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Summary
Summary
A Curious Man is the marvelously compelling biography of Robert "Believe It or Not" Ripley, the enigmatic cartoonist turned globetrotting millionaire who won international fame by celebrating the world's strangest oddities, and whose outrageous showmanship taught us to believe in the unbelievable.
As portrayed by acclaimed biographer Neal Thompson, Ripley's life is the stuff of a classic American fairy tale. Buck-toothed and cursed by shyness, Ripley turned his sense of being an outsider into an appreciation for the strangeness of the world. After selling his first cartoon to Time magazine at age eighteen, more cartooning triumphs followed, but it was his "Believe It or Not" conceit and the wildly popular radio shows it birthed that would make him one of the most successful entertainment figures of his time and spur him to search the globe's farthest corners for bizarre facts, exotic human curiosities, and shocking phenomena.
Ripley delighted in making outrageous declarations that somehow always turned out to be true--such as that Charles Lindbergh was only the sixty-seventh man to fly across the Atlantic or that "The Star Spangled Banner" was not the national anthem. Assisted by an exotic harem of female admirers and by ex-banker Norbert Pearlroth, a devoted researcher who spoke eleven languages, Ripley simultaneously embodied the spirit of Peter Pan, the fearlessness of Marco Polo and the marketing savvy of P. T. Barnum.
In a very real sense, Ripley sought to remake the world's aesthetic. He demanded respect for those who were labeled "eccentrics" or "freaks"--whether it be E. L. Blystone, who wrote 1,615 alphabet letters on a grain of rice, or the man who could swallow his own nose.
By the 1930s Ripley possessed a vast fortune, a private yacht, and a twenty-eight room mansion stocked with such "oddities" as shrunken heads and medieval torture devices, and his pioneering firsts in print, radio, and television were tapping into something deep in the American consciousness--a taste for the titillating and exotic, and a fascination with the fastest, biggest, dumbest and most weird. Today, that legacy continues and can be seen in reality TV, YouTube, America's Funniest Home Videos, Jackass, MythBusters and a host of other pop-culture phenomena.
In the end Robert L. Ripley changed everything. The supreme irony of his life, which was dedicated to exalting the strange and unusual, is that he may have been the most amazing oddity of all.
Author Notes
NEAL THOMPSON is the critically acclaimed author of Light This Candle, Driving with the Devil, and Hurricane Season and has contributed to such publications as Outside, Esquire, and Sports Illustrated. He lives in Seattle with his wife and two sons. You can find him at www.nealthompson.com.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
From his days as a cartoonist and world-renowned adventurer to those spent creating TV's Ripley's Believe It or Not, Robert Ripley led a fascinating life. Thompson meticulously traces Ripley's life-from his humble beginning in Santa Rosa, Calif., to his opulent ending as an international icon-in this fascinating look at a fascinating man. Narrator Marc Cashman's reading has a light and genial tone that matches the author's attitude toward his subject. Cashman's cadence also deftly captures the rhythms of the book's prose. Following the author's lead, the narrator keeps an emotional distance from his subject, while still producing an engaging audio edition that will hold listener attention throughout. A Crown Archetype hardcover. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
You can be very familiar with someone's work but know next to nothing about the person himself. Ripley's Believe It or Not!, which began life as a newspaper feature before becoming a popular television series, is a staple of popular culture. But who among us knows much about its creator? LeRoy Robert Ripley was born in 1890, although he often claimed other birth years; he wanted to be a pro baseball player but wound up a sports cartoonist; he was a bit of a womanizer, quite a bit of a drinker, and he had an insatiable curiosity about the unusual, the exotic, and the just-plain weird. Believe It or Not! made him a wealthy man, which allowed Ripley to indulge his own passions, which included collecting some truly odd things (torture devices, for example). Thompson paints a picture of Ripley as a brilliant but aggressively eccentric man, a globe-trotting curiosity seeker who always believed there was something even more unusual just around the corner. A fine introduction to a man who, for most of us, has been merely the name above a famous title.--Pitt, David Copyright 2010 Booklist
