1938.07.09 “The Old Home Town”
Vignettes of Life
by J. Norman Lynd (1878-1942)
21 x 27 in., ink on board
Coppola Collection
J. Norman Lynd was a staff artist on the New York Herald from 1907 until it merged with the Tribune in 1924. Publisher Frank Munsey, pulp magazine pioneer and great merger and destroyer of newspapers, fired Lynd immediately upon purchasing the Herald. It is believed not only that a caricature Lynd had done of Munsey two years earlier was the cause of his termination, but that firing Lynd was reason he bought the Herald in the first place.
Munsey died the following year and was not remembered fondly. "I am glad Munsey is dead and I hope he is in hell!" said H.L. Mencken. William Allen White of the Emporia (KS) Gazette wrote, “Frank Munsey, the great publisher is dead. Frank Munsey contributed to the journalism of his day the talent of a meat packer, the morals of a money changer and the manners of an undertaker. He and his kind have about succeeded in transforming a once noble profession into an 8 percent security. May he rest in trust!” White was far less kind to Mencken himself:
With a pig’s eyes that never look up, with a pig’s snout that loves muck, with a pig’s brain that knows only the sty, and a pig’s squeal that cries only when he is hurt, he sometimes opens his pig’s mouth, fanged and ugly, and lets out the voice of God – railing at the whitewash that covers the manure about his habitat.
At the Times-Picayune (Louisiana), Lynd took over, from Frank Godwin, “Vignettes of Life,” on October 23, 1927, and stayed on it through mid-1939. He joined the King Features syndicate in 1938 and created a similar feature to Vignettes called the “Family Portraits” series.
The work of Lynd and his predecessor, Godwin, who started Vignettes in 1924, is conceptually comparable to that of WE Hill (Among Us Humans, also called The Hill Page, which began in 1916 and syndicated in 1922).
