“I yam what I yam…”

Greetings from the port of Sweethaven! I’ve been spending several months with Popeye^® the Sailor Man and his loveable crew as imagined by cartoonist E.C. Segar. Come adventure back in time with me to discover what inspired Littleton’s exclusive Popeye coins.

Welcome to Chester, Illinois

Let’s start with the creator himself, Elzie Crisler (E.C.) Segar. His earliest influence might have been his dad. Amzi Segar was a house painter and paperhanger in Chester, a southern Illinois farm town on the Mississippi River. Doubling as the seat of government for Randolph County, Chester owed a lot of its early economic success to its location. It was a river port between St. Louis, to the North, and New Orleans to the South. 

E.C. was born in Chester in 1894 and grew up helping his dad. But as he got older, other artistic talents emerged, according to the Randolph Historical Society. E.C. worked for a local photographer. He tried his hand as a window dresser. He played drums in the local vaudeville venue, the Chester Opera House co-managed by Herman Wiebusch.

When the venue’s owner, J. William “Windy Bill” Schuchert, converted the performance space to show silent movies, E.C. was promoted to film projectionist. He was tasked with rewinding each reel before a new one could be shown. He took that opportunity to practice what he was learning in a cartoon correspondence course that Schuchert was paying for. E.C. drew people and events in Chester on slides that were shown on the screen during the reels change.

The teenager also regularly picked up Schuchert’s hamburgers made at the Wiebusch Tavern located around the corner. Manning the door of the rowdy pub was the retired, but still-muscular merchant marine with the ‘pop eye’ from one too many brawls and an ever-present pipe, Frank “Rocky” Fiegel. Both Windy Bill and Rocky, according to various online accounts, relished telling stories.

What’s in a name? 

The Segar Family shopped at a general store owned by Dora Paskel and her husband. Described as a taller-than-average woman, Dora wore long, black, fitted dresses that exposed nothing to the imagination. The strong-willed and feisty shopkeeper, as E.C. recalled her, also wore her black hair in a tight bun.

In our adventure back in time, let’s also take note of the two islands linked to Chester by a bridge over the Mississippi: Horse Island, where the Lewis & Clark Expedition camped overnight in 1803 during its survey of the Louisiana Purchase, and Kaskaskia Island, capital for the Illinois Territory in 1809.

Last note: Among Chester’s farm crops was the castor bean, which produced an oil-based lubricant that dominated the consumer market before the diversification of uses for petroleum.

By the time he turned 18, E.C. was ready to make his mark as a cartoonist in cosmopolitan Chicago. Before too long, he was on the roster of a paper acquired by media mogul William Randolph Hearst. A new boss suggested E.C. might have more opportunities in New York.

Sure enough, that’s what happened. E.C. got hired by Hearst’s content distribution unit, King Features Syndicate^TM. Of all the cartoon strips E.C. launched, one turned out to have legs. He titled it Thimble Theatre. Its name refers to tiny cartoon panels laid out vertically like a film strip.

“Ja’ think I’m a cowboy?”

Between the twin adages of “write what you know” and “draw whom you know”, E.C. created the Oyl Family to drive the action in Thimble Theatre. He named the long-limbed, sassy daughter with her hair in a bun, Olive Oyl^TM. She was the lead character when the cartoon debuted in 1919.

E.C. drew her a considerably shorter brother, Castor, a scheming gambler. He also gave her a fiancé, Ham Gravy, who had a roving eye. The Oyl Family included parents Cole and Nana, plus sister, Deezil. It rumbled along for 10 years, gradually building a national readership as more newspapers added Thimble Theatre to its pages from King Features.

The cartoonist had fun inventing new words. His most obvious delight was the homonym for the Oyl Family names. Beyond olive oil and castor oil, coal oil referred to kerosene; banana oil to food flavoring (though in early 20th century slang, it also was the equivalent of “Baloney!”), and diesel oil for fuel. Segar’s cartoon signature was a visual homonym, a cigar.

On January 17, 1929, E.C. introduced a sailor not dissimilar to the Polish-born Rocky Fiegel from his hometown of Chester. E.C. had Castor and Ham hire Popeye to navigate them from Sweethaven to Dice Island where there was a gambling casino. The comedic story ran for nearly six months. Their misadventures involved plenty of slapstick, sight gags, fisticuffs, word play, flying bullets, plus a hen with magical restorative powers.

When the storyline was finished, so was Popeye. He wasn’t in the strip’s next adventure. But newspaper readers clamored to bring him back! The feisty mariner whose salty manner, loyalty to friends, and willingness to right wrongs gave readers someone to root for as the Roaring Twenties fizzled and the world’s financial markets teetered on the brink of collapse.

Who else was who?

In honor of his Chester benefactor, J. William “Windy Bill” Schuchert, and to give Popeye an intelligent and genial sidekick, E.C. created the hamburger-loving J. Wellington Wimpy^TM in 1931. Then, in a nod to the likelihood that Schuchert was running a tab at Wiebusch Tavern for all those meat patties, E.C. gave Wimpy a catchphrase: “I’ll gladly pay Tuesday for a hamburger today.” With the sailor man firmly in the lead, the comic strip’s name expanded to Thimble Theatre Starring Popeye.

Ham the fiancé was gone from this retooled strip and E.C. made the sailor man Olive Oyl’s boyfriend. Popeye used the fragrant sweet pea flower known to grow in southern Illinois as a term of affection. But then in 1933, when a foundling appeared on his doorstep, Popeye tagged the baby Swee’Pea^TM. That name outlasted the formal one with which he christened the ‘boy-kid’ and ‘infink’ he adopted: Scooner Seawell Georgia Washenting Christiffer Columbia Daniel Boom.

