Sometimes you teeter on the edge of the larger world,
tilting toward the vastness that is wider acclaim and then swaying back toward
the warm confines of virtual anonymity. The best I can figure, Tom Ward
experienced just that sort of career. He was an artist and cartoonist from the
tiny south-eastern Indiana berg of Aurora, a quiet community nestled into a
bend in the Ohio River closer to Cincinnati, OH and Louisville, KY than the
state capitol and in March of 1949 when the story of his creation of the comic
strip Hub Capp garnered a page in Boy's Life. According to the article,
Ward wanted to become a race car driver and even worked in his father's auto
garage, but eventually settled for penning a racing-based strip.
Just missing the draft and World War II, Ward attended the Cincinnati
School of Art and eventually found his way to then Indianapolis Motor Speedway
President Wilbur Shaw's desk seeking access to Gasoline Alley its driver and
mechanic inhabitants. Cotton Henning and George Connor granted Ward access and,
like many drivers and mechanics of that era, the cartoonist moved in as a
boarder with a Speedway family.
The Boy's Life column
goes on about the people Ward met in his season at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway,
nailing the life and lingo of the drivers and mechanics. On April 10, 1950 Racing Days with Hub Capp was
copyrighted to appear in The Indianapolis
Times, from there the racer disappears in a cloud of smoke and dust. How
long the strip ran is a mystery, at least as far as the internet is concerned.
I'll have to do more digging to find out the facts, maybe the library has a
trove of Hub Capp to be delved into. Perhaps fodder for another racing season?
What I learned from the piece, though, is the value of hard
work. Now it's easy to sit at a keyboard and punch in Google searches for this
or that, it's even easy to start thinking of yourself as fairly well versed. I
don't know, maybe we've entered an age where close is good enough, but do you
ever find yourself asking if cops really talk the way they do on television? Do
you ever wonder if there's more to the 1930's than bootleggers, gangsters, and
breadlines? Nothing beats in person research. Getting out and doing the
footwork, talking to real people who have lived the life you want to write
about, can open new vistas and even teach you more than the lingo. It can let
you into the psyche of your characters and point you in new directions. But
we're talking racing, not writing, aren't we...
