The Unbelievable True Story of “Ripley’s Believe It or Not!”
How a 1918 cartoon led to a global entertainment empire
Robert Ripley specialized in curating some of the world’s strangest, most unbelievable but true stories. It turns out that the true story of Ripley’s rise to fame from sports cartoonist to entertainment mogul is just as unbelievable.
How it all began
Born in 1890, LeRoy Robert Ripley had an insatiable hunger for the curiously strange since childhood. He was also a talented artist, so he left his Santa Rosa, California hometown in 1909 for San Francisco, where he became a sports cartoonist. Back then, before photography became commonplace in newspapers, cartoons were an important visual medium.
Seeking a larger market for his skill, Ripley secured work at the New York Globe newspaper in New York City, and then at the New York Evening Post, where his sports cartoons eventually became nationally popular through the Associated Newspapers syndicate. By that time, he was known as Robert Ripley or just “Ripley.”
On a slow sports day in December 1918, Ripley got the idea to compile some of the most unbelievable feats in sports that he had come across. He included nine sketches of unusual accomplishments — such as a man who had walked backwards…
