Harry J. Tuthill

Who was Harry J. Tuthill?

Harry J. Tuthill was an American cartoonist best known for his comic strip The Bungle Family.

Born in Chicago, Illinois, he grew up in the tenements and worked as a newsboy, quitting when a tough guy muscled in on his corner. At age 15, he traveled the midwest, finding employment with a foot surgeon, selling baking powder, patented eggbeaters and pictures, plus working as a medicine show barker in a street carnival. As he recalled, he left "to work on and at such things as selling enlarged pictures, soliciting for a corn doctor, and for one delirious season carrying on with a medicine show. I would not mention these things except that I feel what may be a pardonable pride in their diversity."

During his late teens, he settled in St. Louis, Missouri, where he was employed for $10 a week as a foreman at the St. Louis Dairy, where he washed milk cans for seven years.

By the age of 30, he still had not sold any cartoons. Finding encouragement on his artwork from Bob Grable of World Color Printing, he worked for the St. Louis Star and then moved to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.