Robert Ripley, Born Here, Believing Nothing

LeRoy Robert Ripley was born in Santa Rosa on February twenty-second, eighteen ninety, in a household that does not appear to have contained much money or much expectation of fame. His father died when Ripley was a teenager. He dropped out of high school to help support the family. He had two things going for him: he could draw, and he could not stop noticing things that did not fit.

Ripley wanted to play baseball. He tried out for the New York Giants during spring training, broke his pitching arm in the process, and turned to cartooning instead. By sixteen he was selling sports cartoons to San Francisco newspapers. By twenty-three he had moved to New York City and landed at the New York Globe.

In December of nineteen eighteen, with no fresh sports story to write, Ripley compiled the most extraordinary athletic facts he had encountered over years of reporting and drew them into a single panel. Nine oddities, drawn together, published in the Globe on December nineteenth. He called it Believe It or Not. He did not think he was starting something.

He was starting something. By nineteen twenty-nine, William Randolph Hearst had syndicated Believe It or Not in three hundred sixty newspapers across seventeen languages. Ripley became one of the most widely read people in the world, a man whose income was built entirely on the proposition that reality was stranger than anyone gave it credit for.

He traveled obsessively, visiting more than two hundred countries and territories. He collected objects, curiosities, and stories. He built a radio program, a television show, an empire of odditoriums in major cities. He died of a heart attack in New York on May twenty-seventh, nineteen forty-nine, at fifty-nine years old, and was buried, as he had asked, in the Odd Fellows Cemetery in his hometown of Santa Rosa.

One of the objects he wrote about early in his career was a church in downtown Santa Rosa built from the lumber of a single redwood tree. He had grown up near it. His mother had attended services there. The Church of One Tree was, by any definition, a believe-it-or-not story that happened to be in his backyard.