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 sold his first cartoons as a teenager for two dollars apiece to the Harvard Lampoon and worked his way up until the drawings appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, American Legion Magazine, and PIC. In 1950 he ranked 14th in national cartoon sales, competing against Mort Walker, Hank Ketcham, and the Berenstains.

During the war he served as chief artist for the 55th Signal Battalion in New Guinea. He returned in 1946, sold to the Post again, and in 1950 submitted the first Smith Family strip — based on his own household — to a syndicate. It was accepted.

The feature ran in more than sixty papers, outlived three syndicates, and was still being published in 1997, long after most of the magazines that first bought his gags had closed.