Russ Westover (1886-1966): Cartoonist who Drew the Rise of the Working Girl

Tillie the Tailor and Russ Westover

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Russell Channing Westover was an American cartoonist best known for creating the long-running comic strip Tillie the Toiler, one of the most successful and influential newspaper features of the twentieth century. Born in Los Angeles on August 3, 1886, Westover developed an early aptitude for drawing that repeatedly brought him into conflict with employers and instructors, but ultimately shaped his professional life. His career traced the evolution of American newspaper cartooning from local sports illustration to international syndication, and his work helped define the modern “working girl” comic strip at a moment of profound social change.

Born on August 3, 1886, in Los Angeles, the son of Channing Clisson Westover and Alice Aldrich, Westover grew up in California and attended high school in Oakland. His earliest professional break came when his refusal to stop doodling finally worked in his favor. The San Francisco Bulletin hired him as a sports illustrator, recognizing that his quick hand and sharp eye could animate box scores and ballfields. From there he moved through a carousel of Bay Area newspapers—the Oakland Herald, the Globe, the Chronicle, and the San Francisco Post—producing editorial cartoons, show-business caricatures, and his first comic strip, a baseball feature called Daffy Dan.

Daffy Dan was a modest, loosely drawn strip, but it revealed the direction Westover was headed. It was rooted in everyday American life, populated by ordinary figures with exaggerated impulses, and driven more by character than by punchline. The strip never achieved the fame of his later work, but it trained him to tell a story in panels and to find humor in routine occupations. Even as he struggled to sell gag cartoons to national magazines like Life, Judge, and Collier’s—mostly without success—Westover was quietly developing the observational style that would define his career.

In 1908 he married Genesta Grace DeLancey, who would remain his wife for nearly six decades and quietly shape his most famous creation. Five years later, when the San Francisco Post merged with the Call, Westover joined the westward migration of ambitious cartoonists and moved to New York City. There he found steady work at the New York Herald, drawing a Sunday feature called Betty, an early example of the “girl strip,” a form still finding its footing in American newspapers. Readers responded warmly. The Herald gave him a daily strip as well, Fat Chance, and soon after he launched Snapshot Bill, his first nationally syndicated feature, about an aspiring photographer whose enthusiasm routinely exceeded his talent.

Then, once again, the ground shifted beneath him. When the Herald merged with the Tribune in 1924, Westover was out of a job. This time, however, he had a reputation. He freelanced successfully for national magazines that had once rejected him, refining his line and building confidence in his instincts. In 1920, sensing that American life itself had changed, he approached King Features Syndicate with an idea that would transform his career.

The war was over. Skirts were shorter. Offices were filling with women who earned their own wages. Westover proposed a strip about a working girl—not a society debutante or a domestic cipher, but a self-supporting office employee navigating modern life. The concept was not entirely new, but the character was. King Features accepted the strip, retitled it Tillie the Toiler, and on January 3, 1921, it debuted in the New York American.

Tillie Jones was a stenographer, a sometime fashion model, and a figure of startling modernity. She flirted, schemed, and dressed impeccably, managing to keep both her job and her independence with minimal visible “toil.” Early versions of Tillie leaned toward girlish frivolity, but she quickly evolved into a competent, capable worker who understood how to maneuver within a male-dominated workplace. Westover later acknowledged that her appearance was modeled on Genesta, though Tillie’s confidence and appetite for independence reflected a broader cultural shift rather than a single muse.

 Tillie the Toiler was not the first comic-strip working woman, but it was the first to celebrate the office girl as a social type worth admiring. At its height, the strip ran in more than six hundred newspapers worldwide. Readers wrote in asking where Tillie bought her clothes; Westover responded by creating a dress-pattern service. The strip spawned collected volumes, comic books, a novel, and two feature films—one silent, starring Marion Davies in 1927, and another in 1941. Through all of it, Tillie remained Tillie: stylish, self-supporting, and quietly subversive.

Westover supplemented Tillie with other work, including The Van Swaggers, a strip that skewered high-society pretensions, but his legacy rested firmly on Miss Jones. Offers came from rival syndicates promising more money, but he stayed with King Features. In 1951 he entered semiretirement, turning much of the daily labor over to his assistant, Bob Gustafson. By 1954 Westover withdrew entirely, allowing Gustafson to sign the strip. Tillie the Toiler continued until 1959, closing out a remarkable thirty-eight-year run.

That same year Westover and Genesta left New Rochelle, New York, where they had lived for decades, and moved to Ross, California. They had married in 1908 and celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary in 1958, with Mount Tamalpais rising behind their home. In retirement, Westover returned to the habit that had never left him: drawing. He spent long hours at the board, sketching without deadlines or syndicates, just as he had when he was young and unemployable.

Russ Westover

Russell C. Westover died on March 6, 1966, in San Rafael, California, after a short illness. He was seventy-nine years old. Newspapers remembered him as the creator of Tillie the Toiler, an internationally known strip that once ran in hundreds of papers from Spain to Japan. His earlier work—Daffy Dan, Snapshot Bill, the years of anonymous freelancing—was largely forgotten, absorbed into the prehistory of a medium he helped define.

Westover’s career traced the arc of American cartooning itself: from newspaper sports pages to mass syndication, from local humor to global circulation, from hand-drawn panels to a fully industrialized cultural form. Yet his story also carries a quieter irony. The man repeatedly fired for drawing on the job ultimately created one of the most enduring images of American working life—a woman who made her living with style, wit, and just enough mischief to keep things interesting.

Sources: San Rafael Daily Independent Journal, March 7, 1966; New York Times obituary, March 7, 1966; Martin Sheridan, Comics and Their Creators (1942); Coulton Waugh, The Comics (1947); Stephen D. Becker, Comic Art in America (1959); Ron Goulart, The Funnies (1995); Wikipedia entry on Russ Westover.; Find a Grave; Mountain View Cemetery records; Wikipedia