Fanny Y. Cory

Today's blog features a short article about Baum-illustrator and pioneering woman cartoonist Fanny Y. Cory. This is taken from a newspaper clipping from the mid-1930s in a scrapbook I own of Cory material. Cory, of course, was the illustrator of Baum's The Master Key (1901) and The Enchanted Island of Yew (1903).  She illustrated much else besides - including a number of comic strips such as Little Miss Muffet and Sonny Sayings. Here is the article as it appears in the clipping.

On a Ranch 27 miles from Helena, Montana, and "three miles from anything," lives Mrs. Fred Cooney. To readers of The Evening Star she is Fanny Y. Cory, illustrator and writer of "Sonny Sayings."

Just now she is in Washington, a guest, with her son Ted, at the home of Mrs. C. R. Thompson, 1334 Farragut Street.

She is on her way to New York, but the reason for her stop-over visit is Joan Thompson, the sixteen-year-old daughter of that household.

Five years ago, when Joan was still in the seventh grade at Macfarland Junior High School, she had the same visitor at her house.

"Sonny Sayings," even then a two-year-old feature syndicated in half a hundred papers over the country, came regularly into Joan's home. In February 1928, she wrote to Mrs. Cooney, in care of The Star, and the letter was forwarded to the Montana ranch. Mrs. Cooney was caught by the enthusiasm of her then eleven-year-old correspondent, and promised that she would visit Joan on her next trip East. Six months later that promise was fulfilled.

The feature is now almost ten years old, and appears in so many newspapers that Mrs. Cooney has lost track of the number.

Mrs. Cooney was well known as a magazine and book illustrator - for St. Nicholas, Youth's Companion, Scribner's, Harper's and others. Back in Montana, after several moves here and there from her original home in Illinois, she became Mrs. Fred Cooney and, in time, the mother of three children.

A brother, J. Campbell Cory, political cartoonist, first suggested the feature idea to her, a cartoon in which a different infant was featured every day.

"It did not take at all," said Mrs. Cooney. "I decided that people had rather see the same child from day to day - one they could identify with their own. So - 'Sonny Sayings' was born."

Mrs. Cooney is at a loss to explain altogether the success of her feature.

"The little fellow I draw is not grotesque in any way," she says. "Perhaps that's part of the reason for his success. I suppose my own children were the inspiration for the feature. Neighbors' children helped some, but I have never gone out of my way to visit homes of people with children or tried to take notes on what they were saying. I guess it's mostly just my own good Scotch imagination that counts after all."

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You can read and see more on F. Y. Cory in our previous blog posts:

Big Little Miss Muffet 

Fanny Y. Cory and the Girl on the Tuffet