Swampy's Florida

Here’s sharing friend John Roses’ post celebrating the momentous 100 years of, the comic strip he writes and draws, ‘Snuffy Smith’. A strip that has significant Florida connections!

The strip actually saw it’s first print June 17th, 1919 as ”Take Barney Google, For Instance’, written and drawn by Chicagoan Billy DeBeck. The strip saw many transformations as the focus shifted from the main character, Barney Google and his wife to a horse named ‘Sparkplug’ (Sparky) to a move to the South. DeBeck had inherited a house in the mountains of North Carolina and this helped change the setting.

It was that move in 1934 that introduced, Barney’s cousin, Snuffy Smith, a hillbilly in the fictitious town of Hoot’n Holler.. The entire strip relocated from it’s urban setting to the mountains of Virginia. Aiding in the writing and drawing of the strip since 1933, Fred Lasswell, now became a major influence due to his Southern roots in Florida.

Fred Laswell was born in Missouri in 1916. At two the family moved to Gainesville, Florida, to operate a chicken farm and who doesn’t do that today? It was 8 years of life Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings wrote about before the family moved agin to Tampa and electricity and running water.
While in elementary school, Fred created his own comic strip with dreams of being in the Tampa Daily Times, as the Tampa Tribune was known then. He accomplished that feat at 16.

I’m not clear how Billy Debeck saw the work of Lasswell in Tampa, but, via the cartoon work Laswell did there, he was hired by DeBeck, at the tender age of 17, to assist him. Within a year Snuffy Smith was introduced. Seems the combination of DeBeck in North Carolina and Lasswell and a fad that popped up in America of fascination of the South that fueled the location change.

In 1942 DeBeck died of cancer and Lasswell found himself taking full reign of, the comic strip, now named ‘Barney Google and Snuffy smith’. Lasswell continued to live in Tampa. Lasswell continued producing ‘Snuffy Smith in Tampa until his death in 2001. For Laswell it was 59 years of continuous production of the comic strip. One of the longest runs any cartoonist has ever done. All done in Florida.

Fred even used assassins in Florida…but, that’s changing lanes into the vast history of Florida and cartooning, which is best done in rest areas down the road.

John Rose, an assistant and native of Virginia, continues the strip not far from the very location DeBeck was thinking of over 80 years ago.

Fred’s friends, including me, knew him as “Uncle Fred”. One of the jolliest and proudest Southerners I’ve ever known.