At the Park in Arizona, he violated a rule barring males from the female employee housing facility and was fired. Moving south to Kansas City, Missouri, he found a job as secretary to the Administrator of Grand Canyon National Park. Everywhere he went, to hear him tell it, his life was as complicated as that of Archie Andrews-and all because of girls.
According to Goldwater, girl trouble was prominent in his young working life.
In later years, Goldwater said he was fired because he got into a scrap over a girl with the son of the paper’s biggest advertiser. Growing up in a foster home, Goldwater attended the High School of Commerce where he developed secretarial skills and some facility as a writer.Īt seventeen, he hitch-hiked across country, stopping first in Kansas at the little town of Hiawatha in the northeast corner of the state where he found a reporting job on the local newspaper. According to various sources (for which Goldwater supplied the information), his mother died during childbirth, and the father, overcome by grief, abandoned the child and died soon afterward. His arrival, however, was (according to Goldwater) accompanied by melodrama enough to be a credit to an aspiring dramatist. JOHN GOLDWATER was born February 14, 1916, in New York, New York, son of Daniel Goldwater and Edna Bogart Goldwater. Here, then, is my unofficial history of John Goldwater, knitting together as many of the known facts and reasonable testimonies as I can-in as charitable and sympathetic a construction as possible with a conspicuous lamination of some likely alternative interpretations. It seemed wonderfully pat.īut I contacted Bob Montana’s daughter (through their family website), and I was able to incorporate into my version of how Archie was created their version.
By the early 1980s, no one was around anymore who could contradict him. In recounting the events of his early life, for instance, Goldwater customarily recollected various of his romantic adventures with the fairer sex that paralleled Archie’s life with Betty Cooper and Veronica Lodge and therefore seemed to support the claim that Goldwater had been Archie’s creator because he had lived in his youth a similar life from which he took inspiration. Like many who have had a role in the early history of comics and who have survived their contemporaries, Goldwater doubtless exaggerated somewhat his claims to fame. Soon after joining MLJ Magazines, Montana told Hurd, he was approached by Goldwater, who “said they’d like me to try and create a teenage strip.”Īt first blush, it looks like Goldwater was the creative impetus. Montana explains in his interview with Jud Hurd, publisher of Cartoonist PROfiles, in No.6 (May 1970). And it’s Montana, not John Goldwater, who invented Archie, Jughead, Betty and Veronica and all the rest of the Riverdale gang.Īt Archie Comics, they steadfastly maintain that Archie was the creation of Goldwater, one of the trio that founded the company. Reproduction is excellent the page size generous enough to show off Montana’s manner. The first-named of these two volumes reprints selected Sunday strips, beginning with the first and concluding with September 24, 1950. We can see Montana’s handiwork in Archie’s Sunday Finest: Classic Newspaper Strips from the 1940s and 1950s (156 10x13-inch pages, color 2012 IDW hardcover, $49.99) and in Archie: The Complete Daily Newspaper Comics, 1946-1948 (302 9x11-inch landscape pages, b/w with occasional color 2010 IDW hardcover, $39.99). Bob Montana drew the newspaper strip from the beginning until he died at age 54 on January 4, 1975, of a heart attack while cross-country skiing he is last credited on the daily of March 1, 1975. That’s 80 years for the comic book 65 for the strip. The comic book character debuted in Pep Comics No.22, cover-dated December 1941. And it’s still going-albeit in reruns since June 2012. The daily began Februthe Sunday, later the same year on October 13. THE COMIC BOOK Archie is so durable an American cultural artifact that it is surprising to discover that the newspaper comic strip version is nearly its equal. Features Bob Montana’s Archie Newspaper Comic Strip…And Who, Actually, Invented Archie
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