June 28, 1926

George Booth (June 28, 1926) mentioned recently, about the pets in his household, that they had no dogs at that moment, only cats. In an interview written up by Mina Kaneko and Francoise Mouly, of The New Yorker, with one of their iconic cartoonists, he says:

We celebrate Christmas with Dionne, my wife, and my daughter, Sarah, and we got a couple of pussycats—Schrodinger and Max. (We don’t have any dogs at the moment.) I grew up in northwest Missouri, about thirty miles from the border with Nebraska, twenty-five from Kansas, and twenty from Iowa, tucked up in the corner—corn country, snow country. It was a wonderful little town called Fairfax. My dad was superintendent of the schools and I had two brothers (I still got one). My mother, Mawmaw Booth, passed away some years ago. I feel her presence all the time. When I was three and half, I drew a race car stuck in the mud. I laughed at it and laughed at it, and she started encouraging me to be a cartoonist—and it went on from there.

We are so interested in origins, in spite of how rarely they explain anything. Booth is a case in point.