Art North's Cartoon Gallary

My father Arthur North was born in 1922 in Pittsburgh and grew up in a duplex on Shadeland Avenue in the city's North Side. In 1940 he graduated from Oliver High School and entered Carnegie Technical Institute (now Carnegie Mellon University) where he was an English major. He transferred to Rutgers University to pursue his love of art, but before long World War Two interfered and he spent three years in the army decoding Japanese military messages.

Following the war he resumed his education, graduating from Swarthmore College in 1948. After graduation he moved to San Francisco, where he worked with Jay Ward and Alex Anderson at Television Arts Productions. He drew and wrote for the cartoons Dudley Doright and Crusader Rabbit. (Jay Ward later launched the Rockie and Bullwinkle Show after what seems to have been a less than amiable split between himself and Anderson. Later, Anderson claimed to be the true creator of Rockie and Bullwinkle. As I understand, Anderson was the creative brain behind the operation while Ward handled the buisness end. Also, Boris and especially Nastasia from the Rockie and Bullwinkle Show bear a strong resemblence to my father's characters, although my father never claimed that they were were his own creations. (I will try to post my father's Boris-esque characters in the near future so visitors can judge for themselves.) In 1950 he moved to New York, where he married my mother, whom he knew from Swarthmore. He never went back to drawing cartoons for a living, but rather became one of the pioneers in the barely emerging computer industry.

During the 1960's and 70's, among other things, he automated the records of the U.S. Patent office, the typesetting system of the Washington Post, and the inventory database of the U.S. Navy. He did early research in Optical Character Recognition (OCR -- computerized text scanning) and was honored as Inventor of the Month by Science Digest in September 1963 for his development of the first intellegent character case converter.

Arthur North wrote extensively about the huge role computers would play in society, but due to his untimely death in 1980 was not able to see his prophecies be fulfilled by the diffusion of the personal computer and the explosion of the internet. Yet, it is fitting that this pioneer of the digital computer should find a home for his cartoons on the World Wide Web.

Titus North, January 21, 1998

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