IMAGE: Milton Caniff poses with Bek Stiner for a publicity photo in 1952. Photo courtesy of Gabrielle Adelman.

One of the more frustrating questions to consider with Miss Mizzou is the character’s visual influences. Did the look of Marilyn Monroe influence the character the most or was it the official character model Bek Stiner?

According to a 1971 book, at some point Caniff mentioned that the first Miss Mizzou was drawn from a picture of Marilyn Monroe. If true, I’m thinking that this image was probably the one that I used for my book cover; it looks closer to images of Marilyn Monroe than Bek Stiner in my opinion. Once Caniff got this drawing done, he probably took it down to the Copacabana nightclub where he found Bek Stiner. Could the picture above be the first meeting between Stiner and Caniff?

IMAGE: Steve Canyon daily comic strip, August 12th, 1952. Copyright 2014 the Milton Caniff Estate.

When the character started appearing in the comic strip in August 1952, she still somewhat looked like Marilyn Monroe, but I think the features of Bek Stiner started to slowly get integrated into the character.

IMAGE: Steve Canyon Sunday comic strip, October 5, 1952 — Copyright 2014 the Milton Caniff Estate.

By October of 1952, she looks quite a bit closer to Bek Stiner, and I think the character stayed with this look during the rest of her comic existence.

It’s hard to determine how much Caniff intended the character to look like any one model because he wasn’t always the greatest portraitist. In an infamous example, TIME magazine wanted to feature him on the cover in 1947, so he drew up a self portrait for the magazine. They didn’t like the result enough, so they got another artist to draw him instead. In later years I think his portrait skills increased when he gave it the time and effort outside his comic strip, such as when he started doing portraits for the Aviation Hall of Fame. He was the sole portrait artist for the organization starting in 1962 until his death in 1988.

IMAGE: Steve Canyon Sunday comic strip, August 22, 1954 — Copyright 2014 the Milton Caniff Estate.

Miss Mizzou in the comic strip was somewhat of a nightclub entertainer, but what kind of music did she sing? Cartoonist Milton Caniff dropped a lot of song references in the “Steve Canyon” comic strip, so I thought I’d explore some of the songs mentioned during Miss Mizzou’s 1952 and 1954 appearances:

• August 16, 1952 — Mizzou sings part of  “Wait Till The Clouds Roll By.“
• August 25, 1952 — Mizzou mentions “Rose Marie.”
• August 09, 1954 — Mizzou apparently sang “Home on the Range.”
• August 11, 1954 — Mizzou’s singing “I Dream of Jeanie” in the first panel. The second panel includes requests for “Mother Machree,” “Melancholy Baby,” and “Deep Night.”
• August 14, 1954 — Mizzou gets a request for “In the Gloaming.“
• August 22, 1954 — Mizzou sings part of “Love’s Old Sweet Song.”

A lot of these songs are what could be termed “old standards” that have been covered by many people over the years. I tried to link to versions of these songs that were made pre-1950s so you might be able to hear versions of these tunes that could have possibly been influences to Caniff.

The year that Miss Mizzou debuted, 1952, was a year marked with health problems for cartoonist Milton Caniff. This post explores both Caniff’s health and the ghost artists who occasionally helped fill in for him on his comic strip that year.

I find some interest in this topic because getting other artists to help Caniff with the strip must have been a humbling experience for the 45 year old artist who had been doing his comics solo up until then. His health problems eventually drove him to hiring Dick Rockwell as an assistant the next year. I’m also curious about Caniff’s decision to not make a trip to Columbia in 1952 with Bek Stiner. Did his health keep him away? Did he not want to come back to Columbia? Was he behind on the comic? He later said his reasoning was that he did not want to steal the spotlight from Stiner, but I’m curious what other factors were at play, if any.

February 1952:

IMAGE: Steve Canyon daily comic strip, February 28, 1952 — Copyright 2014 the Milton Caniff Estate. This sequence was likely drawn by William Overgard.

In the last few strips from February 1952 Caniff got some help from cartoonist William Overgard. In 1986 Caniff wrote “… I was reminded that it was (William) Overgard who did the week of dailies about the college fraternity dance earlier that year.” There’s no telling if the fill in was due to an illness or not, but the sequence in question would have probably been drawn in November or December of 1951. The two panels I picked out above seem quite unlike Caniff, so this is likely the sequence he was talking about.

