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"Don't pay any attention to my husband, Mr. McCully, he's so full of port he doesn't know which side is starboard!"

... "Good Lord, McCully, is this the usually reliable source you've been quoting?"

Wherever this fine old Celtic name appears in a cartoon caption it means that the cartoonist is paying sly tribute to the man who provided the idea. Over the last eight years, Bob McCully has written somewhere between 9,000 and 10,000 memos to cartoonists suggesting situations and punch lines.

Approximately 1,000 of these ideas have been snatched up by grateful cartoonists and editors whose springs of creativeness were, at that moment, running somewhat sluggishly.

Bob has received as much as $50, as little as $1 for ideas. Thinking up cartoon gags can be extremely rewarding financially, especially when one considers that it involves no investment beyond postage. And the person with a basic feeling for human nature will find it a highly diverting and creative hobby.

With Bob McCully, as with hundreds of other people around the United States, cartoon gags are strictly a hobby.

"There are about fifty professionals in the field whose sole income is from cartoon gag work," says Bob.

"Most of them," he adds, "are very good."

A member of one of Pittsburgh's busiest public relations firms, Ketchum, Inc., Bob puts in full days on the Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce account.

Nights and Sundays he retires to his bachelor apartment, scowling and fuming as he painfully wrests from his mind the ideas that some weeks hence will draw guffaws—or at least amused grins—from millions of readers.

Cartoons drawn around his gags have appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, New Yorker, Collier's, Ladies' Home Journal, This Week, Argosy, True, hundreds of newspapers and various obscure publications in foreign lands.

"I always get a kick out of seeing one of my gags in a foreign language," comments Bob.

THE QUALITIES which go into successful cartoon creation, Bob holds, are similar to those required by every other creative line of endeavor from painting a wall to building a cathedral: persistence and sustained effort.

You need not be a dazzling wit nor the life of the party nor a penetrating critic of the human scene who finds comment and satire in every situation.

"What you do need, I think," says Bob, "is some understanding of humor. A person who has no feeling for what constitutes a humorous situation could waste an awful lot of time trying to develop cartoon ideas.

"Sometimes the gags come to mind pretty easily; sometimes I just have to sit down and think them out," says Bob. "Though, on the whole, I think the more you write, especially the more you write at one, sustained sitting, the easier it goes."

A lanky six-footer, Bob got started in the cartoon gag hobby late in World War II during his service in the Navy. For reasons best known to the Bureau of Naval Personnel, he was assigned to a special services group on the West Coast, with the specific assignment of handling publicity for the Fleet City Bluejackets, one of the crack service football teams.

The group to which he was assigned threw him into contact with some extremely talented persons, some of whom were then well on their way toward eminence in the entertainment field. Among them were Red Benson, now master of ceremonies on a network television show, and Bill Bailey, a well-known television performer in the Chicago area.

Bob worked with them on the preparation of comedy material and both urged him to try something along commercial lines. At their suggestion he tried radio scripts, and succeeded to such an extent that he was able to make his living for a couple of years after leaving service by writing for the networks.

About the same time he gave cartoons a try. He had only recently learned that cartoonists sometimes paid for ideas.

So he began leafing through magazines, noting the cartoonists whose work seemed to strike some responsive chord in his creative makeup. He compiled a list of about twenty-five, and wrote a letter to each, inquiring whether he was in the market for cartoon ideas. He did not, at that first approach, submit any material.

"Some were interested, some weren't," Bob relates. "Those who were, said they would be glad to look at any ideas I sent along."

So he sent out his first cartoon ideas, a batch of a dozen or so.

"I have never sent out just one," says Bob, a great believer in Branch Rickey's axiom that in quantity there is very likely to be quality.

All but a few bounced back, and none sold, though the cartoonist—Bob cannot now recall what artist he took his trade to first—wrote him a note to say that he was holding three or four for possible future use.

Along with thinking up and mailing out new batches of cartoon situations, McCully was adding to his mailing list by querying the artists whose work in magazines struck him.

He made his first sale—"What a day that was," he recalls—to Mischa Richter whose "Strictly Richter" panel, distributed by King Features Syndicate, appears in the Hearst chain and hundreds of other daily newspapers in this country. Another early sale was to a struggling young cartoonist who had just pulled out of the Walt Disney studios to try his luck free-lancing. His name is Hank Ketcham, but he is perhaps better known today as the creator of Dennis the Menace.

