The Press: John T. Calls It Quits

Lean and leisurely John Tinney McCutcheon was crowding his deadline. His mind and drawing board were blank, and the bulldog edition over at the Chicago Tribune would wait just so long. Outside his studio window, there was a promise of fall in the hazy September air. He fell to daydreaming . . . on such a smoky afternoon, back home in Indiana, a boy might gaze at a cornfield studded with tattered golden shocks, and see them turn into Indian tepees. Idly he began to sketch. When the Tribune messenger arrived, he had finished his greatest cartoon. That was 39 years...