Goodbye, Orphan Annie

[Jerry Peterson]

Little Orphan Annie, a staple of newspaper comic pages for 86 year, is gone.

The last strip ran last month, ending with Annie kidnapped –again, she was kidnapped so, so many times – and lost in Guatemala.

You didn’t miss her departure, did you?

I didn’t.

I only learned about it while listening to a business story on NPR’s Morning Edition. Annie appeared in fewer than 20 newspapers this year – and none in my area – down from its peak of 200 or more three-quarters of a century ago.

Cartoonist Harold Gray created the character and the first strip in 1924, not as Little Orphan Annie, but as Little Orphan Otto. It was Chicago Tribune publisher Joseph Patterson who changed the name of the comic strip to Little Orphan Annie. Hang onto the Trib connection for a moment.

Gray wrote and drew the strip until he died in 1968. Annie lost audience under succeeding cartoonists, so much so that the Tribune Syndicate fired the new cartoonists in 1974 and reran Gray’s strips.

That changed after the success of Annie, the Broadway musical, in 1977. Two years later, the Tribune Syndicate hired Leonard Starr to write and draw a new Orphan Annie strip. Starr had a record of success. He had created the strip Mary Perkins, On Stage.

Annie again took off.

The Post Office honored her in 1995 by including Annie in its Comic Strip Classics series of commemorative stamps.

Starr retired in 2000, and the Tribune Syndicate hired new writers and cartoonists, but the stories didn’t have the panache of those of Gray and Starr, and the strip went downhill. Not even a new hairdo and jeans could save Annie.

Remember I said hang on to the Chicago Tribune connection. The Trib, back in 1930, spun the strip into a six-day-a-week, 15-minute show on its radio station, WGN. Annie aired for 12 years, going out to a national audience in 1931 on NBC’s Blue Network and moving to the Mutual Network in 1940.

If you’re an Annie afficionado, you should come to Wisconsin – to Door County – and stay a night or two, or a week, at Orphan Annie’s Schoolhouse Inn.

As Dave Barry would say, I’m not making this up.

Tomorrow: An Allen Ginsberg autograph