Kirkus Review
Biography of legendary "Believe It Or Not" cartoonist, world traveler and eccentric millionaire Robert Ripley (18901949). Although capturing every dimension of an oddly complex character like Ripley is no easy task, biographer Thompson (Hurricane Season, 2007, etc.) turns in an obsessively researched but somewhat workmanlike study of the Believe It Or Not founder, whose amazing American life itself plays out like an impossible fairy tale without the need for any particular showy literary finesse. Ripley was born in the 1890s into a lower-middle-class family in California and grew into both a formidable athlete and cartoonist, two interests he would later combine and pursue as a sports cartoonist. But after a few failed stints as a cartoonist for small-time San Francisco newspapers, he moved to New York to try his luck. But it wasn't until he took his first overseas journey to Egypt and across Europe that he began to cultivate an interest in human oddities and exotic cultures that would eventually make his fortune. He jumped from cartoons to radio and then took the Believe It or Not franchise to books and TV. By the 1930s, while most of America was reeling from the Depression, Ripley was one of the highest-paid and most well-traveled men in the world (he visited around 150 countries in all). Unfortunately, once World War II commenced, he found the world was no longer his playground, with hostilities breaking out in all his favorite countries: China's submission to communism in the late 1940s was particularly heartbreaking for Ripley. Overall, Thompson's book only skims the surface of Ripley's psyche without delving too deeply into what drove his odd wanderlust and exotic tastes. The author's competent bricks-and-mortar prose is nothing special, but it does adequately convey a detailed fly-on-the-wallstyle narrative from the (often unbelievable) facts of Ripley's own life. A nuts-and-bolts, mostly nonextraordinary rendering of an extraordinary American life.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
In the first biography of Robert Ripley (1890-1949) since Robert Bernard Considine's Ripley, the Modern Day Marco Polo over 50 years ago, Thompson (Driving with the Devil: Southern Moonshine, Detroit Wheels, and the Birth of NASCAR) presents a well-researched tale of the man born LeRoy Ripley, who combined his talent for drawing cartoons, beginning with sports-related newspaper spreads, with his interest in strange facts to create what became the multimedia Believe It or Not! brand. Ripley grew from a shy, stuttering, buck-toothed dropout to a world-renowned traveler, eccentric, and playboy. Although sometimes a boor, with biases and awkwardness on display, Ripley's dedication to learning and his success in illustrating elusive realities is conveyed by Thompson in a manner that makes Ripley a sympathetic character. Between the world wars and during the Great Depression, Ripley provided escape and entertainment that lives on in today's popular culture that is full of over-the-top reality TV shows and excessive superlatives. VERDICT Interspersed with "Believe It" sidebars and plenty of outlandish and unusual characters, Thompson's biography is a must read for those who enjoy rags-to-riches stories or anything out of the ordinary. Read it or not? Read it!-Barbara Ferrara, Chesterfield Cty. P.L., VA (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
chapter 1 Isaac Davis Ripley, whose son would one day explore all corners of the earth, fled his dead-end Appalachian home at age fourteen and headed west. He didn't get far before the Ohio River blocked his path. Unable to pay for a ferry crossing, Isaac swam solo across the turbulent river, eventually making his way to Northern California, seeking gold but instead finding work as a carpenter and cabinetmaker. By 1889, having settled in Santa Rosa, he fell in love with a woman fourteen years younger. Lillie Belle Yocka's family made their own risky journey toward dreams of a sunnier California life. The Yocka clan left Westport Landing (later called Kansas City) in the late 1860s, joining a straggly crowd along the Santa Fe Trail. During the westward journey, Lillie Belle was born in the back of a covered wagon, and she spent her childhood in a Northern California encampment on the banks of the Russian River. On October 3, 1889, Lillie Belle--twenty-one and pregnant-- married thirty-five-year-old Isaac Ripley, their union earning a brief mention in the Sonoma Democrat. Isaac built a cottage on a postage-stamp lot on Glenn Street, with intricate wood trim that looked like icicles. A son arrived five months