October/November 1952:

IMAGE: Steve Canyon Sunday comic strip, November 9, 1952 — Copyright 2014 the Milton Caniff Estate. This sequence was likely drawn by William Overgard.

In 1986 Caniff wrote about an illness that he got the summer of 1952: “We were having a luncheon party at our house in New City, New York. It might have been for Bunny’s birthday. Around noon, I began feeling lousy. I must have been pretty sick because we had the doctor make a house call. They used to do that in those days. Anyway, I went up to bed.” He proceeds to explain that both Noel Sickles and William Overgard helped him out on the strips he was working on at the time. “It was the week of October 6th to the 11th, and the Sunday page for November 9th, roughed out and lettered,” Caniff wrote.

Caniff’s wife Bunny had a birthday on July 3rd. The weekly strips for October would have probably been on the table in July sometime given that Caniff would usually work about three months ahead. The dates that Caniff references seem air tight as well; the characters in the strip really do not look like they were drawn by Caniff. According to Caniff, Sickles drew on the dailies and Overgard drew on the Sunday. Of course in the next sentence he also writes that they were “handing pages back and forth” so I’m not sure it’s clear which artist did which pages.

December 1952 (unverified):

IMAGE: Steve Canyon daily comic strip, December 8, 1952 — Copyright 2014 the Milton Caniff Estate. Was this sequence ghosted by someone?

Caniff also got sick at the end of September 1952. As I write in the Miss Mizzou book:

The newspapers of the day said that Caniff could not go to Columbia because of illness, which may or may not be true. In an undated letter to his parents after the appearance of Miss Mizzou, he writes of how he “begged off” of going and was planning to send Casson in his place. He doesn’t mention any illness to his parents, and correspondence with Casson indicates that he didn’t know of Caniff’s illness until late September. While it’s still possible he could have turned down the appearance due to health issues, in 1986 he wrote that he wanted to give the focus to Stiner instead of himself. “I didn’t want the spotlight shifting from her to me and back again,” he wrote. Caniff got out of the hospital on the 4th or 5th of October, 1952, so it’s doubtful he would have been up to making the trip to Columbia if he had wanted to go anyway.

This sickness apparently was serious enough that it hospitalized Caniff. For all we know, the July sickness could have been something that he was dealing with that progressively got worse into September. I’m not sure if anyone filled in for him artistically or not during this illness. He may have called on Overgard or Sickles in late September to cover him for some December or January strips, but it’s hard to spot if they did fill in any of these sequences. Maybe some more eagle eyed readers could pick things out? The strip that I show above from December 8th seems uncharacteristic of Caniff, so maybe it’s a possible example of ghosting?

When did the word “Mizzou” start to become popular on the University of Missouri campus? Did the popularity of the Miss Mizzou character in the 1950s and 1960s bolster the usage of the word “Mizzou” over time? I decided to crunch some numbers to see what I could find out.

This is a graph where I listed the mentions of the word “Mizzou” that I searched for in the Missouri Digital Library versions of both the Savitar Yearbook and MU Alumni Magazine. The first use of the word “Mizzou” in print occurred in a 1905 issue of the Missouri Alumni Quarterly and the word was used some over the next few decades as you can see in the graph. It seems that the Alumni Magazine started using the word Mizzou a lot starting in the 1970s and it skyrockets when the University officially trademarks the name in 2004 for branding purposes.

If you take a closer look at the data pre-1971, a different picture emerges. The two data points occasionally mesh up to form a trend, but overall they seem to differ quite a bit. The one interesting thing I do see here is somewhat of an upward trend in the Savitar in the 1950s and 1960s. Could this have been the influence of Miss Mizzou? Given that the Savitar was a student publication, I think this upward trend during those two decades could show the skyrocketing influence of the term as these students later became alumni in the 1970s and beyond.

