Biography
Born in Stockton, California, he was the son of ex-Ziegfeld girl Roberta Pandolfini Montana and Ray Montana, a top banjo player on the Keith vaudeville circuit. Montana knew he wanted to be a cartoonist from the age of seven. By the age of nine, he had traveled to vaudeville houses in all 48 states. (Montana was raised before Hawaii and Alaska were admitted as the 49th and 50th states.) He received his childhood schooling backstage in theater dressing rooms, where he also learned about comedy and humor writing. He spent his school summers in Meredith, New Hampshire, where his father raised vegetables and operated a restaurant. Montana practiced his cartooning by drawing caricatures of the restaurant's customers. At the age of 13, his father died of a heart attack, and his mother remarried.
Montana's stepfather had managed a theatrical costume shop in Bradford, Massachusetts. In 1936, when Montana was 16 years old, the family moved to Haverhill, Massachusetts. For the next two years, he kept diaries of local events and news stories, illustrating the diary pages with his cartoons. The students and faculty of Haverhill High later inspired the leading characters in the Archie cast, as revealed in a 1970s Boston Globe article by film critic Gerald Peary.
Montana spent time in Boston, where his mother and stepfather ran a restaurant. On weekends he worked in Boston, drawing and painting Red Cross and WWII posters. In his senior year of high school, Montana moved to Manchester, New Hampshire. He attended Haverhill High School until 1939, and graduated from Manchester High School Central in 1940.
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“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
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