The Ink Blog

Walter Ball was born to a farming family near Cookstown, Ontario in 1911 and grew up with designs of becoming a Electrical Engineer upon reaching adulthood, but fate chose a different path entirely for him. Newspapers & magazines were the most accessible media in the day and Walter's dreams were swept up in ads for mail-order drawing lessons. Often, the first lesson was sent free, costing just a postage stamp on the letter of request for the lesson. Therefore, as was typically the lot of farm families, the Balls weren't likely awash in cash, Walter learned to draw from these free lessons. It led him into a career in graphic arts, which one day got him hired at the Toronto Star.

At the Star, Walter's duties typically included news graphics, which depicted where the body was found, after foul play, etc. While Ball befriended Jimmy Frise, arguably the biggest legend in the largely forgotten (if ever acknowledged) world of Canadian comic strips, he himself only hobbied in the comics field. However, Frise left Toronto for the Montreal Standard in the late 1940s, leaving a gaping entertainment hole in the Star pages.

The legend goes that the editors of the Star Weekly asked if Ball knew anyone interested in creating a comic strip for the publication, which was about to convert to tabloid from broadsheet in 1956. Ball offered a couple of names, but asked also to submit his own work for consideration. They agreed, he submitted some samples and was offered the job. The feature was run weekly and aptly named "Rural Route", featuring the misadventures of a farm couple named Elmer and Myrtle and their nephew, Willy. A reader survey revealed that one month into the format change, Rural Route had emerged into the most popular feature in the paper.

Unlike Frise, Ball continued in his duties as graphic artist, concurrent to drawing Rural Route, when the Star Weekly folded in 1968. In 1970, Ball was promoted to Art Director and continued in this capacity until retiring in 1975, He and his wife resided in Richmond Hill until his death. I did some investigating about the story from there and learned that Ball's wife moved in with her sister and the two ladies lived busy, vibrant lives through the early 2000s.

Ball himself was very quiet, charming and self-effacing. It seems he never bragged about being one of the few published Canadian cartoonists of his day, probably because he wasn't overly well paid for it. He did it for a little extra spending money, as many of us have done (and continue to do) in the Canadian comic strip industry. Fellow cartoonist Arn Saba talks about this in an interview by Don Harron of "Morningside" found in the CBC Radio Archives.

In the late 1980s, I taught night school cartooning classes in the Grey and Bruce County area. One local was John Diefenbaker Secondary School in the small town of Hanover, Ontario, During one of these sessions, I was fortunate to have a student with a unique connection to Ball.

In the 1950s, or 1960s, the Star Weekly held a contest that invited readers to submit strip ideas for new Rural Route strips that would be drawn by Ball and published. It seems this student had once won the contest and still possessed the original Walter Ball artwork featuring her gag, which the Star Weekly awarded her as a prize. One night following a class, this lady invited me to her home and kindly showed me the strip. I was thrilled for her, that she once had the opportunity so few will ever enjoy in life and while she suffered some health challenges, you could almost feel her robust youth return to her, when she spoke of winning the contest and getting this special comic strip in the mails.

I am sure there are others out there reading this, who enjoyed a similar experience, as the contest ran for many months. This lady seemed saddened that times had changed so much that the strip had been almost completely forgotten. I hope others didn't feel this sadness, but if so and they wished to share the strips with others and get a little bit of notoriety again, I'd be proud to publish them, with any other details deemed noteworthy in upcoming editions of the Ink Blog. The email address is jeffwil@rocketmail.com