Special Collections Divison > Treasures of South Florida Libraries Home > Rollins College > Next

Gasoline Alley.

Hand-drawn cartoon strip. Fixing to Do it


Rollins College. Department of Archives, Special Collections and Records Management. Winter Park, Florida.

Rollins College was founded in 1885 under the auspices of the Congregational Church. It was the first college to be established in Florida. When Rollins College opened, the library collection consisted of a Bible and a dictionary. Today the College's Olin Library, built in 1984, contains over a quarter of a million volumes. The Department of Archives, Special Collections and Records Management is housed on the top floors of the Mills Center, the original campus library. Among the many important collections found in this department are the William Sloane Kennedy Bequest of Whitmaniana and the Jesse B. Rittenhouse Library of Modern Poetry and Literature.

Frank O. King. Frank O. King donated two hundred and seventy-six strips of the original Gasoline Alley cartoons to Rollins College in the 1960s. King was born in 1883 in Cashton, Wisconsin. He was a cartoonist for the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate. In 1916 he created the first nationally distributed general Sunday gag page, the precursor to the Sunday comics supplement. The gag page contained several separate one panel gags on topical themes set in a rectangular box on the first page of the theater section and was popularly known as the Rectangle. King occasionally ran a cartoon in the Rectangle based on the everyday life of a group of men tinkering on cars in an alley, and amongst them was Walt Wallet. In 1919, King began a strip cartoon based on these occasional cartoons, called Gasoline Alley. It was one of the first cartoon strips whose characters aged and lived normal lives. There have been at least three generations of the Wallets, starting with Walt as a bachelor who had foundling, Skeezix, to raise. Walt married Phyllis. Two more children were added, Corky, Skeezix's foster brother, and Judy, another foundling. Skeezix married Nina and they had two children of their own, Chipper and Clovia. The library's collection highlights incidents in the growing family's life. As Skeezix grows up he becomes interested in cars and girls. He graduates, gets his first job and during World War II, joins the army. King received the Freedom Foundation Award in 1949 and 1950 and was recognized by the National Cartoonists Society as Best Strip Cartoonist in 1957 and Cartoonist of the Year in 1959. He died in Winter Park in 1969. Gasoline Alley. Three hand-drawn cartoon strips.

It was supposed to be an Insult. 5-25. Copyrighted 1937. 4 panels. "Skeezix! You thought I was mad because you invited me for a ride and I thought you meant in a car."

The Empty End. 5-25. Copyrighted 1937. 4 panels. "Golly. I'm so proud to be a half owner of our car, Tops!"

Fixing to Do it. 5-13. Copyrighted 1942. 3 panels. "With Father sick in bed there are plenty of things piling up to be done."

Pali Manuscript. Mahapadana Suttanta and Dhammadhanasutta. With commentaries. [n.p., n.d.] Manuscript.

This early Cambodian religious manuscript relates events in the life of Buddha. The manuscript was a gift of Dr. Howard A. Kelly of Baltimore in 1932. It is written in a Cambodian or Khmer script and has numerous gold leaf and watercolor illustrations. The manuscript is written on large sheets of palm-leaf paper folded like a fan to measure five inches by one inch by twenty-seven inches. When unfolded the manuscript is over forty-six feet long.

The language used is Pali, the liturgical tongue of Southern Buddhism. The text is composed of two important works in Pali Buddhism. The Mahapadana Suttanta is a portion of the Digha Nikava and contains teachings of Buddha in dialogue form. The commentaries are written in Siamese.