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Claire Briggs was one of the Sauk County natives who made a significant contribution to the development first of the modern newspaper and ultimately to contemporary mass communication.
Briggs was a featured cartoonist during the heyday of American Newspapering, 1900 - 1930. He was born in Reedsburg in 1875 and lived there until 1884 when his parents moved to Dixon, Illinois.
Images of a boy's life in a small town played a prominent role in his work and success, just as they did in life of another famous Dixonite, Ronald Reagan.
Brigg's family soon moved to Lincoln, Nebraska and young Claire attended the University of Nebraska, where one of his teachers was a young soldier named John J. Pershing. After failing Pershing's mathematics course, Briggs left school and made his way to Saint Louis, where he found a job as a pen and ink illustrator at the Hearst newspaper, the Globe Democrat.
Newspapers could not yet print photos with any great ease and illustrators were an important part of the editorial staff, making simple sketches that complemented the articles and broke up the monotony of page after page of uninterrupted text.
Not long after Briggs went to work, the technology of halftone printing made it easier and cheaper to print photos. Illustrators had to become more than mere copyists who converted facts to images. They had to become storytellers who could add meaning, sarcasm and with to their drawings. Briggs was one of the first and the best of his time.
Briggs invented characters with whom millions of people could identify, the All-American small town boy, who, with a floppy-eared pup and his best buddy at his side, couldn't wait for school to end so he could get into a snowball fight or go skinny-dipping at the local pond; the frivolous woman who cared only about clothes and parties, the befuddled middle class husband and father whose family continually interfered with his basic desire to spend his entire life on the golf course.
Brigg's cartoons were syndicated across the country and, by the 1920's was one of the most highly paid illustrators in the country.
In addition to Brigg's newspaper work, his books of cartoons - Skin-nay, The Days of Real Sport, Ain't It a Grand and Glorious Feeling, When a Feller Needs a Friend - also reached a large audience. He lived a seemingly charmed life with financial success, popularity and respect.
Briggs died at the age of 55 years in 1930. In many ways he portrayed the comfortable, front porch, "good old days" and they were dieing with him just as radio and movies were altering the classic newspapers where and his work were so successful. Yet his wistful images can still strike a popular chord in any grown-up girl or boy who once daydreamed through arithmetic class, had a friend with a nickname like "Skin-nay" or who once owned a floppy eared pup.
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