Charles Harris Kuhn, nicknamed Doc Kuhn, was a cartoonist best known as the creator of the comic strip Grandma. He usually signed his drawings and comic strips Chas. Kuhn.
Charles Harris Kuhn (March 20, 1892 – 1989), nicknamed Doc Kuhn, was a cartoonist best known as the creator of the comic strip Grandma. He usually signed his drawings and comic strips Chas. Kuhn.
Born in Prairie City, Illinois, he was the son of James B. and Minnie Harris Kuhn. His father ran a restaurant and proudly displayed his son's drawings in the eatery's window. At age 12, he decided to become a cartoonist when the sale of his first cartoon brought him 50 cents. Kuhn grew up in Bushnell, Illinois, and later remarked, "I hope some of the oldtimers remember me as a regular fellow."
Cartoons and travels
After high school, Kuhn worked in a plow factory, laboring ten hours a day, six days a week. He moved on to become a freight hustler, mill hand, steel tank worker and sign painter before enrolling at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts (1913–14), where he studied cartooning in a class taught by Frank King. He soon landed an art job paying $10 a week. During World War I, as Kuhn put it, he "shoveled coal and chow" as a Navy fireman on the U.S.S. Connecticut. He also visited France in World War I. During the other travels of his youth, he spent time in the Canadian harvest fields and "stepped over the border into old Mexico."