Bob first cracked the slick, selective pages of the Saturday Evening Post with one of the eternally popular big sister-little brother-boy friend situations.

A teen-age girl, presumably only recently emerged from the tomboy stage, is entertaining a young man in the living room. The pestiferous little brother enters to suggest that his sister show her visitor how she can hold five Ping-Pong balls in her mouth at one time!

Drawn by cartoonist Mort Walker, in his familiar, deceptively simple style, the cartoon was a great hit and has appeared in several anthologies."

THE EVOLUTION of this idea in Bob's mind is a revealing demonstration of how cartoon ideas come to him, or more accurately, by what painful and devious routes he finally comes to the idea.

He was leafing through Pittsburgh's classified telephone directory, a work which the Bell organization may be flattered to know is a source of frequent inspiration. It seems to give his mind the flick it needs to start it spinning, and where it will stop no one knows, as in the case of the Ping-Pong ball gag.

This idea was conceived in the section of the directory headed "Plumbing—Retail."

"Plumbing," mused Bob. It suggested a house. "House, hmm." A house suggests a family. "Family, heh?"

Father, mother, sister, brother. This evolved into the eternal plight of the youthful sister trying to maintain her precarious and recently-acquired glamor in the face of an unimpressed small brother.

What might such a brother say that would distress and mortify the sister ... thus slowly emerged the Ping-Pong ball gag.

If this sounds rather far flung, just try to chase one of your own ideas back to its point of origin.

"There are people who can just look around, on the street or at parties, in restaurants or on buses and see cartoon possibilities in dozens of situations," Bob says wryly. "Not me. I have to sit down and just plain think 'em up."

McCully sends his cartoon ideas out on small 6-by-3½-inch cards, using a minimum of words. Here's how the card read which he submitted with an idea that eventually appeared as a cartoon in This Week magazine.

SCENE: Four garbagemen are standing beside the garbage can in the backyard of a house. Each one is holding his cap in his hand. The lady of the house is standing nearby. She seems embarrassed as one of the garbagemen says:

TITLE: "... and so we're proud to announce that you've been selected as Miss Sanitary Garbage Can of 1949."

Sometimes his ideas are taken exactly as he proposes them; sometimes the idea is retained and the scene and wording somewhat changed, as in the following:

SCENE: A young fellow has taken his girl friend out for dinner. They are sitting at a table in an expensive restaurant. The girl has an elaborate meal spread out on the table in front of her. The young fellow has a sad expression on his face as the girl says—

TITLE: "I'm giving up my diet just for your sake tonight, Jim."

As drawn by Hoff in the New Yorker, scene and title are slightly altered but the idea is essentially the same.

Incidentally, if you should be thinking in terms of the New Yorker, do not submit material to individual cartoonists. Send it to the cartoon editor who will, if he likes it, farm it out to one of the New Yorker's regular cartoonists.

One of that magazine's most famous cartoons, the one of the fencer who cries "Touche" as he decapitates his partner, was submitted to the magazine by a gag man who recommended that it be passed on to a certain cartoonist.

But the editor saw it as a natural for the inimitable style of James Thurber and it has become one of the Thurber classics.

Esquire similarly buys direct from gag men and passes the ideas out to cartoonists of its own choosing. But as a general practice, Bob aims his gags at the cartoonist rather than at any specific magazine, and sends his ideas direct to cartoonists.

TO EXTRACT the maximum revenue from this hobby, Bob maintains a bookkeeping system only slightly less complex than that of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co.

His system, employing carbon duplicates of the cards described above, permits him to know in whose hands any given idea is at any given moment, and where it has been previous to that. When and if a cartoon based upon one of his ideas appears in print, it is clipped out and attached to the duplicate idea card and filed permanently.

Cartoonists, he finds, are honest but disorganized individuals. Few would deliberately fail to pay the idea man who provided the idea for a successful (ie., saleable) idea. But there are many who keep only the most casual of records, and by the time a cartoon has been drawn and sold, the artist may have forgotten completely where the idea came from. A courteous letter of reminder, Bob finds, seldom fails to bring prompt payment.

