IMAGE: An error in a story about Milton Caniff that I’ve corrected using a red pen. (I’ll leave out the details of who made this mistake, but the image is included in my Miss Mizzou book if you care to look.)

Before my Miss Mizzou book came out last year, many past newspaper articles had gotten the story of Miss Mizzou wrong. Yes, sad but true, the errors involved with reporting stories on Miss Mizzou are numerous and plentiful. I thought I’d write up a blog post to correct some of the persistent errors that I’ve come across.

False: Milton Caniff visited Columbia Missouri in 1948.
True: Milton Caniff visited Columbia, Missouri, May 5th, 1949.
This error seemed to crop up right around the character’s debut in 1952. Once printed, this false information has been a perennial mainstay of the Miss Mizzou story that is hard to shake. This isn’t the only date that has been messed up by reporters, but it seems to be the most prevalent.

False: Milton Caniff is an MU Alumnus.
True: Milton Caniff graduated from Ohio State University.
I think what get’s this misconception going is a confusion between cartoonist and MU Alumnus Mort Walker and Milton Caniff. They both produced military strips, so they should be the same guy, right? Not exactly.

False: The Miss Mizzou character graduated from MU.
True: The Miss Mizzou character did not attend MU.
Caniff made clear from the beginning that the character was a waitress from Columbia, Missouri, and people at the diner she worked at called her “Miss Mizzou.” She liked the college in the strip, but she never went to school there.

False: Caniff was inspired by a local waitress to create Miss Mizzou.
True: Caniff did not use a local waitress as inspiration for Miss Mizzou.
Time and time again I’ve seen journalists who deliver this supposition, but Caniff refutes this point whenever he’s been interviewed about it. One interview in the 1980s had Caniff pointing to a waitress that he knew of during his college days that might have inspired the character, as I write about in the book.

False: Bek Stiner was the only person to model for Caniff as Miss Mizzou.
True: Bek Stiner was the first to model for Caniff as Miss Mizzou.
Can’t really blame anyone for this misconception too much, since I didn’t find out how many women had modeled for Caniff as Miss Mizzou until I started writing this book. There are at least two other models that we know of via photographic evidence, and perhaps a third though a report in a newspaper column.

If you have any other corrections, let me know! I will say that while I think I may have got most of the facts correct on Miss Mizzou, my book is of course prone to errors too. There may be parts of the Miss Mizzou story that I may have interpreted wrong or gotten specific facts garbled. Please feel free to send me a note or leave a comment on this blog correcting my mistakes. Thanks!

IMAGE: The front and back of a Miss Mizzou bookmark created to promote the Miss Mizzou book.

This is a bit of a personal post I wanted to write to explain why I didn’t want to create any Miss Mizzou merchandise to go along with the Miss Mizzou book. A couple of practical reasons:

• I wanted to err on the side of caution while dealing with a complex character with a controversial past. The character is not as simple and beloved as the Truman Tiger mascot for example.
• The rights to Miss Mizzou are complex; MU has the “Mizzou” trademark, but the Caniff Estate owns the character. Luckily I got permission to do the book because it was history, but merchandising might be a different situation.

More than these reasons, merchandising didn’t interest me because I want to promote the story of Miss Mizzou, not the character. I’m interested in sharing the story with a new generation of Columbians, MU students, and comic fans. While a lot of my book examines frivolous things, I think there are also interesting lessons to be learned from the story of Miss Mizzou. My role is amateur historian and comics scholar, not intellectual property marketer.

With the interest of sharing the story, I did create one item that might fall in the merchandising category: Bookmarks. These are hopefully a modest promotional tool that I’ve been handing out for free so I can promote my book, and the story of Miss Mizzou.