Overview
Born in Crawfordsville, Indiana, Bill Holman (1903–1987) moved to Chicago, where he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts while working as an office boy in the Chicago Tribune art department. Relocating to New York City, where he worked as a New York Herald Tribune staff artist, Holman submitted freelance cartoons to magazines, (including Colliers, The Saturday Evening Post, Life, Judge and Everybody's Weekly.) He began Smokey Stover as a Sunday strip for the Chicago Tribune Syndicate on March 10, 1935. The daily strip began three years later on November 14, 1938.
The title Smokey Stover derived from Holman's observation of an old smoking stove. Although no clear connection has ever been asserted, Holman's title and character name also could have been a nod toward the ubiquitous stationary engine manufactured by the Stover Manufacturing and Engine Company of Freeport, Illinois. Between 1895 and 1942, it made over 270,000 engines for use on America's farms. Such stationary engines were imprecise machines which often produced substantial exhaust smoke when fueled with kerosene, a common fuel used before catalytic cracking of petroleum became more common in the 1930s.
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