Local legend has it that Fox would often wear his sweater the way he found it in the morning; sometimes it would be inside out and sometimes right side out. And that Webster, known as “Webby,” occasionally wore a hat with an unexplained bullet hole in it. While their idiosyncrasies brought the artists local attention, it was their work and its impact that put them in the national spotlight. “These cartoons helped form the culture of the United States, because everyone in the country was reading the same thing every day,” says Dottie Patterson, archivist at the Delray Beach Historical Society, which exhibited the works of the colony’s main artists in 1989 and still maintains a sizable collection of their work. With the national exposure came a bit of celebrity, especially since cartoons back then received a lot more attention than they do today. “Fontaine Fox was a name that anyone in the country would have recognized,” says longtime Delray Beach october/november
resident Ernie Simon, who delivered newspapers to Fox’s home in the 1940s. “At the time we had cartoons, radio and the movies. That was it for entertainment.” Local notables in their own right, the cartoonists blended easily into the community. “They were acknowledged as pretty important people, but the community adjusted to them,” Simon says. “The sense back then was not to bother any of the important people who came in the winter.” Still, most everyone in town knew when the cartoonists were here and what they were doing. “It wasn’t any secret that they were here,” says Betty Diggans, whose father-in-law, and then her husband, served as postmasters in Delray Beach. “Back then the town was so small, you knew who everybody was.” Comprised mostly of New Yorkers who were all friends, the eccentric little colony had several syndicated artists, including five whose work was perhaps the best known.
Roth’s depiction of himself and fellow cartoonist H.T. “Webby” Webster
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