Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Gaylord DuBois


A Conceptual Artistic Installation Exhibition of Gaylord Dubois (Du Bois)

Life Scripted

from 10/1/05
It is this artists' conclusion that there is a propensity of material spanning the 93 years of Gaylord Dubois's life. Numerous photos ranging from birth to death have been obtained along with letters, journals, articles and account records.
Gaylord Dubois's history ranges from salesman, minister, school teacher, social worker, deputy sheriff to writer and scripter -- the career we all know him for. In his lifetime Dubois wrote over 3000 comic stories, more then 10 novels or adaptations (including the first Lone Ranger), at least 4 Little Blue Books, several volumes of poetry, 30+ Big Little Books and more.
Comic scripting began as early as 1938 and continued until 1977 with a few stories published as late as 1995 and some still being published. Titles include Tarzan, Lost in Space, Roy Rogers, Turok, The Lone Ranger, Uncle Wiggily, Red Ryder, Brother's of the Spear, Tom and Jerry and Raggedy Ann. A more complete list will appear on this site in the near future.
The location of the initial opening of this exhibition has yet to be determined. Tentatively we have been looking at Denver although it has been suggested Boston might be more fitting since Gaylord Dubois was a Boston 'home town boy'. He was born in Massachusetts in 1899 and died in Florida in 1993 at 94 years of age. During that time he traveled at great length throughout the US and Western Canada.
It is expected the exhibition will be traveling to many of Gaylord's haunts throughout New York, Texas, New Mexico, California, Wyoming, Alberta and other places. After graduating from Boston University, Dubois returned to the Adirondacks where he had spent much of his childhood. In 1946 he, along with his wife Mary Van Alen, purchased a trailer and set off across the country in search of material for his writing. He spent many of his summers in the Peace River District of Alberta staying with his daughter and his grandchildren.


Gaylord DuBois

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Your blog keeps getting better and better! Your older articles are not as good as newer ones you have a lot more creativity and originality now keep it up!

Anonymous said...

Hello,

This is a inquiry for the webmaster/admin here at gaylorddubois.blogspot.com.

May I use some of the information from your blog post right above if I give a backlink back to your website?

Thanks,
Alex

wourpet said...

Yes Alex, you may. Please send me a link tp wourpet at gmail.com once you have posted.

David Porta said...

Excellent.

Did you mean preponderance?

Prepon
Propen
derance
sity

I could see what happened.

:)

What resources are you using for GDB publication data? I knew he was ghostwriting the newspaper comic strips Red Ryder and King of the Royal Mounted before he began with comic books, but I never had any source for dates, other than that he was recruited by Oskar LeBeck for comic books circa 1940. Same company, Whitman aka Western Litho.

I see "Comic scripting began as early as 1938," and are there records? Or was is deduction? Backtracking from 1940?

I have read that Big Little Books (and Big Better Books), which your ancestor wrote regularly for Whitman throughout the 1930s, may be regarded as being proto comic books, comic books in an early format that used text pages instead of captions, much less word balloons. (Prince Valiant never used them; only captions.)

Anonymous said...

Wow, I have been thinking about your grandfather on and off over the years. It has been a real pleasure to read about him and his life. It's funny I always just knew him as my Godfather! I never really realized until I was older his contributions to the outside world, to me he and your grandmother were just two special people that we went to visit all of the time! I love reading about him once again!

Anne Oakes ( Worthy )

Canyon Covenants Blog said...

I'm on the Board of Directors of Zane Grey's West Society and would love to follow up on Mr. Du Bois, perhaps in one of our quarterly newsletters. How could I get in touch to discuss this further.