Hammond Edward “Ham” Fisher

His Wisconsin tie was an adult second home: a Spanish-style mansion on South Lake Shore Drive in Edithton Beach / Carol Beach—now Pleasant Prairie—where he drew the strip until a 1954 northeaster put the house into Lake Michigan.

Born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, on September 24, 1900, he quit school at sixteen, peddled brushes, drove a truck, sold ads at the Wilkes-Barre Record, and then sold other people’s strips for the McNaught Syndicate while carrying his own unsold boxing strip in the sample case. In 1928 he sold Joe Palooka to more than twenty papers, including the New York Daily Mirror, forcing his bosses to take it. By the 1940s it was a top-five strip; the dumb palooka on the page was heavyweight champion of the world. Fisher helped found the National Cartoonists Society and became the only member it ever expelled, for “conduct unbecoming a cartoonist,” after a twenty-year feud with Al Capp—the former Palooka ghost who had drawn Li’l Abner. Fisher accused Capp of hiding pornography in the panels; the Society believed Capp.

Around the same season, the Carol Beach house came down in the storm. On December 27, 1955, in Moe Leff’s New York studio, Fisher killed himself. A will drawn weeks earlier left about $2.5 million to his wife Marilyn and daughter Wendy.