In 1936, E.C. introduced a mystical, dog-like creature from the African continent. He reached back to WWI slang to deploy a word for an unproven vehicle or recruit and named the yellow-colored animal Eugene the Jeep^TM. Like the hen from the Dice Island storyline, here was another animal with magical powers. In Eugene’s case, there appeared to be two. He could see an event before it happened and used that knowledge to help Popeye and Olive Oyl solve tricky problems. The other was an ability to disappear from one place and reappear at another.

Once again, the cartoonist was tapping into a style of storytelling known as fabulism, in which fantasy and myth blended with realism. Given the hardships imposed on many by the Great Depression, the notion of supernatural talent gave comic strip readers some relief during a challenging era.

“I’m strong to the finish ’cause I eats me spinach.”

During the epic Plunder Island storyline from 1933 to 1934, E.C. introduced Alice the Goon^TM, a tormented humanoid. But Popeye saw through her fearsome façade when he realized she was also a mother. Their resulting friendship gave him another ally with a superpower to fight bad guys, plus a babysitter for Swee’Pea.

Because every cartoon strip needs at least one recurring baddie to advance the action, E.C. created the menacing and bearded sailor, Bluto^TM. He also had googly eyes for Olive Oyl, competing with Popeye for her affections. Following one episode in which Bluto tossed Popeye into a spinach field, spinach sales reportedly increased by 33%. In one published survey, children voted spinach their third favorite food behind turkey and ice cream! As a father of two, E.C. might have had an awareness of childhood nutrition and the benefits of iron-rich spinach, especially in the 1930s when his daughter and son were youngsters.

Every time the fight for good over evil reached a critical breaking point, Popeye gulped down a can of spinach to make his muscles pop and guarantee victory. Here’s Littleton’s homage to the leafy green vegetable that’s one of our exclusive, silver-plated Popeye coins!

We’re also planning to release colorized Federal Reserve Notes that celebrate Popeye and friends. The first one is an ode to love, featuring Popeye and Olive Oyl. These offers will be released in the coming months, so look online or sign up to receive our print catalogs.

I hope you enjoyed this adventure back in time as much as I did! The extensive list of sources below is part of a larger testament of how much Popeye was a folk hero during an important chapter of American history…and no doubt will be again!

NOTE: E.C. Segar died in 1938 at the age of 43 in Santa Monica, CA. By this point, Popeye and crew had parallel lives as animated film cartoons whose creators leaned away from some of E.C.’s original characterizations. His assistants, and then successors who kept the Popeye strip going in newspapers, also added mannerisms. For the purpose of Littleton’s Popeye coins, we’ve chosen to pay homage to E.C.’s vision as much as possible.

SOURCES

Are Comics Even Good. “A Year of Reading Acknowledged Masterpieces #3: E.C. Segar’s Popeye.” Tumblr. Accessed December 3, 2024. https://www.tumblr.com/arecomicsevengood/183140145886/a-year-of-reading-acknowledged-masterpieces-3

Barat, Chris. “Comics Review: E.C. SEGAR’S POPEYE, Volume 4: “PLUNDER ISLAND” (Fantagraphics Books, 2009).” December 24, 2009. http://newsandviewsbychrisbarat.blogspot.com/2009/12/comics-review-ec-segars-popeye-volume-4.html

Cagle, Daryl. “I Yam What I Yam.” May 22, 2019. 

https://darylcagle.com/topic/king-features-syndicate

City of Chester, Illinois Popeye/Character Trail. Accessed November 27, 2024. https://www.chesterill.com/character-trail/

Dison, Brad. “Remembering Chester.” September 25, 2024. https://websterparishjournal.com/2024/09/25/remembering-chester/

“Elzie Segar” The Randolph Society. Accessed November 27, 2024. https://randolphsociety.org/elzie-segar/

“Elzie Segar American cartoonist.” Accessed December 5, 2024.  https://www.britannica.com/biography/Elzie-Crisler-Segar

“Elzie Crisler Segar.” Lambiek Comiclopedia. Accessed September 25, 2024. https://www.lambiek.net/artists/s/segar.htm

Grandinetti, Fred M. “Ninety years of Bluto – or is it Brutus?” October 5th, 2022. https://www.boomermagazine.com/ninety-years-of-bluto-or-is-it-brutus/

Huffstutler, Jessie Lee. “I Remember: Early Memories of Chester, Illinois.” 1976. Accessed December 12, 2024.https://archive.org/details/irememberearlyme00huff

“List of Thimble Theatre storylines.” Popeye the Sailorpedia. Accessed December 3, 2024. https://popeye.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Thimble_Theatre_storylines#Stories_created_by_Segar

Martin, R.S. “Comics Review: The Complete Popeye, Volume IV: “Plunder Island”, E. C. Segar.” May 29, 2016. http://rsmwriter.blogspot.com/2016/05/comics-review-complete-popeye-volume-iv.html

Real Food Encyclopedia: Spinach. Accessed September 25, 2024. https://foodprint.org/real-food/spinach/

Spinach Can Collectibles/Popeye Museum. Accessed November 22, 2024. http://www.popeyethesailor.com/

Toups, Robin. “Popeye and the Canned Spinach Controversy: A Tale of Weights, Measures, and Public Outcry.” January 17, 2024. https://www.michelli.com/popeye-and-the-canned-spinach-controversy-a-tale-of-weights-measures-and-public-outcry/#:~:text=In%20the%20colorful%20realm%20of,idea%20of%20shrinking%20spinach%20portions

Yako, Andika Hadithi. “Sura 8: Popeye’s Impact on Popular Culture.” Accessed September 25, 2024. https://www.bookbaker.com/sw/v/The-Adventures-of-Popeye-the-Sailor-Man-Popeyes-Impact-on-Popular-Culture/8ab7342f-8515-4b7a-ba40-0723487e43ff/8