Guisewite began the comic strip in 1976. She was going through a difficult time at her first job as an advertising copywriter. She’d draw cartoons and send them to her mother, who suggested she try publishing them.
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“I’d send drawings home to let her know I was coping,” Guisewite once told the Dayton Daily News. “They were very scratchy stick figures. It was humiliating because it was me at my worst.”
Following her mother’s advice, Guisewite submitted her drawings, and within a week she had a contract with Universal Press.
“Cathy” ran in newspapers 365 days a year from 1976 to 2010. At its peak, the comic strip was syndicated in 1,400 newspapers, and it was compiled into more than 20 books.
Her comic strip was featured in the Dayton Daily News during all of its 34 years.
“To know that my work was being delivered to Dayton homes meant so much to me,” she once said.
The first published strip was three frames depicting “Cathy” deliberating what to say when she answered a phone call from a suitor who had broken her heart.
The last “Cathy” cartoon appeared in newspapers Oct. 3, 2010. In the final frames the character and her husband, Irving, announced to her mother she was pregnant with a girl.
Guisewite lived in Dayton for the first five years of her life before moving to Michigan with her parents and sisters. Her parents moved back to Kettering when she was in college, and she has said that she always considered the Gem City home.
Guisewite was inducted into the Dayton Walk of Fame in 2017.
“To know now that a little piece of our family will be enshrined in cement in the Dayton Walk of Fame is an unbelievable honor,” she said at the time. “I am proud and grateful beyond words to be from Dayton.”
During her speech, she talked about growing up in Dayton.
“I could not have created ‘Cathy’ if I wasn’t so grounded in the Midwest,” she said, “The values of family and community gave me a solid core for my life and my whole career — being able to step back and see what rattles us in particular moments in our culture, without being too rattled myself, and then writing and drawing about it.”
In an interview with the Dayton Daily News in 2017, Guisewite said, “I don’t think I ever could have done what I did in my life If I didn’t have my start here.”
Guisewite created three animated television specials for the strip, all of which aired on CBS. For the first, Guisewite won an Emmy for Outstanding Animated Program in 1987.
In 1992, she also won the National Cartoonists Society Reuben Award, the profession’s highest honor.
Credit: Universal Press Syndicate
Credit: Universal Press Syndicate
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