George J. Smith was born on February 5, 1920, in the back of an ambulance on the way to Cumberland Street Hospital in Brooklyn — a fittingly dramatic entrance for a man who would spend his life making people laugh. He died in 2012. Virginia Mary Quinlan was born July 20, 1919, and died June 30, 2006. While George held the pen, she was editor and co-writer.

As a teenager he sold cartoons to the Harvard Lampoon for two dollars apiece. The drawings climbed into The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, American Legion Magazine, and PIC. In 1950 he ranked 14th in national cartoon sales against Mort Walker, Hank Ketcham, and the Berenstains.

During the war he was chief artist for the 55th Signal Battalion in New Guinea. He came home in 1946, sold to the Post again, and in 1950 submitted a strip based on his own household. A syndicate took it. The Smith Family ran in more than sixty papers — including a forty-four-year run in The Boston Globe — and was still being published in 1997, having outlived three syndicates.

They raised ten daughters and one son. The page was not a soap opera. It was the track meet: theology at the back door, gun laws at the dinner table, a child asking why taking out the garbage isn’t savagery. Later they left the city for a house in the wooded foothills above White Salmon, Washington, miles from pavement, often snowed in.

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