Quick Draw

The Landon School of Illustration and Cartooning 

As an "old boy" from Worcester Boys High (though from a later era—I was there in the 1960s), I've always been fascinated by the tales from my father's and uncle's time at the school.

My uncle, Theodore "Theo" Kramer (born 1918), and his older brother, my father Solly, walked those same halls during the 1920s and 30s. It was a world I only heard about in stories: the formidable, near-legendary headmaster Mr. Ben Eybers ("Ou Ben"), the weekly Cadets in their khaki uniforms, and the ever-present hardship of the Great Depression that hung over everything.

Theo was always known in the family as the creative soul, the artist. But it was only after he passed away in Onrus back in 2002 that I discovered the real, and frankly amazing, story. While sorting through his papers, I found a fragile, time-yellowed bundle of documents. They were a series of mail-order art exercises, complete with detailed critiques.

This sparked a question that, as a fellow Worcester Boys High alumnus, I found compelling. Think about it: it's the 1930s, you're a teenager in a small Boland town, and you love to draw. You fill your schoolbook margins with scribbles. How on earth do you get proper, professional art training?

The answer was right there in those papers. Around 1935, when he was just seventeen and likely still a pupil at Boys High—probably dodging Ou Ben like the rest of them—Theo took the remarkable step of enrolling in a correspondence course. But this wasn't from a school in Cape Town or Johannesburg. His lessons, his homework, and his grades were coming from Cleveland, Ohio.

He had enrolled in The Landon School of Illustration and Cartooning.

I've since looked into it, and this school was no small-time operation. It was founded and run by a man named Charles N. Landon, who was, to put it mildly, a giant in the field. Landon wasn't just a teacher; he was the Art Director for the Newspaper Enterprise Association (NEA), a massive American news and comics syndicate, and even the Art Editor for Cosmopolitan magazine. He was, in effect, a gatekeeper to the entire profession.

And the course itself... this is the part that truly fascinates me. This wasn't just passive learning. The Landon School operated on what you'd call an "asynchronous master-apprenticeship" model.

First, an envelope would arrive in Worcester from Cleveland, filled with lesson booklets and illustrated plates. These were practical, "how-to" guides, not fine art theory. The lessons had titles like "Pen and Ink Lines," "The Head," "Expression," "Action," and "Hands & Feet."

Then, Theo would have to complete specific, practical assignments. I can just picture him at his desk, working on tasks like, "Draw a two-thirds view of a thin-faced college professor scowling, to express SEVERITY" (which must have given him plenty of inspiration from his days at WBHS!) or "Draw a fat cook with an apron tied around her waist, ready to bang someone with a shovel."

He would then bundle up his drawings and post them all the way back to Cleveland. Weeks, maybe months, later, they would return. And this is the magic: his artwork would be covered in personalized, handwritten comments and corrections from Charles Landon himself. It was a direct, one-on-one critique from one of the most powerful men in the industry.

But here is the real kicker. It's truly amazing to think about. While my uncle was living the life of a Worcester Boys High pupil under Ou Ben, he was also, in secret, a "classmate" of men who would go on to define 20th-century cartooning. Also taking that exact same mail-order course at that exact same time were:

• Carl Barks (the legendary Disney artist who would go on to create Uncle Scrooge)

• Bill Mauldin (the man who became the most famous soldier's cartoonist of WWII with "Willie and Joe")

• Chic Young (the creator of the immortal comic strip Blondie)

I still have fragments of his exercises, with those corrections mailed from Cleveland to Worcester. Charles Landon passed away in 1936, so my uncle must have been one of his last-ever students.

That remote education, which he sought out with such singular determination as a teenager, was the foundation he needed. It gave him the skills and confidence to go on and become the man many South Africans would later know as the ‘Springbok Bairnsfather’ during the war.

It’s a piece of family history I'm incredibly proud of, and it's a quiet, amazing link from the halls of our old school to the wider world—a link that provided the shared DNA for an entire art form.