later, although the exact year and date of birth would remain a lingering mystery. Possibly to prevent profilers from revealing his mother's premarital pregnancy, LeRoy Robert Ripley would never admit to being born on February 22, 1890; on passport applications and other documents he'd declare 1891, 1892, 1893, or 1894 as his birth year. He'd also later claim to have been born on Christmas Day or Christmas Eve. Isaac and Lillie named him LeRoy but usually called him Roy. Only later in life would he adopt his middle name. A daughter, Ethel, arrived three years later and the family moved into a two-story bungalow Isaac built on Orchard Street, in a quiet grid of streets, home to saloon keepers and dentists, milliners and hops brokers. LeRoy was lean and slight, socially timid but full of energy. He had a ball-shaped head and high forehead, a tousled mop of hair above comically jutted-out ears, a freckled and often-dirty face. His most notable feature was an unfortunate set of protruding and misaligned front teeth, a crooked jumble that practically tumbled from his mouth. When he smiled, it looked like he was wearing novelty teeth. He usually kept his mouth closed, lips stretched to hide his dental deformity. He suffered from a debilitating shyness, caused largely by his disfigured smile, and by a stutter that filled his speech with uhs, ums, and frozen words. Ripley carried himself in ways meant to shield his smile and stutter from others: hunched inward, chin tucked down, shoulders drawn forward, a protective stance. He seemed fragile, almost effeminate, and years later would admit to feeling embarrassed about his "backwardness." Though thin, he grew to be fast and fit. A tireless neighborhood explorer, he ventured into the orchards north of town and probed south into the beckoning city. Mostly, he preferred to be alone. Barefoot, wearing carpenter's overalls or knickerbocker pants and a ragged straw hat, the curious, dreamy boy roved and reconnoitered, collecting bottle caps, cigar bands, and the baseball cards that came inside cigarette packs. He amassed a set of nails bent in the shape of each letter of the alphabet, keeping them in a cigar box under his bed. At the one-room Lewis School, he was forced to wear shoes. He owned a single beat-up pair and would stuff newspaper into the holes and gloss them over with shoe polish. Once, he actually made a pair of shoes from folded-up newspapers, tied together with string and caked black with polish. "He wasn't fooling anyone," said one classmate. When his clothes began to fray and tear, his mother crafted new outfits by recycling old dresses and leftovers from her laundry jobs. In his flower-print pants and shirts, LeRoy was cruelly mocked. Hey kid, why are you wearing a dress? At lunchtime, while the other boys chased girls around the water pump and outhouse, Ripley sat beneath a tree, drawing pictures or reading books about pirates or explorers. In class, students were required to stand and recite poems or essays, but Ripley's stutter made this an excruciating nightmare. Hunched over at his desk, he constantly scribbled and sketched in his notebooks. One teacher would smack him upside the head whenever she caught him copying scenes out of his history book instead of paying attention to the lessons. "Everyone at school picked on him because he was so different," a classmate would later say. "Not one of the guys," said another. After a bad day at school he'd escape to the attic of his house to draw or carve letters into the roof beams. Other early artistic inclinations included defacing his bedroom wall and chewing on pencils. Though it would become an epicurean mecca, the land of Ripley's youth--known by the Pomo and Miwok Indians as Sonoma, or Valley of the Moon--was more Wild West than wine country. A few years past its cowboy-and-Indian days, Santa Rosa and nearby Sonoma and Napa could be dangerous and deadly. When Ripley was a toddler, the Sonoma Democrat reported in breathless detail how Indians had looted a winery, adding: "The red-skins have been on a wild debauch." Also full of debauch were the newspapers. LeRoy learned to read in a lively two-paper town whose editors practiced what would soon be called yellow journalism. The Democrat and its rival, the Santa Rosa Republican, cackled with stories of murderous deeds and accidental deaths, divorces, suicides, and all variety of lunacy, a daily "news of the weird." People plunged off railroad trestles, lost limbs beneath train wheels, became mangled by farm machines. They shot each other over card games, stole horses, robbed banks. The Democrat was especially poetic in its depictions of death, offering vivid descriptions of "putrescent" bodies "lying in pools of blood." Santa Rosa's children were kept close to home and warned to stay away from the streets of downtown, especially Chinatown and its alleged opium dens. With his parents working--Dad as a carpenter, Mom taking in laundry and sewing jobs--Ripley had the freedom to ramble. A shoeless ragamuffin, he scampered through streets and alleys, avoiding the train and trolley traffic but irresistibly lured to Chinatown, where he'd peek into the laundries, restaurants, and shops. The proprietors, all men, puffed on long bamboo pipes and beckoned the curious kid, offering peculiar treats like lychee nuts. Ripley found Santa Rosa's small Chinese community exotic and bizarre. He was awed by the strange clothes, the spicy food smells, and the hand-lettered signs whose symbols looked like hieroglyphs. On the few occasions his parents took him to San Francisco, the highlight was always a brief glimpse of shambling Chinatown. By 1900, Santa Rosa was home to six thousand farmers, timbermen, miners, vintners, and railroad workers--a vibrant downtown of dusty roads clotted by horse-drawn carts, bicycles, and livestock. The region had attracted a variegated mix of romantic eccentrics, including Thomas Lake Harris, charismatic leader of an alternative-lifestyle "Brotherhood of the New Life" commune, who extolled the virtues of wine, tobacco, and sexuality. As one Sonoma County historian put it, Santa Rosa and its environs was a land of "explorers, rancheros, vintners, artists, writers, athletes, movers & shakers & dreamers." Among the dreamers was famed horticulturalist Luther Burbank, who created hundreds of fruit, flower, and vegetable varieties at his agricultural laboratory--a thornless cactus, a white blackberry, a "New Seedling Cherry," the result of grafting two hundred cherry varieties onto one tree. Burbank considered California an unconquered land, a new world where a man who avoided alcohol and tobacco "has ten thousand chances of success." Believe It! Burbank's prized creation, the perky perennial he named the Shasta Daisy, took seventeen years of trial and error. The Santa Rosa of his childhood taught Ripley many things, not least of which was to appreciate off-kilter hobbyists, obsessives, and fanatics, the kind who would years later become targets of his own journalistic curiosity. Ripley's hometown confirmed that you could be both odd and fascinating, obsessive and successful. Even Ripley's mother's church had an appealingly curious backstory. In 1873, congregants of the First Baptist Church, having outgrown their place of worship, felled a 275-foot redwood; sawed and sliced it into studs, beams, and planks; hauled it to town; and assembled a new church from the single tree. Isaac Ripley had been among the builders of the structure that earned headlines as "The Church Built of One Tree." Evidence that a town of death and debauchery could also be a place of magic and wonder was found on the city's stages, too. The Athenaeum Theatre hosted a unique medley of entertainment, from Shakespeare to vaudeville to minstrel shows. Newspaper ads hawked the "world's greatest cornetist" and the "world's most marvelous dancer." The nearby Novelty Theatre hosted lowlier acts: a midget show, a bone-playing musician, a boxing kangaroo. Santa Rosa was also a regular stop on the circus circuit, visited by Tom Thumb's "Smallest Human Beings in the World" and Buffalo Bill's "Wild West Show." The Ringling Brothers Circus visited annually, and when Barnum & Bailey's "Greatest Show on Earth" arrived in town, the Democrat described its "troupe of wonderful midgets [and] a giant who stands nearly eight feet tall--All these curious people . . . living wonders." For a kid who was mocked and teased for his funny looks and shabby clothes, his balky speech and his pathological dread of girls, Santa Rosa proved to be an ideal hometown, a place where the unusual was acceptable, where a person could be a bit peculiar and still succeed. "Anybody who is born in Santa Rosa must turn out to be either an artist or a poet, for the spirit of the hills gets into your blood out there," Ripley would say years later, calling his home "the quaintest little town in the United States." By the fall of 1904, when he entered Santa Rosa High, Ripley had grown taller and stronger, filling out his scrawny frame and showing signs of athletic prowess. In the spring of his freshman year he joined the baseball team, though he remained an awkward, eye-averting doodler. "No one thought he would amount to much of anything," said a classmate. In the presence of female classmates, he showed a laughable insecurity. Teachers recalled seeing him run when girls came near and classmates would