4-2-10
Cartoonist’s Death May End Idea Of Comic Strip
By JIM KEVLIN
Once in a while, time runs out on a good idea.
Oneonta’s Cory Talarico felt that way in recent days, after learning that famed comic-strip illustrator Don Sherwood had passed away.
Sherwood, an Otego native whose “Dan Flagg” comic strip ran in virtually every daily in the country in the 1960s, had launched a short-lived “Sergeant Preston of the Yukon” strip in 1981.
If “Sergeant Preston,” Talarico reasoned, why not “Sergeant Cunningham”?
That’s as in Sgt. John L. Cunningham, Cooperstown’s resident trooper for three decades (1921-52), who won national notice for his horse-riding, crime-fighting exploits in the towns around Otsego Lake.
When Sherwood, fighting cancer, visited for a final time in August 2009 for an opening of an exhibit of his work at the B. Sharp Gallery on Franklin Mountain, Talarico sought him ought.
Last fall, Sherwood even worked up a protype – Cunningham and his dog, Trooper, in front of the former state police barracks at Main and Pine, Cooperstown – for a possible strip.
News of Sherwood’s passing – he died March 6 at a hospice in North Carolina – caused Talarico to put this phase of his plan on hold, but not his admiration for the legendary state police officer.
Both in 1882, John Cunningham’s identical twin, James, went into the state police when it formed in 1917, and his brother followed two weeks later.
“You have to be 50 years or over to even had heard of him,” said Mary C. Devenpeck of Toddsville, the only child of the sergeant and his wife, Elizabeth.
The first memory of a “barracks” in Cooperstown was in that yellow house, one up from Lamb Realty; Veronica Gil lives there now. The family soon moved to 184 Main, now the Cadwalader place.
The sergeant would board his horse, Tom, in stables just down from Hoffman Lane Bistro. Troopers who rotated through town would stay at the Fenimore Hotel, on the grounds of the present Cooper Inn, before 184 Main provided sufficient space for visitors rooms.
Mary Devenpeck remembers the excitement of growing up in a police family in the 1940s. Something – a murder from time to time, or burglaries – was always going on.
For particulars, she pulls out a copy of a scrapbook her mother maintained for decades – the original is now at Troop C, Sidney – and the headlines say it all.
“Oneontan’s Son Killed In Odd Farm Mishap,” after a mechanical hayfork fell on him. “Couple Drowns While Fishing” on Canadarago Lake. “Youths Held For Stealing Automobiles.” “Three Fined For Doing Over 35” on Route 20 near East Springfield; they were clocked at 52.
On duty during the notorious Eva Coo’s murder trial in the county courthouse in 1934, the twin sergeants were singled out by Frank Lee Donoghue, a New York City newspaper man who went on to write a series of dime novels, “G Riders In Action.”
The brothers won recognition far and wide for “The Cunninghams Get Their Man,” in the 1936 “Gray Ghosts of Justice” compilation.
“A dangerous firebug is tracked to his lair in a backwoods lumber camp. He fights back with the help of his crew,” Donoghue wrote. “How he is captured makes an amazing tale of those colorful twins of the Gray Mounties.”
He describes “Jack and Jim” as “Glens Falls Irish and the dead spit of each other. Twins they were born and twins they’ve been though 52 years of life, alike in everything” through a life of “faithful and loyal service.”
He worked until 1952, so formidable, his daughter remembers, that the boys in her high school class were afraid to ask her out.
He never got his driver’s license. In his later years, a younger trooper would chauffer him around. Or he would walk to the corner and flag a passing motorist, who always gave him a lift to wherever he wished.
Talarico first ran across Sergeant Cunningham in B.C. Stevens, 1996 “Hinman Hollow Road Dust,” but became reacquainted with him in 2002 during Hartwick’s celebration of its Bicentennial.
As the writer/law-enforcement officer began to research a Civilian Conservation Corps camp in Hartwick in back issues of The Freeman’s Journal at NYSHA, “I kept seeing the name, Cunningham, Cunningham, Cunningham. He was all over the paper,” Talarico said, “like a local celebrity.”
On a parallel track, he’d been running across pieces of artwork in Oneonta’s bars and restaurants, signed “Don Sherwood, Don Sherwood. Who is Don Sherwood?”
He concluded, “Wouldn’t it be neat? Why not have Don Sherwood drawing ‘Sergeant Cunningham of Cooperstown’?”
Talarico located Sherwood in Maryland three or four years ago, but couldn’t connect. The visit to the B. Sharp Gallery provided an unexpected opportunity to take his idea to the next level.
Now, Talarico isn’t sure which turn his project will take. He’s been in touch with artist Marty Glanzman and writer Marty Podskoch, producers of “Adirondack Stories” – each combines a drawing and short text – in the Adirondack Park. Maybe something like that would work here.
Meanwhile, the Cunningham legend continues to fade as fewer people – Cooperstown’s Fred St. John and recently retired Middlefield Town Justice Ray Burr among them – are around.
Everyone thought he was tough, said Mrs. Devenpeck, but his daughter saw another side: “Down deep, he was really a softie. You wouldn’t know it, though.”
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