Alley Oop is a Texan

Alley Oop arrived on the American scene in 1933 aboard his faithful dinosaur companion, Dinny, via V.T. Hamlin’s popular “Alley Oop” comic strip. Mr. Oop was born a million years ago in a land called Moo but he showed up in the 20^th century via Dr. Wonmug’s time machine— heck, everybody knows that— but they may not known that Oop was reborn in the 20^th century as a Texan. 

Hamlin illustrated his and Alley Oop’s comic strip autobiographies for Collier’s magazine in 1949. The first panel shows Alley Oop and Dinny encountering a press photographer as he walks away from a small plane crash. (The smoldering plane represents a crash Hamlin survived on his way back from covering a short-lived revolution in Mexico in 1929.) “Holy cow!” the photographer exclaims after seeing the cave man and the dinosaur. “Where did you come from?”.

“Me and Dinny just popped out of Ira Yates Number Two well,” Oop explains, proving that Alley Oop was reborn as a full-grown cave man in West Texas.  

“Newspapering in West Texas is strenuous business, but a guy’s got to eat,” the cartoon stand-in for Hamlin tells Oop, who then introduces Hamlin to all the comic strip characters as their new boss. 

Vernon T. Hamlin’s own life is almost as implausible as Alley Oop’s. He was born —prematurely— in Perry, Iowa in 1900. He was blind for the first six months of his life (and the last six years) and was small and somewhat fragile for the whole of his 93 years. He estimated that he’d broken every bone in his body at least once before he was 30. 

By then he had played high school football, lied about his age to join the Army during World War I and returned for more high school football when the war ended. He apparently left high school without a diploma but enrolled at the University of Missouri with a veteran’s dispensation. He studied journalism and took an art class. 

One day his art teacher held up Hamlin’s rendering of a tiger and told the class it was “the work of a truly fine artist, but he wants to perjure this God-given gift to become a cartoonist” and handed it back to him. Hamlin gave his tiger a top hat, spats, a cigar and a cane in the crook of his tail. So much for higher education. 

Out in the wider world Hamlin was, at various times, a truck driver, mapmaker, sportswriter, hobo and newspaper photographer. He tried his hand at boxing but he broke that hand a couple of times. 

During an age of colorful newspaper names, Hamlin came to Texas in 1922 to work in the art department of the Fort Worth Grubstaker. He moved to the Star-Telegram art department a year later and eventually showed up in West Texas to draw maps of Permian Basin oilfields and snap photographs for Texas Oil World. 

Hamlin’s experiences in the West Texas oilfield sparked a fascination with geology and paleontology that never left him, other than to leave him bruised and many of his favorite bones broken. 

“I fractured my spine, broke my right wrist once and my nose three times,” he later said of his time in West Texas. “I also stopped hot lead twice.” 

In West Texas, Hamlin discovered, deep in the recesses of his imagination, the land of Moo and Alley Oop. The Newspaper Enterprise Association syndicated Oop and his pals in 1933 and it soon became one of the syndicate’s most popular strips. 

 “Alley Oop” was also the title and subject of a hit song by the Hollywood Argyles in 1966, where we learned that Oop, in addition to being a cave man, was also “a mean motor scooter and a bad go getter.” Hamlin’s royalties from the song paid for a new bright red Ford Thunderbird. 

In 1965, on the weekend preceding his 65^th birthday, Hamlin was back in Iraan for the first time since 1929 to serve as the guest of honor at the opening of the Alley Oop Fantasy Land, a playground and museum, where he confirmed Oop’s Texas roots. 

“The legend is true,” he said. “I dreamed up the idea for the cartoon strip about dinosaurs while working on an oil surveying crew down in the new (in 1929) oil field… I was making maps for this bunch of oil men and I was just real impressed with the country. The idea came to me while tromping though the rocks near Iraan.” 

Hamlin said he was pleased with his comic strip’s popularity but just as pleased to lead a quiet life out of the spotlight. “I don’t go around looking for publicity,” he said. “I’m just an old newsman and it kinda embarrasses me.”