Chester Gould was born in Pawnee, Oklahoma on November 20, 1900, to Alice and Gilbert Gould. Chester was fascinated with comic strips and began drawing his own versions of cartoons by the age of seven. His father, a publisher of a weekly newspaper, encouraged his son's interest in sketching and drawing, and by the time he was in his late teens, the young Gould had won first place in a couple of art contests. He worked as a painter of advertising signs for a summer; then used his earnings to take a correspondence course in cartooning and caricature.
Before Chester even finished high school, his cartoons had appeared in two college yearbooks, in a 27-page Class History for his own school and in a collection of 18 political cartoons for The Tulsa Democrat, for which he was paid the handsome sum of $35. *(2) Art was his life and his dreams were forming.
Enrolled in Oklahoma A & M College in 1919, Chester studied Business Administration. He transferred to Chicago, Illinois' Northwestern University in 1921, taking night classes and graduating in 1923. To support himself, Chester produced art for the advertising and sports departments of several newspapers in Chicago. He also drew two comic strips for the Evening American, "Radio Catts" and "Fillum Fables", wrote theatre reviews and a Chicago feature column entitled "Why It's a Windy City."
On the social side, Chester was introduced to a young woman on a blind date in 1925. He married that young woman, Edna Gauger, in November 1926 and they had their daughter Jean Ellen in 1927. The Gould family made their home on a farm near Woodstock, Illinois.
Throughout his studies and working steadily, Chester drew comic strips, submitting them to the Chicago Tribune in an attempt to catch the attention of the editor, Joseph Patterson. Over the years, Chester sent in dozens of strips, each receiving rejection. Until, that is, he drew his 61st strip, about a detective called Plainclothes Tracy. "I decided to invent a comic strip character who would always get the best of the assorted hoodlums and mobsters," Chester mentioned in The Encyclopedia of American Comics. *(1)
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