Some notes:

• Correlation does not indicate causation. The appearance of Miss Mizzou may have an an effect on the prevalence on the appearance of the word Mizzou, but this data does not definitively show a cause one way or another. This data is presented for fun contemplation, so take it as such.
• The data here is of course influenced by the use of OCR technology that sometimes picks up words in scanned text and sometimes doesn’t. For instance, the technology may have not collected many instances of “Mizzou” that were written in unique display fonts.
• The Savitar Yearbook began publication in 1894 and ended publication in 2005. The Alumni Magazine started in 1905, and is still published today.
• By comparing these two publications I’m afraid I’m comparing apples and oranges at times. The Savitar started off as a small publication and grew in size as the school did, even getting two volumes in some years. Comparatively, the Alumni Magazine has had a much more erratic run; some years it was produced almost monthly, while in the 1980s it finally moved to it’s current quarterly status. From 1969-1973 they played around with their format quite a bit and chopped up the magazine into different sections for various divisions which I think elevated the numbers for those years artificially.
• I call the alumni publication “The Alumni Magazine” here for clarity’s sake but it had various names throughout the years. Originally known as “Missouri Alumni Quarterly” it changed it’s name to “Missouri Alumnus” in 1912, which stuck until 1995 where it was renamed “MIZZOU.”
• It should go without saying that the occurrence of the word “Mizzou” in these publications doesn’t necessarily reflect it’s use in everyday real world situations. Oftentimes staff members of yearbooks and alumni magazines present a certain viewpoint that might not be representative of a University community as a whole.
• I was inspired to do this research from Norm Benedict’s guest post a few weeks back about his Miss Mizzou memories.

Update 04-28-15: One reader wrote me with an interesting thought that did not occur to me as I was putting this data together. In the early part of the 20th century, some people used “Missou” instead of “Mizzou.” It’d be interesting to go through the searching again and add this variation to see how it’d change the chart.

IMAGE: Marilyn Monroe’s star on the Palm Springs Walk of Stars, Palm Springs, California. Photo from flickr user Chris Parker taken in 2013, some rights reserved.

Miss Mizzou debuted on September 5th, 1952, just as one of the people who inspired the character, Marilyn Monroe, was gaining momentum with her film career. Marilyn Monroe was in five films released during the summer and fall of 1952:

• • • “Clash by Night” – June 18, 1952
    • “We’re Not Married!” – July 11, 1952
    • “Don’t Bother to Knock” – July 18, 1952
    • “Monkey Business” – September 2, 1952
    • “O. Henry’s Full House” – September 19, 1952

These films were smaller roles except for “Don’t Bother to Knock,” which was her first major role as an actress. Most of these films don’t merit mention in relation to Miss Mizzou, but let me comment on a couple that might.

On July 11th, “We’re Not Married!” was released. The film portrays several couples who aren’t married because the judge who married them wasn’t licensed at the time. One of the couples includes Monroe’s character who easily wins a “Mrs. Mississippi” contest and sets her sights on a “Mrs. America” competition. The upstart offshoot of the “Miss America” contest struggles to get off the ground, but when the couple gets notice that they are not married, Monroe’s character simply takes the “Miss Mississippi” competition instead and sets her sights on becoming “Miss America”.

It’s tempting to look at Monroe’s role in “We’re Not Married!” and say that Caniff merely took “Miss Mississippi” and molded that into “Miss Mizzou.” I tend to think Monroe’s role in the film is only a odd coincidence as far as Miss Mizzou is concerned. Here’s my three reasons:

1. It doesn’t fit the timeline. Caniff was working up the Miss Mizzou character by the end of May, and would have likely had her name figured out by the time he started working on strips for August that would have featured the character. Caniff was working only about two months ahead at that time as far as I can tell; this means he would have been working up the August strips in early June, a full month before the film came out.
2. Monroe had a small role. In theory there could have been some advanced publicity for the film that Caniff could have been influenced by, but it seems to me that Monroe’s role in the jam packed cast wasn’t promoted that much, at least compared to Monroe’s role in “Clash by Night” released a few weeks earlier.
3. Monroe already had a beauty title. Monroe was already known as a “Miss Cheescake” in 1951 by Stars and Stripes Magazine, so idea of Monroe being “Miss [something]” already existed long before this film came out. (Perhaps this inspired Caniff instead?)

Monroe’s beauty queen role in “We’re Not Married!” likely led her to an interesting publicity stunt a couple months later. On September 2nd, the film “Monkey Business” was released and Monroe toured to support the film; she got the honor of being Grand Marshall the Miss America parade that month as well.

One more comment about the film “Monkey Business.” While Monroe did not wear a trench coat in Monkey Business, her blonde costar Ginger Rogers did put on a trench coat for a while near the end of the film. The use of the trench coat in the film is yet another example of how the trench coat was coming into use by women in post World War II America.