George Baker (cartoonist)

George Baker (May 22 1915 - May 5 1975) was a cartoonist who became prominent during World War II as the creator of the popular comic strip, "The Sad Sack". Born in Lowell, Massachusetts, Baker grew up in Rock Island, Illinois and Chicago. In Chicago, he attended Lane Technical High School, and graduated from Roosevelt High School, where he played baseball and drew pictures for the high school annual. After six weeks of art training in a night school, he got a job as a commercial artist, "but soon grew tired of drawing pots and pans for newspaper advertisements" [ "Current Biography 1944", pp28-30 ] , and moved to California to pursue a minor league career. Instead, he was hired by Walt Disney in 1937, and assisted in the production of the studio's full length animated features, including "Pinocchio", "Fantasia", "Dumbo" and "Bambi". His specialty was effects in the animation of thunderstorms, waterfalls, and other features [ Id. at 28 ] . Five months prior to Pearl Harbor, Baker was drafted (June 1941) into the United States Army. He related later that he expected that the Army Classification System would have no use for his artistic experience, noting "They say it makes cooks out of mechanics, and vice versa. But I must say, it worked perfectly in my case," [ Id. at 28 ] . To his surprise, he was assigned to Fort Monmouth for basic training and to do animation work on training films for the Signal Corps. Baker won a cartoon contest, sponsored by the "Defense Recreation Committee", and received a portable typewriter as first prize. "Life" magazine printed some of his submissions, and he was hired by YANK magazine, where he adapted his drawings of the misadventures of an army recruit into "The Sad Sack". The strip, drawn in "pantomime" (without words), became the magazine's most popular feature, as measured by the fan mail that it drew from men in the U.S. Army who identified with the luckless private. General George C. Marshall praised the Sad Sack, in an official document, as a morale-booster for the troops during the Second World War.

At the end of the war, the U.S. Army created an advertising campaign with the phrase: "Don't be a Sad Sack, re-enlist in the Regular Army". Nonetheless, George Baker himself was discharged from military service at the end of the War and returned to live in Los Angeles where he transformed the "Sad Sack" army cartoon into a syndicated comic strip and a long-lived comic book series aimed at younger readers. While Baker gave the job of writing the comic narrative to others, he continued to illustrate the covers of "Sad Sack" comics until the time of his death. For a short time, there was a "Sad Sack" radio program in which Mel Blanc did the character's voice. George Baker is buried at Riverside National Cemetery, Riverside, California.

References

External links

* [http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=6819866 George Baker] at Find-A-Grave