Clare Briggs - A Push From Pershing

A Push From Pershing

While attending the University of Nebraska for two years, he studied drawing and stenography. Employment as a stenographer brought him six dollars a week when the work was available. One of his art instructors was an editor with Western Penman, where his first published drawings appeared. His mathematics teacher was Lieutenant John J. Pershing. "If ever a fellow needed a friend, I did in mathematics," said Briggs. "It happened that Lieutenant Pershing was my instructor, and I believe he will testify that it was easier to conquer Germany than to teach me math. One day he ordered me to the blackboard to demonstrate a theorem, and while I was giving the problem a hard but losing battle, he remarked: 'Briggs, sit down, you don't know anything.' Right then and there, I decided to become a newspaper man."

On July 18, 1900, he married Ruth Owen of Lincoln. He began his career as a newspaper sketch artist in St. Louis, Missouri with William Randolph Hearst's Globe-Democrat, which sent him off to cover the Spanish American War as an editorial cartoonist. Relocating in New York, his drawings for the New York Journal prompted Hearst to send Briggs to the Chicago Herald and the Chicago's American, where he created A. Piker Clerk, often described as the first daily continuity comic strip. After 17 years in Chicago, Briggs returned to New York to spend the remaining 13 years of his life with the New York Tribune.

Clare and Ruth Owen Briggs were together for 29 years and had three children. They divorced in February 1929. Briggs died ten months later, leaving his estate of $90,067 to Ruth Briggs. However, the will was challenged by his second wife, Marie C. Briggs, aka Maggie Touhey.