When the Tot Charged Admission: A 2007 Globe
Feature Reconnects The Smith Family to the Stage.
In the spring of 2007, The Boston Globe ran a feature that, for our archive,
sits at a perfect intersection — the comic strip that started it all, the
newspaper that first published it, and a daughter who grew up inside the panels
and went on to make a life in the theater.
The article, by Globe correspondent Terry Byrne, profiles Carol Triffle,
daughter of The Smith Family creators George and Virginia Smith. It ran the
day before her Portland-based Imago Theatre brought its revue FROGZ! to Boston's Cutler Majestic Theatre. And it
opens, fittingly, with a comic strip.
A free show — for the price of a lemonade
Byrne begins with a 1964 Smith Family strip. A tiny blond tot invites her
father to a show she's putting on. It won't cost a thing, she assures him — he
just must buy a glass of lemonade. After the performance, she steps up to his
chair and pipes: that'll be two dollars and fifty cents for the lemonade.
The tot was drawn from life. Carol Triffle was a regular character in her
parents' strip, one of the eleven Smith children whose everyday adventures
George and Virginia turned into a nationally syndicated feature. The strip
originated in the Globe and ran, by this article's account, from 1951 to 1994 —
more than four decades of finding fun in family life.
Humor learned at the drawing table
What makes the piece valuable to us isn't just the charming hook. It's the
through-line Byrne draws between George Smith's art and his daughter's
stagecraft.
Triffle, co-creator of FROGZ!, describes learning as a child how to combine
simple ideas with high-impact imagery — exactly what her father did with
minimal brush strokes. "Our show is simple like his drawings," she
told the Globe, "but his strip had a much more philosophical bent."
She watched him draw constantly, and the influence shows in how she builds her
own work, even though, by her own account, she doesn't draw nearly as well as
he did.
That household, by her tell, was its own kind of theater. With no television —
her father didn't want one — the family of ten girls and one boy to entertain
each other. "I think I learned more about listening to an audience
response and adjusting what works and what doesn't from having that built-in
crowd watching me show off," she said, laughing.
George Smith, at 87
The article also reaches George Smith himself, by phone at a daughter's home
outside Seattle. At 87, he reflected on where the strip came from: the same
instinct to find humor in everyday life. "So many things happen with
children, the strip kind of writes itself," he said. He credited his wife,
Virginia, who edited the strip's story lines — "I was just putting words
to music” and he spoke warmly of the Globe as the first paper ever to pick up The Smith Family.
For an archive built around this strip, a 2007 interview with its creator is a
rare and precious thing: a late, first-person account of how the work was made
and what it meant to the man who made it.
Why this piece matters to the archive
Beyond its warmth, the feature does real documentary work. It independently
confirms several cornerstones of the strip's history — its Globe origins, its
long syndication run, its basis in the Smiths' large family, and Virginia's
essential editorial hand. And it shows something the archive cares about
deeply: that The Smith Family
didn't simply end in 1994. Its sensibility
carried forward into a new generation and onto the live stage, where one of its
original "characters" is still putting on a show.
Just, presumably, for more than two-fifty.
From the collection of The Smith Family Comic Archive Project. Article:
"A comics perspective" / "From childhood on, she's played to a
full house," by Terry Byrne, The Boston Globe, May 30, 2007 (pages E1 and
E7). Carol Triffle portrait by Justine Hunt/Globe Staff; strip reproduction
courtesy Globe Archives. The Smith Family strip © George and Virginia Smith.
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