Alley Oop in Flat Rock

Author’s Note:  I fell into the rabbit hole of online research this week as I chased after the details of a story I heard some years ago about a connection between the comic strip Alley Oop and Flat Rock. I honestly don’t know why that conversation popped back into my head this week, but it did and here we are - with the story of a famous comic strip caveman’s unlikely association with a village in the mountains of western North Carolina. -BH

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Although six million years too late perhaps, 1933 was a very good year for dinosaurs. 

The movie, King Kong, was released and featured a giant ape captured on an uncharted island inhabited by long-lost dinosaurs. 1933 was also the year of the Chicago World’s Fair which featured animatronic, roaring dinosaurs. The prehistoric creatures even found their way into newspapers around the country via a cartoon strip about a Stone Age caveman and his pet dinosaur, Dinny. The strip was called Alley Oop.

Improbably, that same caveman would later find a home in Flat Rock, NC.

The comic was the brainchild of Vincent Trout (V.T.) Hamlin - a WWI veteran from Iowa. Forty years after its debut, the extremely popular strip had become an iconic staple of newspapers everywhere.  Hamlin, however, had gotten old and was having health issues - most notably with his eyesight. He retired in 1971 and turned the strip over to his long-time assistant, Dave Graue. Graue, as it turns out, lived the last years of his life in Flat Rock, and the continuing adventures of a time-traveling caveman were written, drawn, and inked out of his home studio in the Tranquility subdivision of the Village.

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V.T. Hamlin (seated) with Dave Graue

V.T. Hamlin was born in 1900, in Perry, Iowa. He began drawing at an early age and published his first cartoons in 1916. Lying about his age, he enlisted in the army at 17 to fight in WWI and was shipped to France as part of the Sixth Army’s Motor Transport Group. When the war ended, he returned to the United States determined to become a syndicated comic artist based on the encouragement of a newspaperman in the army who convinced him of his abilities.

On December 24, 1926, he married high-school sweetheart Dorothy Stapleton. Dorothy later became the model for Alley Oop's girlfriend Ooola. More than just a model, Dorothy Hamlin also worked on the strip, creating color roughs and contributing story ideas.

When the Newspaper Enterprise Association purchased Alley Oop for syndication in 1933 they introduced the caveman to a much wider audience - appearing alongside other classic strips such as Blondie, Gasoline Alley, Nancy, Mutt and Jeff, and Captain Easy.

For those too young to remember, Alley Oop was an irrepressible and club-wielding Neanderthal.  He lived in the Stone Age Kingdom of Moo with Ooola, as well as his friend Foozy who spoke only in rhymes, King Guzzle the ruler of Moo, and a witch doctor known as the Grand Wizer, among others. 

Alley Oop and Dinny commemorated on a US Postage Stamp (1995)

The strip melded together physical comedy reminiscent of the very popular vaudeville shows of the 1930s with slice-of-life drama found in small towns. Unlike Hamlin’s hometown of Perry, however, the Kingdom of Moo featured dinosaurs both menacing and friendly. In the 1930s, this all added up to a formula for big success. And indeed after it was syndicated in 1933, the strip found its way into 800 newspapers around the country. Alley Oop was a slam dunk even before that term became associated with the exploits of high-flying basketball players.

By the end of the 1930s, Hamlin began to feel creatively constrained by a storyline set solely in the prehistoric Kingdom of Moo. It was his wife, Dorothy, who suggested the introduction of a time machine to liberate the free-wheeling Alley Oop from his caveman constraints. Immediately, Oop’s world and the storyline expanded prodigiously.

In April of 1939, leading characters Alley and Ooola were transported out of Moo and into the 20th-century laboratory of Dr. Elbert Wonmug. Given a free pass to all of history, Alley soon found himself in a variety of adventures including time spent in Troy where he participated in the stories from the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Jumping through time over the succeeding years, the strip's characters encountered many historic and literary characters  - including Cleopatra, King Arthur, Napoleon, Shakespeare, King Solomon, Robinson Crusoe, and Robert E. Lee. The storyline with General Lee is interesting given that the widow of the Confederate general’s grandson, Robert E. Lee, III, coincidentally lived for many years in Flat Rock.

Dave Graue

In 1950, the syndicate promoting Alley Oop suggested that Hamlin hire an assistant. A young man by the name of David Graue was hired and by the mid-1960s Graue began to write some of the Alley Oop storylines. By 1966, he was doing the daily strip on his own although Hamlin continued to co-sign the strips. When Hamlin retired in 1971, Dave Graue was completely in charge of the daily strip. Working out of his Flat Rock studio, Graue was both the writer and illustrator for Alley Oop for the next 30 years.

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In the early 1990s, Jack and Carole Bender were hired by Graue as assistants and when Graue retired in 2001, Alley Oop Sunday and daily strips were drawn entirely by the Benders.  Today, the strip continues under the direction of writer Joey Alison Sayers and artist Jonathan Lemon who took over in 2019.

Sadly, just four months after his full retirement, Dave Graue died in an auto accident on Little River Road in Flat Rock when his car was struck by an out-of-control dump truck.  His wife, Eliza, was a member of the Flat Rock Village Council and he was remembered fondly by local residents  "He was a fine man; everyone who knew him loved him," said Flat Rock Mayor Terry Hicks. Friend and neighbor Jim Wert said, "Dave was a wonderful, kind man. It's a terrible tragedy. Life is fragile.”  

Alley Oop has been in print for 89 years now and Alley Oop and friends have been witnesses to a cavalcade of historic events - both real and imaginary.  

From the earliest cave paintings to the animated web cartoons of today, humans have been expressing themselves and telling their stories through visual media. Alley Oop, like any comic, serves as a cultural artifact. It reflects on its audience and times: what its readers found funny, what issues were important to them, what they read, what they found attractive, etc. This gives the modern-day reader a unique snapshot of life in an era contemporary to the strip, even if it is about cavemen and dinosaurs.

-University of Missouri, Special Collections and Archives,
“75 Years of the Comic World of V. T. Hamlin”

Flat Rock is full of surprising people with impressive and unusual accomplishments. Perhaps none more unusual than a cartoon caveman with a pet dinosaur and a time machine.

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Sources

https://www.gocomics.com/blog/4800/a-brief-history-of-alley-oop

https://www.blueridgenow.com/story/news/2001/12/11/man-dies-when-dump-truck-slams-into-car/28121239007/

Terry Ruscin, his book, “Hidden History of Henderson County”

https://library.missouri.edu/specialcollections/exhibits/show/alley-oop/introduction

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V._T._Hamlin