The matter of payment is by no means hard and fast. Most gag men work on a percentage basis, running from 25 to 33¹/3 per cent of the sale price of the cartoon.

"If you know the market," Bob explains, "you have a general idea of what the minimum sale price was. A magazine editor once told me he didn't know of any business where the creator of humor—the gag man, that is—is so much at the mercy of a co-worker.

"That's true, of course. But in my experience almost all the cartoonists I've dealt with have sincerely tried to stay on the up and up.

"They have their problems, too. What they submit to editors generally is not a finished cartoon. It's a roughed-in, pencil sketch. If the editor likes it he may make suggestions for revisions. If he doesn't the cartoonist tries another editor.

"And maybe these sketches will circulate around for three or four years before they sell. Unless the cartoonist takes the time to keep full, permanent records he may have the best of intentions about paying his gag man but not be able, for the life of him, to remember who provided him that particular idea three or four years ago."

Bob always keeps in mind the fact that this is strictly a hobby with him. He keeps in mind, too, that in many cases the reason a particular idea is successful is because of the established name and the individual skill of the cartoonist who sells the finished product.

"A cartoonist has a rough job," Bob says. "He is competing in a knock down, drag-out market. He must evaluate the gags he receives. He must sketch the gag. He must hustle around offices of editors in New York, if he happens to live there, or mail out the roughs if he lives outside the New York area.

"As to whether or not that gag he is trying to peddle is original, he has nothing to go on but the word of the gag man. A gag man who steals ideas and tricks the cartoonist into trying to sell them as originals can ruin an honest cartoonist. The cartoonist's reputation rides on what he sells. The gag man, working in complete anonymity as far as the editors and the public are concerned, does not share that responsibility.

"Still, it's a two-way street. I have heard a leading editor comment: 'A good gag will always sell, even with a bad drawing. But good drawing can never sell a poor gag.'"

IT PROBABLY would not be wholly honest to suggest that anyone can become even an occasionally successful producer of cartoon ideas. Certainly it requires some natural flair for comedy and sense of humor (yet who of us is without one, however deep it may be buried?), some knack for dramatizing a comical idea in a simple, easily sketched scene and a few words of explanatory dialogue.

But as a hobby there is this to be said for it: You need not make one cent of investment beyond postage. You need not own nor know how to operate a typewriter; for the few words required in a cartoon suggestion, a legible pen and ink note is highly satisfactory. All the magazines you need are available in any public library.

If you would care to give this appealing hobby a whirl, here are a few suggestions from the successful Bob McCully to guide you on your way:

1. Study lots of cartoons. This gets you thinking along the lines of situations and titles.

2. Don't assume that you have failed because one or two or a dozen gags fail to sell. This is a field in which quantity pays. Any cartoonist is more likely than not to look at one idea and reject it. But out of a dozen he is very likely to see one or more that strikes him. Like baseball managers and Fuller brushmen, you're playing for the percentages.

3. Keep your ideas general. Jokes involving the home, the family, the office are always good. But try also to be somewhat topical. Remember the rash of jokes just after World War II built around such issues of the day as the housing shortage, the high price of used cars, taxes, etc. Later came the wave of cartoons involving television, the fad for ranch style homes and picture windows.

4. Keep the seasons in mind. Remember that magazines start to think about material for the Christmas issue sometime in mid-summer. A Fourth of July cartoon is much more likely to sell in February than it is in June.

5. Remember and be cheered by the thought that the market for cartoon ideas is getting bigger every day. More and more magazines are running more and more cartoons. Editors have found them to be a splendid device for brightening otherwise forbidding pages of type and for pulling readers in to the back of the book.

6. You have Bob's word that once you have made a serious effort in this cartoon idea field, you will find yourself developing a flair for brief, humorous, forceful writing. The potential here is vast. Many who started out as cartoon idea writers have graduated to humorous essays and skits. Many, including Bob, have acquired an amazing knack for contests of the "finish this sentence in twenty-five words or less" and the last line of a limerick variety.

7. When you send out gags, enclose a stamped, self-addressed return envelope.

8. There are a few good books on the general field of cartoons, gags, etc. Most adequate libraries carry them. Ask your librarian.

9. Once you have made a sale or two expand your mailing list of cartoonists, selling yourself in your new letters of query on the basis that you have successfully sold to so-and-so and it appeared in ...