Frank King

He married Delia Drew in 1911. They had one son Robert Drew King.

During his later years he retired to Florida and spent time on his hobbies which included gardening, sculpting and collecting maps. He was found dead in his bathroom in 1969 at the age of 86.

Frank King was one of the two sons of John J. King and his wife Caroline. His father was a mechanic. The family moved to Tomah in Wisconsin to operate a general store when Frank was four years old.

He was an artistically inclined child and started to draw when he was quite young. He graduated from Tomah High School in 1901.

As a teenager he entered a country fair drawing competition and drew a sign for a hotel bootblack. An acquaintance of his father saw the sign and arranged for him to have an interview with an editor of the ‘Minneapolis Times’.

He was hired for $7 a week at the ‘Minneapolis Times’ as a cartoonist. King was only 19 years old at the time. He worked with the paper for four years.

In 1905, he gave a chalk talk on St. Patrick’s Day celebration. Chalk talks are monologue presentations given by artists while they draw with chalk, crayons or pastels. Chalk talks were popular acts in vaudeville in those days.

He enrolled at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts to study during the 1905-06 session.

He worked for a short period at an advertising agency and at the ‘Chicago American’ before shifting to the ‘Chicago Examiner’. There he spent three years working next to cartoonist T. S. Sullivant.

The comic strip ‘Gasoline Alley’ is the second longest running comic strip in the U.S. and appears in more than 300 newspapers. The strip was critically acclaimed for its innovative ideas and has won several awards from the National Cartoonists Society.