Robert Ripley: The modern Marco Polo

JAKARTA (JP): Who would have thought that Robert Leroy Ripley would become famous around the world?

Born on Christmas Day in 1893 in Santa Rosa, California, he started along the path to fame at the age of 14 when he sold a drawing to Life magazine. But young Ripley preferred baseball to drawing. Unfortunately, his big league career was crushed after he broke his arm playing his first professional game.

After the accident, Ripley returned to his earlier goal of becoming a professional artist. Then he landed a job as a cartoonist covering sports for the San Francisco Chronicle. He started drawing sport cartoons when he joined New York Globe, focusing on odd facts and feats. There was one on a Toronto youth who could run the 100 yard dash backwards in 14 seconds. There was an Austrian who could jump rope 11,810 times nonstop. Or a Parisian who could stay under water without a breathing device for 6:29.9 minutes.

Initially his cartoons ran under the title Champs and Chumps. Later, the editor of New York Globe wanted a title that would describe the incredible nature of the sporting feats. That was when Champs and Chumps became Believe It or Not.

In no time at all Ripley's cartoons gained fame. Since December 1918, Believe It or Not periodically appeared in the New York Globe. When the newspaper went bankrupt, Ripley sold his cartoons to the New York Post.

Although he started with sports, Ripley later extended the themes for his cartoons from other fields. He also started collecting strange-but-true stories, such as one on a man who survived a fall from a 126-story building; or a chicken which could lay 312 eggs in 308 days; a musician who could play the piano for 66 hours nonstop; an Austrian linguist named Norbert Pearlroth who could speak 14 languages.

In 1920, he traveled to Europe in search of more oddities. Two years later he visited Central and South America and wrote about his adventures in a syndicated feature column called Rambles Around South America.

He was drawn to the Orient in 1925, crossing through Japan, Malaysia, Indonesia, New Guinea and the Philippines. Ripley felt most at home in China. He found Chinese culture fascinating.

Ripley was called "The Modern Marco Polo". His travels took him to North Africa, New Zealand, Tibet and Russia. On one trip he crossed two continents and covered over 39,000 kilometers from New York to Cairo and back again in search of the unbelievable. The journey included 24,000 km by air, 13,000 km by ship an over 16,000 km by camel, donkey and horse.

Ripley's early cartoons, a collection of oddities found on his journeys, were first published in book form by Simon and Schuster in 1929. Believe It or Not! by Ripley sold over half a million copies. Today, if all the Believe It or Not! books ever published were stacked one upon another, the stack would be over 100 times as tall as the Empire State Building.

In 1929, after signing on as a syndicated cartoonist with King Features, part of the William Randolph Hearts newspaper empire, Ripley's salary rocketed from US$10,000 to $100,000 a year.

At the height of its popularity, the Believe It or Not! feature was carried in over 300 newspapers around the world, was translated into 17 different languages and had a readership of 80 million people.

Ripley died in 1949 at the age of 55. A memorial to him has been created in his hometown of Santa Rosa, California in the church where his family worshiped every Sunday. The church, believe it or not, was made entirely out of a single giant redwood tree.

Ripley's unusual legacy lives on in the Believe It or Not! cartoon still featured in hundreds of newspapers around the world, and his spirit of adventure continues in the museums that house his bizarre collection of oddities. (aks)