Fifty years after his death, Bob Ripley and his tag line remain etched in the lexicon. A showman in the tradition of P.T. Barnum—albeit with a few more scruples—he peerlessly exploited the human appetite for the strange-but-true. "Ripley was the ultimate collector," says Bill Miller, publisher of Pop Culture Collecting magazine. "I don't know of anyone who had as good an eye for unusual items that could both entertain and repulse people at the same time."
"Ripley's Believe It or Not!" cartoons, drawn by a contemporary artist, still appear in 170 newspapers worldwide. And Ripley Entertainment Inc. (the umbrella firm Ripley formed for his various enterprises) owns a total of 20,000 oddities, kept in the Orlando warehouse and at 27 Believe It or Not! museums worldwide. "When a farmer in Nebraska has a two-headed calf born," boasts-Edward Meyer, vice president of publishing for Ripley Entertainment, "we're the first people he calls."
For someone whose name is synonymous with all things exotic, Ripley's first love—baseball—was pure American traditional. The oldest of three children, he was born in 1894 to Isaac, a Santa Rosa, Calif., carpenter, and his wife, Lillie. Ripley pitched for a semipro team and at 20 earned a tryout with the New York Giants. But his dream died when he severely injured his pitching arm.
Luckily, Ripley had pursued a second passion. At Santa Rosa High School he drew cartoons for the school paper and sold his first sketch—of a woman wringing out her laundry—to Life magazine (not the current publication) for $8 in 1908. The following year, Ripley moved to San Francisco, where he got his big break, illustrating sports stories for the San Francisco Chronicle. It was author Jack London, then a reporter at the paper, who advised him to seek his fortune on the East Coast. The ambitious youth needed little prodding and in 1912 set out for New York City, then the nation's newspaper capital. "This is a guy," says Edward Meyer, "who wanted to be famous."
The following year Ripley joined the New York Globe as a sports cartoonist. In 1918 he began drawing sports-related "Believe It or Not" cartoons (one of his first was of a man who jumped rope 11,810 times in about four hours). Eventually he branched out into more general oddities—a will written on an eggshell, two Ukrainians who slapped each other's faces for 36 hours straight. Sporadic at first, his vivid line drawings caught on with readers and became a daily feature in 1923. That same year, Ripley took his first trip around the world, filing colorful dispatches en route. ("The Hindoo is frail and skinny," read one. "His legs are always as misshapen as sticks.")
It was then that Ripley began collecting artifacts. "He was curious about everything," says Hazel Storer, 80, a friend and onetime production assistant on Ripley's 1940s radio and television shows. "He rarely talked about himself, but he would go off on a tear on anything he was interested in."
Ripley himself was something of a curiosity. In public, says Meyer, he was "flamboyant and a publicity hound," who "liked to carry canes and wear two-tone shoes." At home, however, "he always wore kimonos and sandals," says Storer. "He was mad about Oriental things." Ripley was also extremely shy, with a slight stammer—yet he earned a reputation as a ladies' man. In 1918 he married Beatrice Carlisle, a Ziegfeld Follies girl, but was soon "fooling around," according to Meyer. The childless couple divorced in 1923, and Ripley never remarried.
His empire, however, continued to grow. In 1930, Ripley began a radio show spotlighting people with unusual stories. Over the next few years he appeared in a series of short films shown in movie theaters around the country. By then, publisher William Randolph Hearst had made Ripley a rich man by syndicating his cartoon; it was eventually carried in 325 newspapers in 42 countries. Ripley received about 3,500 fan letters a day. (One 12-year-old boy sent a drawing of his dog, claiming it ate pins, screws and razor blades; Ripley published the picture. The child's name: Charles M. Schulz, who later used the pooch as tne moaei ror snoopy in his "Peanuts" comic strip.)
At the 1933 Chicago World's Fair, Ripley opened his first "Odditorium," which Meyer calls "a combination of a sideshow, freak show, dime-store museum and natural-history museum. You could learn about shrunken heads, learn about a guy who makes things from match-sticks and see a guy who drives nails up his nose." Audiences inhaled it all, and Ripley opened six more Odditoriums around the country. "At Chicago, 100 people fainted every day, and we had to have six beds," Ripley proudly told The New Yorker in 1940.
Ripley clearly enjoyed the trappings of his growing fame. He bought three homes in the '30s and '40s—a 28-room mansion in Mamaroneck, N.Y., a stylish Manhattan apartment and a house in West Palm Beach, Fla.—and owned a Chinese junk. Ripley's lavish parties were attended by the likes of Babe Ruth, W.C. Fields and Mae West. Nonetheless, Hazel Storer recalls, he never rid himself of a fundamental insecurity. "Even though he was very proud of what he did," she says, "Ripley always felt like a poor boy from the other side of the tracks."
As World War II forced him to cut back on his travels, Ripley's health began to decline. Plagued by hypertension, he gained weight and began drinking heavily—even as he became host of a weekly NBC TV show in 1949. Near collapse on May 23 of that year, Ripley did his episode, then checked into a Manhattan hospital. Four days later, at 54, he died of a heart attack.
But the master of the unusual couldn't depart without one last eerie twist. His final TV broadcast, about Memorial Day, ended with a bugler playing taps as Ripley signed off. "Had he known," says Storer, "he would have been yery pleased."
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