Cartoonist
Ted Key, who created the beloved, bossy maid
Hazel in the 1940s and the iconic time-traveling cartoon characters
Peabody and Sherman some 15 years later, died Saturday, May 3 at his home in Tredyffrin Township, Pa., outside Philadelphia. He was 95...
He's pictured here alongside actress Shirley Booth, who played Hazel in the popular television series in the 1960s...Mr. Key was diagnosed with bladder cancer in late 2006 and suffered a stroke last September. He is survived by his second wife, Bonnie; his sons, Stephen of Providence, R.I., and David and Peter of Philadelphia; and three grandchildren. His first wife, Anne, passed away in 1984. In lieu of flowers, the family is asking that donations be made to the American Cancer Society...
Ted Key was born Theodore Keyser in Fresno, Calif., on Aug. 25, 1912. His father, Simon Keyser, was a Latvian immigrant who had changed his last name from Katseff to Keyser during a stint in South Africa and would change it to Key during World War I... In 1933, Mr. Key graduated from the University of California at Berkeley and moved to New York to freelance cartoons to the many magazines then based there. He also wrote for radio, penning a play called
“The Clinic” that aired on NBC and was included in a book,
“Best Broadcasts of 1939-40,” which was edited by Max Wylie.
Mr. Key’s big break came in 1943, when he sold a maid cartoon to
The Saturday Evening Post, a national, weekly magazine put out by The Curtis Publishing Co., the giant publishing concern that had its headquarters in Philadelphia...The maid quickly became a feature in
The Post, acquiring the name of
Hazel and a family, the Baxter’s, which employs her to this day. Her popularity grew so rapidly that when E.P. Dutton & Co. published the first collection of Hazel cartoons in 1946, it sold 500,000 copies, a huge number for the time...By then, Mr. Key had moved to the Philadelphia area, where he bought his current house in 1951...Dutton eventually published eight collections of Hazel cartoons in hardback. Bantam Books put out six of them in paperback and Curtis Books issued three other Hazel collections in paperback.
In 1961,
Hazel got her own eponymous prime-time TV show, which ran for four years on NBC and one year on CBS. The show starred
Shirley Booth, who won two Emmy Awards for her portrayal of the maid, making her the first actor to have won Emmy, Tony and Academy awards...Mr. Key acquired the rights to
Hazel from
The Post in 1969, when Curtis succumbed to the financial trouble that led to its move to Indianapolis. That year, King Features Syndicate began distributing the comic panel to newspapers. It still does, using cartoons drawn by Mr. Key before he retired in 1993...In addition to
Hazel, Mr. Key created
Diz and Liz for Curtis. The brother and sister appeared in a multi-panel cartoon in the company’s monthly children’s magazine,
Jack and Jill, from 1961 through 1972. They also were featured in three books, two of which were collections of their
Jack and Jill cartoons...Despite
Hazel’s popularity in her heyday, Mr. Key’s best-known creations today are probably
Peabody and Sherman. Mr. Key came up with them for Jay Ward, a childhood friend of his brother, Leonard Key, who needed enough material to build a half-hour show around the adventures of a flying squirrel named Rocky and a moose named Bullwinkle...
Peabody was the fourth successful animal character Mr. Key created in the 1950s. The other three became children’s books for Dutton —
“So’M I,” which was about a knock-kneed, bow-legged colt;
“Phyllis,” which featured a sparrow that built a nest in the outfield of the Philadelphia Phillies’ ball park; and
“The Biggest Dog in the World,” which was the only one of the three books that Mr. Key illustrated and later became the basis for the 1973 British movie,
“Digby, the Biggest Dog in the World.”“Digby” was one of four movies featuring animals conceived by Mr. Key as title characters that came out in the 1970s. The other three, which were made by The Walt Disney Co., were
“The Million Dollar Duck,” which was about a pet duck that laid golden eggs;
“Gus,” which featured a mule that kicked field goals; and
“The Cat from Outer Space.” In addition to writing the proposal for
“The Cat from Outer Space,” Mr. Key wrote the screenplay for it and turned it into a novel that was published in the United States, Great Britain, France and Japan.
Mr. Key’s most lucrative venture may have been the series of motivational posters that he and a neighbor, Milton Fox-Martin, created for the Economics Press Inc. Called
“Positive Attitude Posters,” they consisted of a sentence or two about how to behave and a cartoon by Mr. Key, often featuring children, humorously illustrating the copy. They were published biweekly for around 30 years...Mr. Key and Mr. Fox-Martin also created
“Sales Bullets,” a series of motivational pamphlets for sales people featuring cartoons by Mr. Key that the Economics Press published biweekly from the late 1950s into the 1980s...Despite the success of
Hazel and his other ventures, Mr. Key continued freelancing cartoons to
The Post and other magazines, including
Sports Illustrated, Better Homes and Gardens and
Cosmopolitan, through the early 1970s. Three collections of those cartoons were published by Dutton...Over the course of his life, Mr. Key also sold ideas for covers to
The Post, including at least one used by Norman Rockwell; illustrated books and advertising and public-service campaigns; sold a proposal for a movie about the Loch Ness monster to the Hanna-Barbera Studio; created a half dozen or so unsold proposals for movies and TV shows; and wrote the script for a
“Hazel” musical...Mr. Key also wrote down many ideas he never fully executed, including one conceived with his brother-in-law, cartoonist Fritz Wilkinson, for a desk calendar with a different cartoon each day. Nowadays, such calendars are commonplace; theirs, however, would have been among the first of its kind; the month featured in the prototype for it is January 1951.
Cartoonist Ted Key, who created the beloved, bossy maid Hazel in the 1940s and the iconic time-traveling cartoon characters Peabody and Sherman some 15 years later, died Saturday, May 3 at his home in Tredyffrin Township, Pa., outside Philadelphia. He was 95...He's pictured here alongside actress Shirley Booth, who played Hazel in the popular television series in the 1960s...Mr. Key was diagnosed with bladder cancer in late 2006 and suffered a stroke last September. He is survived by his second wife, Bonnie; his sons, Stephen of Providence, R.I., and David and Peter of Philadelphia; and three grandchildren. His first wife, Anne, passed away in 1984. In lieu of flowers, the family is asking that donations be made to the American Cancer Society...Ted Key was born Theodore Keyser in Fresno, Calif., on Aug. 25, 1912. His father, Simon Keyser, was a Latvian immigrant who had changed his last name from Katseff to Keyser during a stint in South Africa and would change it to Key during World War I... In 1933, Mr. Key graduated from the University of California at Berkeley and moved to New York to freelance cartoons to the many magazines then based there. He also wrote for radio, penning a play called “The Clinic” that aired on NBC and was included in a book, “Best Broadcasts of 1939-40,” which was edited by Max Wylie.
