or as he imagines them."

Runyan - a sportswriter himself -reminisced warmly about Hatlo's popular earlier football cartoons. He then concluded: "I have known the work of all the great cartoonists of the past thirty odd years in the newspaper business - I have known many of them personally, though that is not germane to an appraisal of their work, and I believe that Jimmy Hatlo rightly belongs in the first rank with them. I believe, too, that his cartoons represent a contribution to the entertainment of the American people at this time that is unsurpassed in any field."

Hatlo's success also attracted imitators, and a rival syndicate launched a clone cartoon titled "There Oughta Be A Law."

After World War II, Hatlo settled in Carmel, California, where he became part of a cartoonist community that over time included such artists as Gus Arriola, Frank O'Neal, Eldon Dedini, and Hank Ketcham.

Other collections of "They'll Do It Every Time" - Avon paperbacks - followed throughout the 1950s. At their peak, Hatlo's cartoons appeared in over 400 newspapers worldwide. "Little Iodine," a spin-off comic strip featuring a mischievous little girl who had become one of Hatlo's stock characters, even got her own series of comic books.

Hatlo's popularity was perhaps at its highest in the early 1950s. He was profiled in a 1952 feature article in "The Saturday Evening Post" titled "He Needles the Human Race." Ironically, that was the year that an emerging strip from a cartoonist a generation younger, Charles M. Schulz, first broke into the color "Sunday funnies." Reportedly, Hatlo was not a big fan of Schulz' simple style - but "Peanuts" would eventually usher in sweeping changes in public taste (and artistic entry-level requirements) for newspaper cartoons.

A lifelong smoker - Hatlo once appeared in magazine and newspaper ads for Lucky Strike cigarettes, his favorite brand - and a product of an era when newspapermen only asked for water if they were adding it to scotch or bourbon, Hatlo was troubled in his later years by atherosclerosis. A few days after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Hatlo was hospitalized for a kidney condition. He died of a stroke early on December 1, 1963.

The Canadian Seth_(cartoonist) reminisced over Hatlo's work in his picture novella "It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken".

External links

* [http://www.toonopedia.com/theydoit.htm "They'll Do It Every Time" at Toonopedia]
* [http://www.reuben.org/ncs/awards.asp NCS Awards]