History
He was born John Barton Gruelle in Arcola, Illinois. His father Richard Gruelle was an artist affiliated with the Hoosier Group of Indiana artists. His first well known cartooning work was Mr. Twee Deedle which Gruelle created after he beat out 1,500 entrants to win a cartooning contest sponsored in 1911 by The New York Herald. Mr. Twee Deedle was in print from 1911 to 1914.
Gruelle gave his daughter Marcella a dusty, faceless rag doll which she found in the attic. He drew a face on the doll and named her Raggedy Ann. Marcella played with the doll so much, Gruelle figured other children would like the doll too. Gruelle's Raggedy Ann doll U.S. Patent D47,789 was dated September 7, 1915. In 1918, the PF Volland Company published Raggedy Ann Stories. Gruelle then created a series of popular Raggedy Ann books and dolls. These became Volland's major source of revenue.
Marcella Gruelle, after being vaccinated at her school for smallpox, was given an unidentified second shot without parental consent. She soon contracted diphtheria and died at the age of 13. After this blow, family friends described Gruelle as "possessed, with a heavy countenance, and ... with the only thing he would bear to have near him as a reminder of Marcella a rag doll."
Gruelle's "Raggedy Ann's Sunny Songs" was set to music by William H. Woodin, who in 1934 was appointed FDR's first Secretary of the Treasury. One of Gruelle's characters is Little Wooden Willie, probably a reference to Will Woodin.
Gruelle lived in the Silvermine section of New Canaan, Connecticut, where the dolls were first mass produced, and later moved his home and company to neighboring Wilton, Connecticut. Gruelle spent a year in Ashland, Oregon from 1923–24. He had a long-standing heart condition, and died in Miami Beach, Florida on January 8, 1938, of a heart attack.
Read more about this topic: Johnny Gruelle
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“All history attests that man has subjected woman to his will, used her as a means to promote his selfish gratification, to minister to his sensual pleasures, to be instrumental in promoting his comfort; but never has he desired to elevate her to that rank she was created to fill. He has done all he could to debase and enslave her mind; and now he looks triumphantly on the ruin he has wrought, and say, the being he has thus deeply injured is his inferior.”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“A country grows in history not only because of the heroism of its troops on the field of battle, it grows also when it turns to justice and to right for the conservation of its interests.”
—Aristide Briand (1862–1932)
“What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.”
—Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)