Dick Tracy In B Flat
It would be a fool’s errand to try and list all of the Dick Tracy-inspired material absorbed by our culture over the last 80-plus years. Name a medium – TV, radio, movies, even animated cartoons – and he’s been there. Toys from dolls to “metal handcuffs with trick locking mechanism” have sprung from the strip. Tracy and his cast of characters have even been set to music, most notably a hilarious radio musical called Dick Tracy In B Flat that featured Bing Crosby as Tracy and Dinah Shore as Tess Truehart, with the likes of Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, Bob Hope and the Andrews Sisters in supporting roles. Its Feb. 15, 1945, broadcast over the Armed Forces Radio Network reached nearly 100 million troops.
On a far smaller scale, but intriguing because of the involvement of a couple of Gould’s fellow Oklahomans, was a Liberty Records single released in October 1965 and titled “Dick Tracy.” Written by songwriters Jim Robinson, Johnny “Peanuts” Wilson and Roland Pike, it was recorded by Tulsa native J.J. Cale, still several years away from stardom. The arranger of the session, as well as its co-producer (with west coast music figure Snuff Garrett), was another Tulsan, Cale’s friend Leon Russell, who’d already made a name for himself as an L.A. session player.
With narrative verses and a bouncy chorus, it was somewhat reminiscent of the comic-strip-themed No. 1 hit of a half-decade earlier, the Hollywood Argyles’ “Alley Oop.” Unfortunately, it didn’t duplicate that success and never cracked the national charts.
Two Museums, One Legacy
Chester Gould had two hometowns: Pawnee, where he grew up, and Woodstock, Ill., 60 miles northwest of Chicago, where he moved with his wife, Edna, and young daughter, Jean, in 1935. Both Pawnee and Woodstock ended up with museums honoring their favorite son, and each can trace its origin back to 1990 – 13 years after Gould had retired from the strip, and five years after his death. The catalyst – or, at least, a major factor – in both cases was the big-budget summer blockbuster Dick Tracy, produced and directed by Hollywood superstar Warren Beatty, who also had the title role. The Chester Gould-Dick Tracy Museum in Woodstock began in 1991, after community members put on a Dick Tracy Days event, which raised enough money to open the doors, and for years, according to its site, “relied on donations, merchandise sales, and most heavily on funds from Chester Gould’s daughter, Jean O’Connell.”
It took Pawnee a little longer, but several of the town’s residents knew something needed to be done to acknowledge its hometown hero – especially after TV crews, following the success of the film, began descending on Gould’s hometown.
“We had TV people coming in from everywhere, and I’d take them around and show them Pawnee,” recalls Gambill. “I’d say, ‘Someday, we’re going to have a big mural up on the side of a building showing Dick Tracy, but we can’t afford it now.’
“Somebody in Tulsa saw me interviewed on TV, and he said, `You want a mural?’ I said, `Yeah, but we can’t afford it.’ He said, `Well, we’ll do it all for free.’”
That man turned out to be Ed Melberg, head of the Tulsa-based company Sign Excellence.
“He came over with two big trucks full of paint and people, and they were all over that building,” remembers Gambill. “In the middle of the morning, it started to rain, and I thought, ‘Well, that’s it.’ We took ‘em over to a little cafe for lunch, and when we came back it had stopped raining, and the rain hadn’t hurt a thing.”
Although it still exists as an online entity, the Chester Gould-Dick Tracy Museum in Illinois closed its brick-and-mortar operation in 2008. Gambill says that Gould’s daughter then sent material from that museum to Pawnee, where it’s now on display in the Dick Tracy Headquarters section of the Pawnee County Historical Society Museum. The society also hosts an annual Dick Tracy Day.
“Every day, we have people coming in,” says Gambill. “We’ve got three bus tours coming in next week.”
The Yellow Coat Keeps Going
Although they didn’t know it until they began working together, writer Mike Curtis and artist Joe Staton, the current creative team behind Dick Tracy, both started reading Gould’s strip in the same newspaper. “[Staton] grew up in Milan, Tenn. The big paper to get there was the Jackson Sun,” explains Curtis. “And I lived in Jackson, Tenn., where the paper came from.”
Both comic professionals of long standing, the two got together in 2010 to create material for a website anticipating Tracy’s 80th birthday. By the time that 2011 birthday rolled around, artist Dick Locher, who was also writing the strip, had announced his retirement, and Curtis and Staton stepped in.
“Chester Gould left all these actors to us, and it’s like a little playhouse,” says Curtis of the venerable strip. “All we’re doing is writing new plays for them.”
