Cyrus Baldridge

Cyrus Leroy Baldridge (May 27, 1889 – June 6, 1977) was an artist, illustrator, author and adventurer. He was born to William Baldridge and Eliza Burgdorf Baldridge, in Alton, New York in 1889. When very young, his mother left his father and began a nomadic life as a traveling sales person, selling kitchen equipment from town to town. Devoted to this strong and independent woman, Baldridge’s personality absorbed from her a spirit of quite exceptional individualism.

Baldridge's career in art began when the 10-year-old Cyrus was accepted as the youngest student at Frank Holme's Chicago School of Illustration. Holme became his second father. In his studio, Baldridge sat with students three times his age to do life drawings, and under Holme's direction went into the streets to make the detailed sketches meant to become newspaper illustrations. He learned to count and remember the number of buttons on a policeman’s jacket, and the sad faces of tenement children, and then return to the studio to include them in finished illustrations. The tenet of art creation that he would ever remember from Holme was "Say it with a few bold strokes." He followed that rule and improved upon it through time spent with Japanese artists years later.

Baldridge was admitted to the University of Chicago in 1907 and graduated in 1911 and was evermore devoted to that institution. He was poor boy with no scholarship in an elite college. During his whole life lack of money never stopped him from anything, and at the University of Chicago he paid his way by drawing signs for campus events. He became a campus leader, most likely to succeed, Grand Marshal of the University and a model for students who remembered him long afterwards. According to Harry Hansen, "Men who knew him then will talk to you about him by the hour – but not necessarily about his drawings. They will tell you about his honesty, his candor, his sense of democracy, his unfailing good humor and his faith in his fellow man."

After college, life for Baldridge was both struggle and an exuberant adventure. While looking for commissions as an illustrator, he worked in a Chicago settlement house and in the stockyards. He became superb rider while training in the Illinois National Guard Cavalry and with that skill worked as a cow hand on the King Ranch in Texas for a summer.

When World War I began, Baldridge traveled through occupied Belgium and France as a war correspondent and illustrator. Using a German letter of passage he interacted with the conquered and their conquerors. He traveled through war zones on bicycle, horse cart and horseback until his money ran out and he returned to Chicago.

Called to Mexico as a member of the National Guard he was on the Mexican/American border in 1916 to repulse Pancho Villa and in 1917 he joined the French Army as a stretcher bearer. The entrance of the United States into the war required his transfer to the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF). In the AEF he joined the talented team that brought the Stars and Stripes newspaper into being. Baldridge was the chief artist on staff that included Harold Ross, founder of The New Yorker, Alexander Woollcott, drama critic for the New York Times, and others who later achieved considerable fame. As a journalist, Baldridge traveled freely and saw as much as any general. His work appeared in virtually every issue of Stars and Stripes from March 1918 until the end of the War in November, 1918, and portrayed the full range of emotion of soldiers facing death at the Front. HaroldRoss called him the greatest illustrator of the War.

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