The Smith Family was never a made-up household. It was George and Virginia Smith's own life, drawn in public for forty-seven years, from the strip's beginnings in 1950 through its last published cartoon in 1997. What follows is the longer story behind that run: how a Brooklyn cartoonist and his wife turned a real family into one of the most candid family strips on the American funny pages.

From Brooklyn to the drawing board

George J. Smith was born on February 5, 1920, in the back of an ambulance on the way to Cumberland Street Hospital in Brooklyn. He grew up in a cold-water tenement in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, with "no bathroom or toilet or heat," he later said, only a wood stove that kept one room warm.

He found his calling early. Through WPA life-drawing classes and night study at Pratt Institute in the late 1930s, he trained in the social-realist current that shaped a generation of New York artists. He sold his first cartoon in 1938 and was soon peddling panels to the Harvard Lampoon for two dollars apiece. Collier's became his first big magazine sale, and The Saturday Evening Post followed, sometimes signed "Pvt. George Smith" once the Army had him.

During World War II he served as an instructional artist in the South Pacific, including a long stretch in New Guinea. The Army and George Smith, he admitted, "were never meant for each other." When he came home, the freelance market was "murderous," but the habit of turning out roughs every week stuck.

By 1950, a national gag-sales survey of 242 magazine issues ranked him tied for 14th place, with 42 panels sold under his own name, on the same list as Mort Walker and Hank Ketcham. An early self-portrait captured both the grind and the dream:

"Turn out about 40 roughs a week but would like a job with some syndicate doing one a day, with Friday to Monday off and a pension after 1st year." - George Smith, "Self Portrait," The Artists' Advisor (1941)

He got the syndicate job. The Friday-to-Monday off and the pension never quite arrived.

Virginia, and a family that became the strip

Virginia Mary Quinlan, born July 20, 1919, was working as a secretary in New York brokerage and accounting offices when they met. "The first time I saw him he was doodling with his drawings," she recalled. They married in New York City on April 11, 1942.

George held the pen. Virginia shaped the voice as editor, co-writer, and the other half of a byline that often read "Mr. and Mrs. George Smith." Their household grew to eleven children, ten daughters and one son, and later to 42 grandchildren and 15 great-grandchildren.

That household was the strip's engine. As George told The Columbian (Vancouver, Washington) in 1981: "It was a good idea to have an actual family with two really real parents doing scenes from the family. You have a bunch of kids and there's a lot of funny things going on. We had tons of mail from people identifying with us."

National syndication

The Smith Family began in 1950, when the real family already numbered two adults and five children. National syndication came in April 1952 with the George Matthew Adams Service, and the feature later moved to Universal Press Syndicate. Over 47 years, George and Virginia produced roughly 17,000 daily and Sunday strips. At its peak the strip reached about 74 newspapers, including:

The Boston Globe

The Washington Star

The Detroit News

The Philadelphia Inquirer

The Oregonian

The Austin American-Statesman

The Columbian (Vancouver, Washington)

The Prattville Progress

Readers met a cast that grew up in public alongside the real Smiths: Ginny, Kip, Ellen, Tina, Lorraine, Tish, Carol, Georgie, and the younger sisters who kept arriving. When the family packed up for California in 1960, cartoonist-columnist Pat Fulford Mullen caught the scene in Writer's Digest: a Mack truck with little children sticking out of the top, and that would be "The Smith Family."

"Dirty Is Beautiful," and other uncomfortable truths

What set the strip apart was its refusal to tidy family life for the comics page. Young Georgie championed a "Dirty Is Beautiful" ethos: messy kitchens, sibling chaos, and the ordinary friction of marriage and parenthood, treated as material worth drawing, not hiding. Other mid-century family strips sold a polished ideal. The Smiths drew the track meet they actually lived.

They also used the family-strip form for sharper commentary, taking on subjects many editors weren't ready for:

Gun control and the absurdity of military spending

Environmental harm, including the automobile's "destructive streak" (one such strip, George said, earned a cancellation from a Detroit paper)

Women's equality and cultural hypocrisy

The "technocracy" of modern life, with people "programmed by technocracy like chimpanzees in captivity," kept in check by the voice of television

George read Erich Fromm and worried aloud about the gap between a child's "dreaming innocence" and the adult "rat race." "Whatever the art form, even the lowliest comic strip, this is really the function of art," he told The Columbian. "It's got to come out."

The cost of candor

Honesty had a price. A wave of cancellations in the late 1970s nearly ended the feature, and by 1981 Universal Press Syndicate was distributing it to about 22 dailies and 11 Sundays. George said he had been "beating the air," and that the family still had to eat. Even so, Georgie's plea for Dirty Is Beautiful kept turning up in the bathtub panels.

Leaving the rat race

The family's path west matched the strip's philosophy: Brooklyn, Staten Island, Fallbrook, California, the Portland, Oregon area, and finally, in the early 1970s, the high wooded foothills near White Salmon and Appleton, Washington. Their place on Snowden Road sat about three miles from the nearest paved road, and winter snows could shut them in for weeks.

"Just getting away from the whole thing," George said. "The rat race didn't agree with me."

From that Cascade studio he kept drawing the harried father who got up "mean and ugly" and the kids who were a little afraid of him, and the slide "from the mouse race to the rat race, from educational sedation to the dry martini, until the martini won't keep him quiet anymore." Underneath the jokes, he insisted, "it's really not funny." The last published Smith Family cartoon appeared in 1997, closing a 47-year run that ranks among the longest for a family strip in American newspaper comics.

The Archive Project

That body of work, including originals, clippings, magazine gags, and the stories around them, is what The Smith Family Comic Archive Project exists to keep. The archive is free for students, researchers, and the public. The aim is simple: keep George and Virginia Smith's family strip readable for the next generation, the way it once arrived on doorsteps from Boston to Prattville.

