“In 1932— the very bottom of the Depression. I was lucky, because I was working. My mother was the personnel manager of McCall’s in Philadelphia and I was working in the printing department on the 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. shift on a 96-page fold and delivery press. We were printing Redbook.
   About 1 a.m., a distinguished-looking man, dressed in a $250 tuxedo, came into the pressroom. He was McClelland Barclay, one of the premiere illustrators of that time. He had come in to see how the color reproductions of his latest cover were going to look. I can’t say that I didn’t care anything about art at all— but what sold me on a career was this man’s lifestyle. I wanted to wear a dinner jacket like his and earn the money he made.
   On the strength of that, I quit my job, borrowed $250 and moved to Chicago, where I apprenticed myself to Haddon Sundblom, who, as a matter of fact, had formerly been an apprentice to Barclay. (Haddon Sundblom had the account from Coca-Cola to do much of their illustration, including their famous Santa Claus)
    As an apprentice, my duties included doing all the green. He hated green, said it made nauseous. Previous to my apprenticeship, I had attended the Charles F. Kettering School — a sort of unusual, progressive school which Kettering held in his greenhouse. I attended on a scholarship. We were exposed to a great many things, including some very fine art. I attended there until his son graduated— then he closed down the school. After that, I got a scholarship to the Dayton Art Institute and learned some basics there, but I had not really even considered a career until I met Barclay.
    As an apprentice with Haddon Sundblom, I was fired many times— almost once a week. Sunny spent many of his afternoons in a bar, which was down a long hall from his studio. I may have done something wrong— something that displeased him and after he sat in the bar for a while, he would come out in the hall and holler, “CO-BY! YOU’RE FIRED!”

The next morning I would begin cleaning out my things and he would come in and say, “What are you doing,” and I would explain to him that I was fired and he would clap me on the shoulder and say, “Well, now, watch it in the future!”
He was truly a master craftsman, and he could come in after I had been daubing and with two or three strokes, he could change everything and make it look like something.
The first thing he did when I arrived in Chicago was to make me enroll at the Chicago Art Institute to study anatomy. Counting all my time with him, it amounted to three years.

In 1936, I went to work for the Chicago Herald-Examiner, the most legendary newspaper the world has ever seen. The paper that inspired “The Front Page.” The paper of Hecht and MacArthur. I was a staff artist and drew everything from burlesque to furniture. It was a marvelous experience and it taught me that I could draw literally anything— and that on short notice.

I worked for the “Examiner” for a little over a year. That’s when I got my first offer as an artist, to go to work for a studio in Cincinnati, doing commercial work.

In 1939, I got another offer to go back to Chicago. It was a much larger studio and for several years— from 1939 to 1943— I made a lot of money doing a lot of jobs.

The war was moving on by then, and even though I had two children, it looked like I was going to be drafted pretty soon. I went east to make contacts with the Saturday Evening Post and other magazines, hopefully, trying to find someone who would commission some work while I was in camp in the army— to help support the family.

I met Charles E. Cooper, who ran the biggest studio in the country and he urged me to move to New York, despite the draft. “Why not get drafted from New York?” he said. He convinced me and even helped me pay my moving expenses to a small apartment in Bronxville.

As it turned out, I wasn’t drafted, after all, and I began to hit the magazines very early. I was just lucky, I guess.”

Excerpts from a conversation between Coby Whitmore and Jim Littlejohn during an interview printed in Island Events Magazine.

To view more information about Coby Whitmore, including his artwork, please visit the section of my website dedicated to Coby Whitmore by clicking on this link.

“Coby Whitmore, in 1948, was a superstar among American illustrators and he was my idol. Imagine an eighteen year old aspiring artist, who had no training, with the opportunity to apprentice with the leading illustrators of the day. That was my good fortune at the Charles E. Cooper Studios in New York. What turned out to be the best part of the arrangement was that Coby Whitmore was there and as generous with his time and attention as the leading teacher could possibly be.

During my first months of apprenticeship, matting his paintings, cleaning his brushes and palette and watching every brush stroke during the day, I would practice painting at night. Within six months, Coby had taken a sample painting of mine to a national magazine, Cosmopolitan, and sold it as an illustration for what will always seem to me to be the largest sum of money I will ever receive.

Coby epitomizes the great sharing of knowledge and information in the tradition of history’s finest artists who pass on to others what they have learned form earlier generations.

Over the forty years of our friendship, we have helped each other when in trouble with paintings, given and accepted critiques and haunted each other’s studios.

Coby Whitmore has been the most important person in my development as an artist.”

Comments on Coby Whitmore
By Joseph Bowler, Hilton Head Island, S.C.

To view more information about Coby Whitmore, including his artwork, please visit the section of my website dedicated to Coby Whitmore by clicking on this link.