1948: Remembering the NCS in St. Petersburg, Florida

This is one of those things I ran into on the Web. I don't know what I was searching for, but this popped up and since it had some great art and photos. OK, the photos are darn muddy, but , hey, I had to share. So, here's the St. Petersburg Times' enthusiastic coverage of a National Cartoonists Society exhibit of cartoons from 1948.


Above cartoon splash page by Dick Bothwell, "described as 'the St. Petersburg edition of Will Rogers."' This was back in the day when every newspaper had a staff cartoonist. The larger papers had more than one.

Milt Caniff, Rube Goldberg and other NCS luminaries made the trip down to Florida for the festivities surrounding this show of original cartoon art that had traveled from the Nyack, NY Rockland Foundation Gallery. And why not? It was in a great hotel, with warm weather and year-round golf.


From the St. Petersburg Times, March 21, 1948.


The show was at the Soreno Hotel in St. Petersburg, a large, beautiful hotel and resort which was built in 1923, shuttered in 1984, and "its 1992 implosion lives on to this day at the end of the movie 'Lethal Weapon III.'"



At Memorial Hospital in New York City [,] members of the National Cartoonists Society decorated the walls of the Children's Cancer Ward with their characters. Left to right: Otto Soglow, Milton Caniff, C.D. Russell, Rube Goldberg, Russell Patterson, Gus Edson, Ernie Bushmiller and Joe Shuster.

Above: a courtesy photo that was reprinted in the Times. Just look at that line up of cartoonist greats, huh? And the NCS continues the tradition of visiting hospitals to this day.