Kin Hubbard and Abe Martin

Irvington, a planned community on Indianapolis’s eastside, has been home to a number of famous Hoosiers through the years. One day in the 1910s, a camera-laden tourist was searching through the area for the home of Frank McKinney “Kin” Hubbard, creator of cracker-barrel philosopher Abe Martin, whose folksy brand of humor graced the Indianapolis News’s back page for twenty-six years.

Finally finding Hubbard’s home, the visitor approached a disheveled-looking gardener working on the author’s lawn and asked him if he thought Mr. Hubbard would mind if he took a few snapshots of the house. “What if Mr. Hubbard does care?” the man asked the tourist. “How will he ever know?”

The tourist was closer to his favorite author than he knew. The man he had questioned was Kin Hubbard himself, who was involved in one of his favorite hobbies: gardening and being mischievous. His behavior with the tourist merely reinforced a fellow News employee’s observation that Hubbard was “a genial Dapper Dan with the soul of an imp.”

Operating out of the fictional town of Bloom Center in Brown County, Abe Martin delighted millions of readers across the country with such sage wisdom as “It’s no disgrace t’ be poor, but it might as well be,” and “When a feller says, ‘It hain’t th’ money, but th’ principle o’ th’ thing,’ it’s the money.” Hubbard, the News noted upon its faithful worker’s death in 1930, possessed the uncanny ability “of seeing life clearly, and touching it kindly in the places where it should be touched.” Although biting at times, Hubbard’s humor could always be counted on to produce a laugh and leave behind no trace of bitterness.

Hubbard displayed an artistic flair at an early age. In an autobiographical sketch he provided the News, he said that from the time he was old enough to hold a pair of scissors, he could “cut from blank paper any kind of an animal with a correctness and deftness that was almost creepy.” This artistic talent, however, did not translate into classroom success, as Hubbard dropped out of school in his hometown of Bellefontaine, Ohio, before the seventh grade and took a job in a paint shop. His father could not be too upset at his youngest child, as he seemed to miss his son’s presence during the day. He once complained to a teacher who made his son stay after school that if his son “doesn’t get his lessons, it’s because you don’t know how to teach. Besides, the boy’s needed for errands at home.”

Although displaying no enthusiasm for school work, Hubbard, like fellow Hoosier humorist George Ade, who figured prominently in the artist’s subsequent career, displayed a passion for the theatrical life. From his youth until his death, Hubbard dropped whatever he was doing if a circus came to town. Asked by the owner of the paint shop where he worked what he wanted to be, Hubbard had a career in mind: "I want to be the sole proprietor of a good, well-painted, comprehensive, one-ring circus."

Politics, however, provided Hubbard with another livelihood. With the election of Democrat Grover Cleveland to his first term as president in 1884, Hubbard's father was rewarded for his lifelong devotion to the Democratic Party with an appointment as postmaster. Kin clerked at the post office for a time, but it did not cure his ambition for the theatrical life. During his employment, he made trips to the South as a silhouette artist and even enrolled in the Jefferson School of Art in Detroit. That experience, however, lasted only a short time as Hubbard complained that the school was “too tame.”

Hubbard’s love for the theater, however, paid off in a way that set the course for his future career. After witnessing a local performance of the Grand Bellefontaine Operatic Minstrels and Professor Tom Wright’s Operatic Solo Orchestra, Hubbard wrote to a friend in Indianapolis about the show, embellishing his remarks with some drawings. Impressed with Hubbard's artwork, the friend showed the drawings to John H. Holliday, Indianapolis News owner and editor. The friend wrote to Hubbard and urged him to come to Indiana and try for a job on the News. Hubbard agreed, but once in the city he sat in University Park for nearly a week before gaining enough courage to approach the newspaper for work. Finally given a job, Hubbard remembered the editor remarking as a salary was agreed upon ($12 a week), “I reckon you’ve got to live.”

Hired in 1891, Hubbard remained at the News for three years. During that time he produced a number of works for the newspaper, but, as he remembered, was “always handicapped by not knowing how to draw. I could execute rude, sketchy caricatures that were readily recognized, but I knew nothing of composition, light and shade, and perspective.” Although apprehensive about his position, Hubbard did manage to enjoy his life in Indianapolis. Given an annual pass to local theaters, he never missed a show or, when they came to town, a circus. 

