The Press: De Beck Dies

The begetter of Barney Google and Snuffy Smith died last week in Manhattan.

In many ways Billy De Beck lived a life as unreal as the comic-strip characters he fathered. When he was at high school in Chicago he drew imitation Charles Dana Gibson pictures, peddled them for profit. He did cartoons for a theatrical weekly and for several newspapers. But he stayed poor until he turned out a correspondence course on "How to be a cartoonist and make big money." He sold thousands of copies for $1 apiece. He was doing a so-so successful strip, "Married Life," for the Chicago Herald at $35 a week when King Features hired him in 1919. Result: Barney Google. Before he died last week at 52 after a year's illness. William Morgan De Beck had a 14-room Florida house, a Manhattan Riverside Drive apartment where, once, he threw dollar bills to kids from the window until he was stopped by police.

Knee-high, banjo-eyed, potato-nosed Barney Google and his wonder nag, Spark Plug, were to U.S. kids in the '20s what Superman is today. Barney Google ("and his goo-goo-googly eyes") was a 1923 song hit that sold more than a million copies. Three Barney Google musicomedies toured the U.S. for two years; a toy manufacturer sold $1,000,000 worth of Google and Spark Plug toys and dolls; many a Google catchphrase entered the slanguage ("Horsefeathers!" "Heebie-jeebies"; "Jeepers Creepers!" "Youse Is A Viper"; "Bus' Mah Britches!" "Time's a'wastin'!"). In the mid '30s De Beck abandoned Spark Plug, subordinated Barney, brought bodacious Hillbilly Snuffy Smith (also a slangy shorty) to the fore.

Because of De Beck's illness, an understudy has been drawing the strip for months. Just as Andy Gump survived Sidney Smith's death (in 1935), Snuffy and Barney will survive De Beck's.