History of Comedy

CONTINUATION of Biography of George Wilbur Peck

By Dave Peck

Comic Author & Governor of Wisconsin

Three years after his 1860 marriage to Frances Rowley of Delavan, Wisconsin, Peck enlisted as a private in the Union Army's Fourth Wisconsin Cavalry during the Civil War. He once wryly explained: "I was willing to lay down my life for my country at $13 a month if the government would feed and cloth me and I didn't have to set type anymore." He served about three years, most of the time stationed on the Texas frontier, and he did sometimes have to practice his printer's skills on a general's orders. Promotions to sergeant and first lieutenant followed. His 1916 obituary reported "he was in many engagements of the regiment". His Civil War service was a rich source of his ingratiating, self-deprecating humor, "I was too scared to fight and too frightened to run." But he added a serious note, his wish that "no American ever again shed another's gore." June 1866 was eventful for him. He was discharged from his Civil War service and he took a plunge by founding the Ripon Representative in Fond du Lac County. He was 25 years old. In the next 15 years Peck laid the groundwork for his later successes in journalism, humor writing, and politics. Writing in his own Ripon paper, Peck penned sketches called "The Adventures of One Terence McGrant." These Irish dialect pieces gave him room for wry political commentary, much like what Finley Peter Dunne was doing in the Chicago Daily News. Peck devised his dialect pieces to attack Ullysses Grant's Republican campaign for the Presidency. Later came his bad boy books, first appearing in paper covers at 25 cents a copy. Hennery, the bad boy, put cod liver oil on his pa's pancakes, soft soap on the steps when the deacon came to call, ice in Pa's bed, and forged a note from a make-believe temptress, Daisy, offering to meet Pa at a street corner on Saturday night.

TO BE CONTINUED