Browse the archive at thsmithstrip.com

Sources: The Columbian (1981); The Artists' Advisor (1941); Writer's Digest.

 

 

TWO enormous black beasts guard the entrance to the little stony road leading up the hill to the rust colored home of The Smith Family, located north east of New York City in the Catskills.

Distant cousins of chows, Blackie and Teddy lie on either side of the entrance like the New York public library lions, waiting to bite automobiles-revenge for several old wounds.

"The Smith Family," most densely populated of the "family" come strips, appears in real life very much as it looks in The Courier-Journal.

Most of the characters are easily identifiable, even 6-week-old Suzanne, the dominating personality of the strip at present. Mrs. Smith, an exceptionally gentle woman of few words, had just started Suzanne on her bottle when I arrived. Cartoonist George Smith listened intently to the sound effects.

"I'd give anything to be able to spell that noise," mourned the artist, who is recognized in his field as the most realistic interpreter of family life in America. Watching the new baby were Dolores, 2, Georgie, 3%, and Carol, 5. They were also attacking a 10-pound bag of gum drops I had brought from the city.

The Smith Family" appeared off and on in maga zines before it began as a strip in 1960. The cast then included five children; the count of wee noses has since doubled. As the children arrive and grow up in the house with a mountain view on every side, they also arrive and grow up in the comic strip.

This growing up causes a certain regret in some fan mail. "But I want to portray a growing 'mural" of family life," says the cartoonist. "It delights me to see chil dren develop. Eventually there will be grandchildren." After lunch we toured Smith's two acres while awaiting the older children's return from school. Every where were evidences of small fry: a wading pool, jerry built "houses," dugouts, and left-ever implements of play, such as soup spoons

Smith retrieved two of the latter from the dirt-an act from right out of the strip a few weeks back. In that strip, when Mama asked for a fork, Papa didn't even look in the kitchen drawer. He went immediately to the back yard.

"ALMOST ALMOST everything in my strip has actually hap pened," he laughed, stooping over to pick up a mitten. There is, of course, one difference. George Smith's days of dashing for the bus ended in 1950. Like all successful comic strip artists, Smith works at home and

mails his work in to his syndicate.

At 3 pm, the school has brought the first wave of returning scholars: Tish, 6, Lorraine, 7, and Tina, At 3:30, a second school bus arrived. Ellen, 9, and

Kip, 10, hopped out. At 4 pm, Ginny, 14, brought up the rear guard of Smith students. Ginny is usually portrayed by Papa in the role of a lovesmitten teenager. Actually her first love in mathematics.

The presence of a stranger in the house had no effect on the little Smiths. I have never encountered better behaved or happier children anywhere.

There were evening chores, and 18 little handa be came very bury. A vast quantity of milk was brought into the house, one bottle at a time cach via a different Smith. Always there was a passing hand to keep the baby carriage rocking. Singing broke out in the kitchen. A light supper appeared.

IT WAS now necessary for Papa Smith to keep tab on the time, for my train schedule had to be consid ered. This brought up another Smith Family story.. Papa Smith's watch-now in perfect working order had been returned to him only the day before. Tish had wrecked it and carried the pieces to school, and a school-bus transaction had resulted in the passing of the wheels, springs and so on into the hands of another little girl.

"The Smith Family" appears in no papers in the immediate area, so the parents of the other girl were uneducated in the fate of watches in the Smith house hold. They feared their little daughter was guilty of doing the wrecking, so they had the watch repaired and apologetically returned it to the astounded artist.

"It runs for the first time in years," said Smith. As train time approached, and we drove out between the two crouching "lions," I looked back up the hill. The house was silhouetted against the evening elouds, and on the skyline in the gathering dusk appeared little figures in peaked caps, traditional headgear of the lit tle Smiths in and out of the funnies.

It rather seemed that I was leaving an enchanted land of gnomes, guarded by the two black dogs, who became mysterious fairy-tale beasts in the half-light.

 1970s The Columbian strips 1970–1979, Philadelphia Inquirer 1972, Austin American-Statesman 1971

 

The Boston Globe Boston, Massachusetts · Sunday, July 02, 1978

 

The Peoria Journal Peoria, Illinois · Friday, December 11, 1953

HANG ONTO YOUR HAT

New Family With 7 Girls Is Moving In!

MR. AND MRS, GEORGE SMITH, ARTIST 

and collaborator of the delightfully honest and hilarious comic strip, "The Smith Family," which starts Monday in the Peoria Journal, are shown with their family. Left to right are (top row), Ellen, Virginia (Ginny), and Katherine (Kip). (bottom) Lorraine, Carol Ann, Patricia (Tish) and Christine (Tina).

 

"One of the Smith Kids": A Smith Family Newspaper Panel

 "From the very beginning men an' women have had nothing in common except stupidity. They was given brains an' all they could see was apples!" One of the Smith kids drops a little philosophy in this panel, which a newspaper ran as a teaser for that day's strip. Clippings like this show how papers promoted The Smith Family to readers.

"Whoever Makes the Ugliest Face Wins My Teddy Bear": The Smith Family (Tri-City Herald, 1955)

 "Whoever makes the ugliest face wins my teddy bear." The Smith kids pull their worst faces, and then Mother's coming for a visit brings Dad into the contest. This daily ran in the Tri-City Herald on February 28, 1955, signed V. & G. Smith and distributed by the George Matthew Adams Service.

"Why Not, Mom?": The Smith Family (The Cincinnati Post & Times-Star)

 "Dolores, I've told you not to bring food out of the kitchen." "Why not, Mom?" Little Dolores makes her point in the last panel. This four-panel Smith Family strip was clipped from The Cincinnati Post & Times-Star.