Sketching out the Sharon Playhouse

Guernsey LePelley (1910-1990) was the Northwest Corner’s busiest cartoonist in the 1950s, providing the Christian Science Monitor with two drawings a day.

“We moved to Sharon in 1940 because we liked it,” LePelley told The Lakeville Journal in a story appearing June 8, 1950. That was a compliment to the town, considering the LePelleys had lived at one time or another in Cambridge, Mass., Highland Park,Ill., Los Angeles, Dallas and Venice, Fla. The LePelleys also lived in Salisbury before building a cottage in Sharon.

“I sold my first story too long ago to remember,” he said, “but it was probably while I was attending school in the Middle West.”

The Chicago native served in the Army during World War II. He attended the School of the Art Institute in Chicago and other schools. 

He worked for the Highland Park Press. He wrote for radio. He was a freelance writer from 1932 on. He illustrated children’s books such as “The Caboose Who Got Loose.”

And LePelley wrote stage plays, many of them one-act comedies including “Tell Dora Not to Cry,”  “Absolutely Murder” and “Maybe Love.”

LePelley and his wife, Maxine (Gillis), had two children, Lynn and Richard.

The artist produced the Tubby and Buddy daily comic strip for the Monitor syndicate from April 1934 to June 1981. 

In a  typical Tubby three-panel, the young hero shows his girl friend a mousetrap he’s just purchased for 2 cents. It won’t work; she challenges, “It doesn’t have a spring.”  “It was a special sale to mouse lovers,” Tubby responds. 

LePelley was an editorial cartoonist for the Boston-based newspaper from 1961 to 1981. 

“Though political cartoons are traditionally an attack weapon, the Monitor cartoon attacks what’s wrong without being vindictive or personal,” LePelley said in a trade advertisement in 1979.

The Monitor boasted that LePelley “has a gift for looking at people and things through his private fun-house mirror. Possibly that gift comes from 35-plus years of flying his own planes, looking down at the world from different angles. Or perhaps from his being a dramatist — the author of 18 plays.

“LePelley sees people’s faces as fair public comment upon themselves; a cartoonist only underlines that comment. 

“LePelley’s law: The bigger the man, the less likely he is to object to caricature. Several Presidents have requested his originals for themselves.”

The paper dropped the humor strip and designated a house editorial page cartoonist in 1981. 

LePelley still had plenty on his plate. His up-the-road neighbor near Amenia Union was Judson Philips, another playwright and a mystery novelist. 

With their mutual interest in theatricals, the men organized the Sharon Players and under the name Community Plays Inc. bought physical assets of Walter Winburn’s fledgling carriage house stage.  

Sharon Playhouse opened in 1950. Philips produced numerous early dramas. LePelley’s plays “Cracked Ice,” “When I was Green,” “Nobody Sleeps,” “Doomsday for Skeptics” and “Love Is Too Much Trouble” were staged at the theater.

The stage is celebrating its 60th season this year.

 The writer is senior associate editor of this newspaper.