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As a tribute to her father’s love of literature, they gave Else a middle name in honor of novelist George Eliot.

On May 27, 1910, Else George Leisk was born. was 41, relatively old for first-time parents. At the time of David’s birth, Mary was 29 and David Sr. His parents named him “David” for his father, and “Johnson” for his father’s place of employment. A year later, David Johnson Leisk was born in this apartment. In October 1905, they married, moving into a six-storey apartment building at Manhattan’s 444 East 58th Street, a block west of the East River, and a block south of where the Queensboro Bridge (the 59th Street Bridge) was then under construction. In New York City, he found work as a bookkeeper at the Johnson Lumber Company, and fell in love with department store saleslady Mary Burg, a German immigrant. Seeking professional opportunities, Johnson’s father - the third eldest of ten children - left the Shetlands just after the turn of the twentieth century. His blue eyes and blond hair hint at this Scandinavian ancestry. His roots go back at least six generations in the Shetlands - rocky, mostly treeless islands halfway between Scotland and Norway, governed by the latter until the late fifteenth century. He was born in New York City, on October 20, 1906. And before Crockett Johnson, there was David Johnson Leisk. He talked to journalists, but, in his wry, laconic way, he typically said very little about his life before Barnaby.īut before Barnaby, there was Crockett Johnson. When the first collection of the strip was published the following year, newspapers and magazines sought interviews with the strip’s creator, Crockett Johnson.

O’Malley - part confidence man, part fairy godfather - met five-year-old Barnaby, and the comics pages had a new classic. Features Before Barnaby: Crockett Johnson Grows Up and Turns LeftĪdapted from Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss: How an Unlikely Couple Found Love, Dodged the FBI, and Transformed Children’s Literature (University Press of Mississippi, 2012).Ĭushlamochree! In April 1942, Mr.