The formidable dinosaur sculpture standing guard at Fort Worth’s Museum of Science and History is a native Southwesterner in more ways than one. The creature goes by the academic name of Acrocanthosaurus atokensis, and as such, it was not discovered until 1950.
But a Fort Worth cartoonist named Vincent T. Hamlin had envisioned that unknown monster in the fertile substrata of his imagination — almost a generation before the first real-world unearthing of any recognizable fossil remains. Hamlin called the creature by a simpler name, and he made Dinny the Dinosaur a key player in a rip-snorting comic strip called “Alley Oop” about a prehistoric Everyman. Dinny’s resemblance to the Acrocanthosaurus, or high-spined lizard, is uncannily prophetic, although the creature’s practical use as a horse, in effect, by the title character, Alley Oop, is a stretch.
The juxtaposition of provocative science-fact with adventurous frontier lore and science-fantasy is one of those nowhere-but-Texas coincidences that would leave V.T. Hamlin beaming with pride. If he were still around to do any beaming, that is.
In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that Hamlin (1900-1993) was an early mentor of mine in the cartooning profession and that I have worked since the 1990s on a series of books dedicated to keeping Hamlin’s rambunctious stories in print. Latest of these are Library of American Comics Essentials: Alley Oop, 1939; and Alley Oop’s Ancestors, the latter containing Hamlin’s 1920s cartoons for the Star-Telegram of Fort Worth. Not to mention that in 2005, the playwright–director Johnny Simons and I developed a stage production of “Alley Oop” at Fort Worth’s Hip Pocket Theatre.
It was the ranchlands of West Texas, rich in prehistoric outcroppings and an air of primeval antiquity, that had given the Iowa-born Hamlin an inspiration for “Alley Oop,” way back during the 1920s. He was based at the Star-Telegram at the time — producing a series called “The Panther Kitten,” a droll chronicle of a tenacious baseball team called the Fort Worth Cats. His nearness to the cowboy life and the natural history of the region became a springboard to “Alley Oop.”
“Y’know,” Hamlin told me during a series of late-in-life conversations, “I really created the blueprint for “Alley Oop” there at the Star-Telegram. Well, I suppose I had been drawing the guy who would become Oop ever since I was a kid — sort of a cowboys-and-dinosaurs thing.
“But the one I called the Panther Kitten — he was my proving ground for the real Oop character. Y’might say I took this baseball cat and transformed him into this big caveman-cowboy I called Oop. I was more interested in prehistory and frontier life, anyhow, than I was in baseball — not that my tendencies to mix cavemen up with dinosaurs could be considered accurate prehistory!” If dinosaurs and cavemen had co-existed, Hamlin suggested, “why, those prehistoric rascals probably would have invented horsemanship and livestock-wrangling, using dinosaurs!”
The Telegram also provided Hamlin with the leverage to break through to greater prominence, however awkwardly.
“Fort Worth, I recall with a certain pleasurable fondness,” Hamlin said, “even though they canned me there at the Star-Telegram. It was at the Telegram where I had the freedom to get frisky with my drawing — polish it up to the level it needed to be at — and where I had the responsibility placed on me to crank out the stuff on a routine basis.”
Hamlin also ranged the state as a news photographer. He shot the zeppelin Shenandoah from atop Fort Worth’s 24-story F&M Bank Building — one such photo appeared in The National Geographic magazine — and he showed up with camera in hand at a watershed moment in Texas’ oil-boom history when the No. 2 well of Ira and Ann Yates (hence the townsite’s name of Iraan) yielded a gusher in 1928, signaling a land rush. His friendships with the working cowboys of West Texas gave Hamlin plenty of inspiration for the wild and heroic character of Alley Oop.
That landscape, Hamlin recalled, “got me to thinking about the dinosaurs that must’ve been all over the place back in prehistory. I had a dinosaur cartoon in mind before I got up the sense to throw in a caveman and call him Oop.” He christened “Alley Oop” after the French expression allez-oop! — a sporting exclamation, signaling strenuous activity.
But how about that sacking from the Telegram?
“Like I said, they canned me,” Hamlin explained, describing a freelance venture in which he and a Telegram engraver had used the newspaper’s equipment.
“No big deal to the brass,” Hamlin continued, “’cause we made no secret of it, and they had more or less given us a nod and a wink to do so. But what soured the deal was the nature of some of the work we were getting on the side. This was during Prohibition, remember, and one of Herman’s and my lines was making these counterfeit labels for — well, for bootleg whiskey bottles.
“Well, the boss, a guy named Jimmy North, called me on the carpet, in a friendly but stern way. I was kind of lippy as a youngster, which had gotten me in some scrapes back in college, and I hadn’t entirely outgrown it.
“So ’stead of going, ‘Yes, sir, I was wrong, sir. I won’t do it again, sir,’ like I was s’posed to do, I just went mouthy on ol’ Jimmy North. And he fired me. So here I was, scrambling again.”
After a few years’ frustrations and false starts, Hamlin moved to Florida, put “Alley Oop” into production, and landed a newspaper-syndication deal. After his first syndicate went bust, Newspaper Enterprise Association stepped in to rescue “Oop,” which had become a popular success by the end of 1933. Successors to Hamlin have kept the strip going into recent times.
“I came back to visit Fort Worth after ‘Oop’ got to going pretty good,” Hamlin told me. “Looked up the Star-Telegram people for old times’ sake, and even dropped in on Jimmy North… His greeting was like, ‘Well, I sure kicked you upstairs, didn’t I?’ To which I said, ‘Well, it sure was a roundabout way of gettin’ upstairs!’”
Although Hamlin never presented himself as an authority on prehistory, he weaved a scientific background into “Oop’s” Sunday-funnies installments, with sidebar features dealing with prehistoric life. Dinny was strictly a concoction of the artist’s imagination — or so Hamlin believed until the discovery of Acrocanthosaurus remains on ranchlands in Oklahoma and Texas proved him predictive as well as productive.
When Hamlin announced his gradual retirement during the early 1970s, he complained to me: “Nobody’s interested in dinosaurs or prehistory anymore.” This sad insight may have seemed accurate to an artist who had weathered the pop-cultural trends of multiple generations and by now found his eyesight failing.
But Hamlin also maintained ties to “Oop” and lived long enough to take part in an ambitious series of books reprinting many peak-period episodes. He also lived long enough to witness practically everybody become interested all over again in that area of his greatest fascination: Hamlin died not long after Steven Spielberg’s movie version of “Jurassic Park” (1993) had reawakened that interest.
And as to whether anybody’s “interested in dinosaurs and prehistory” all these years beyond that surge — well, just ask the visitors queueing up for the Science and History Museum’s Dinosaur Gallery. The effect is nothing short of a posthumous homecoming for Vince Hamlin.