later remember him as "not much of a ladies' man." His one true female friend, who had roamed with him through downtown and among Chinatown's alleys, was Nell "Nellie Bell" Griffith. By high school, Nell had grown into a dark-haired beauty, a poet and basketball standout. Though she'd tell classmates that she and LeRoy were just "very close friends," Ripley clearly thought it was more than that. Nell never seemed bothered by Ripley's gawky looks. She knew he was "awkward," but also funny, smart, and artistic. Nell's parents owned an orchard, where she and Ripley often played among the rows of trees. Ripley once upset a bees' nest and ran away screaming--a scene that he captured in a pencil drawing, which he presented to Nell. In class, Ripley began letting classmates lean over his shoulder to watch him draw amusing caricatures of peers and teachers. Among his popular sketches were those of the balding, bespectacled history teacher, Charles T. Conger, despised by students and teachers alike, whom Ripley posed in what he called "some of his favorite attitudes": sitting at his desk with arms spread wide; sitting on a stool pointing a long ruler at the blackboard. Conger didn't appreciate the likenesses, but others did, and classmates' reactions to his drawings marked the first time Ripley stood out for reasons other than his crooked teeth and stammer. Notebooks, textbooks, sheets of scrap paper--no empty space was safe from Ripley's eager pencil. His happiest, purest school moments were with a pencil in his right hand, a clean white space before him. His family couldn't afford art supplies, so he hoarded butcher paper and used a cutting board as an easel. Though he never took drawing lessons, he practiced relentlessly, sitting in front of a mirror to study his own lips, eyes, and facial muscles, then drawing his own expressions on crumpled scraps of butcher paper, smiling, scowling, frowning. He once splurged on a five-cent postcard featuring a painting called The Wedding Feast, and practiced copying the scene, over and over. He would follow his sister and mother around, sketching them as they cleaned dishes, washed clothes, or hung laundry, pleading with Ethel or Lillie Belle to sit or stand still for just a few minutes. "Pose for me just a little while, will you?" he'd ask, and they usually gave in. As he prepared to enter his second year of high school, in mid-1905, Ripley seemed to be settling into a comfortable routine. He'd started making a few friends, and had begun making a less-than-negative impression on classmates. The bucktoothed young misfit was beginning to feel normal. That's when everything changed. Isaac Ripley was a glum, gruff, and serious man, judging by the scant few surviving photographs: the corners of his mustachioed mouth were pulled low and his deep, dark eyes were typically pinched into a scowl. He must have seemed especially forlorn that Friday night in September of 1905. Ripley's grandmother, who had recently moved to Santa Rosa, had died of a lung hemorrhage that summer, and Isaac was still mourning his mother's death. After dinner on the night of September 15, he felt a crushing pain in his chest. Lillie Belle summoned the local physician, Dr. Jesse, who gave Isaac some medicine to ease his discomfort. A few hours later, just before midnight, Isaac was beset by another attack. Within thirty minutes he was dead, his wife and children by his side. Ten days shy of his fifty-first birthday, Isaac was buried at the Odd Fellows Cemetery, just blocks from his home. A choral quartet sang as Isaac's brethren from the carpenters' union and the Woodmen of the World lowered his casket into the ground. LeRoy and sister, Ethel, stood beside their mother, who held in her arms the newest family member, sixteen-month-old Douglas. Alone with three children, Lillie had no apparent skills with which to find a decent job. She began renting out a room to tenants, baking bread, continuing to take on needlework and the laundry of others while looking for a nursing job. Somehow, she was determined to keep her fragile household intact. Short, tough, and attractive, she had always been the dominant parent, quick-witted and sharp-tongued. With a pouty mouth, dark skin and eyes, narrow waist, and shapely hips, even Ripley's classmates thought his mother was "quite attractive." Though he'd later speak adoringly of Lillie, Ripley "never spoke much about his father," according to one longtime friend. "And the impression is left, somehow, that he did not think too much of him." Excerpted from A Curious Man: The Strange and Brilliant Life of Robert Believe It or Not! Ripley by Neal Thompson All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.