The Fontaine Fox Line: Toonerville and the Suburb That Imagined Itself

Fontaine Fox grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, and came to Kansas City in the early nineteen hundreds to work as a cartoonist for the Kansas City Post and then the Kansas City Star. While working the city beat, he began drawing a comic strip built around a shabby suburban trolley and the people who rode it. He called the strip Toonerville Folks, after the fictional neighborhood its characters inhabited. It debuted in nineteen thirteen and ran until nineteen fifty-five.

The strip's central character was a ramshackle streetcar run by the Skipper, a weathered conductor who piloted his decrepit trolley through the chaos of a fictional suburb whose name, Toonerville, became a word in the American lexicon. Toonerville, in common usage, came to mean any small, run-down, or disorganized operation, the kind of enterprise that keeps running on will and familiarity rather than competence.

Fox syndicated the strip to newspapers across the country. At its peak it ran in more than two hundred fifty papers and was one of the most widely read comics in the United States. Fox left Kansas City for New York, then Connecticut, as the strip's income allowed, but the suburb it described, drawn from the texture of small-town trolley life in the nineteen tens, remained the strip's imaginative location for four decades.

The actual streetcar lines that Fox rode and observed were torn out, as they were in most American cities, in the nineteen thirties through the nineteen fifties. Kansas City brought streetcars back to a short downtown loop in twenty sixteen. Toonerville remains the name for something barely holding together and mostly beloved for it.