The end of his first stint at the News came about as the result of the hiring of a new managing editor who wanted, according to Hubbard, “a real artist who could draw anything.” Called upon by the editor to produce a drawing of an angel for Easter, Hubbard did not panic, but hurried to the city editor, who liked the young man, and asked for his help. The sympathetic editor found an art student to furnish the needed illustration (described by Hubbard as a “production that would have made a circus wagon woodcarver turn green with envy”) and Hubbard's job was saved for a time.

His time at the News, however, would be short. Called upon to draw for the newspaper pictures of the intricately-restored interiors for a number of city banks, Hubbard threw up his hands and departed Indianapolis for the safety of the family home in Bellefontaine. During the next few years, Hubbard kept busy by again visiting the South, driving a mule team in Chattanooga, serving as a gatekeeper for a Cincinnati amusement park, and working as an artist for the Cincinnati Tribune and Mansfield News.

In 1899 the thirty-one-year-old Hubbard received a letter from the Indianapolis Sun inviting him to work for the newspaper. He accepted the offer and during the two years he worked at the Sun “really made more progress as an artist . . . than I had in all the years before,” he said. Hubbard rejoined the News as an artist in the fall of 1901 and worked there for the rest of his life.

Upon his return to the News, Hubbard became well-known for his caricatures of state political figures, particularly Indiana legislators. In working with politicians as subjects, he preferred to draw those with whiskers and hair, as caricaturing bald lawmakers was “just like drawing a cocoanut.” Although a collection of these drawings was published in 1903, Hubbard’s lasting fame would come not from politicians, but from a rustic character who made a habit of commenting on legislator’s foibles all the way from the wild country of Brown County.

While traveling on trains during campaign trips by Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan and Republic vice presidential candidate Charles Fairbanks in 1904, Hubbard found that at campaign’s end he had some extra material. After first experimenting with such names as Seth Martin, Steve Martin, and Abe Hulsizer, Hubbard finally hit on the right one—Abe Martin. On December 17, 1904, the Abe Martin character made his first appearance. The drawing showed a smiling, whiskered gentleman staring at a playbill featuring a scantily-clad (for those days) woman. At the drawing’s bottom, the character commented: “If I thought that blamed troupe done everything it has pictures fer, I’d stay over this evening and go home on the interubin.” The feature, Hubbard laconically recalled years later, “caused some favorable comment and it was decided to continue it.”

On February 3, 1905, Hubbard moved Abe Martin to Brown County, where he remained for the rest of his career. Finding that sometimes he had things to say that Abe Martin would be unlikely to utter, Hubbard added to his cast with such delightful country neighbors as spinster Miss Fawn Lippincut; senior citizen Uncle Niles Turner; teacher Professor Alexander Tansey; editor and publisher of the Bloom Center Weekly Sliphorn the Hon. Ex-Editor Cale Fluhart; businessman Tell Binkley; and many others. In naming his characters, Hubbard sometimes used the names of people he knew in Bellefontaine. He also found that another good source was Kentucky jury lists.

Hubbard's career received a boost in 1910, again thanks to a Hoosier author. In May of that year an article about the Abe Martin feature appeared in American magazine. The article’s author, Ade, lavishly praised Hubbard’s work. Before the article had appeared, Fred Kelly, a friend of Hubbard’s had been trying to find a firm to syndicate Abe Martin nationally. Kelly was turned down by the McClure Newspaper Syndicate in New York because that agency thought Abe Martin was merely a local phenomenon. Ade’s piece changed that view in a hurry, as syndication offers poured in after its publication. Hubbard signed with the George Matthew Adams Syndicate and Abe Martin was soon appearing in approximately 200 cities.

On December 26, 1930, at his new North Meridian Street home, the sixty-two-year-old Hubbard died from a heart attack. Just the day before he told his wife and two children that it had been the happiest Christmas of his life. Tributes to Hubbard flooded the News following his death and in 1967 he was posthumously inducted into the Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame. Although touted as “the humorists’ humorist” by D. Laurance Chambers of Indianapolis’s Bobbs-Merrill Company, Hubbard probably would not have let the praise go to his head, preferring to remember what Abe Martin once said: “Flattery won’t hurt you if you don’t swallow it.”