 C. Carey Cloud is primarily known as Carey Cloud
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This biography from the Archives of AskART:
| An artist and toy designer, C. Carey Cloud, through his Cloudcrest
Studios (later Cloudcrest Creations), developed hundreds of prizes for
Cracker Jack boxes from the late 1930s through the 1950s. Among
the memorable prizes were: Clown Rocker, Paper Doll, Tin Litho Garage,
Cowboy Puzzle, Parrot Puzzle, Humpty Dumpty Stand-Up, and many
others. He was one of the most prolific Cracker Jack prize
designers.
"Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack, I don’t care if I never get
back.” was the line in Jack Norworth’s 1908 “Take Me Out to the Ball
Game.” immortalizing a snack food in song. The popcorn, peanuts,
and molasses confection was introduced by F. W. Rueckheim and his
brother to a snack-craving public in 1893 at the World’s Columbian
Exposition, Chicago’s first World’s Fair. “A Prize in Every Box”
became its advertising slogan when toys and baseball cards were
inserted into every package. More than 23 billion toys have been
given out since they were first introduced in 1912. Some old
Cracker Jack prizes are valued today at more than $7,000.
One series Cloud created were his Nursery Rhyme series. The
Humpty Dumpty stand-up Cracker Jack prize toy by Cloudcrest Studios is
die-cut to fold out into a three-dimensional 2 3/16" tall
stand-up. Humpty Dumpty is in the foreground, and the King's man
on the King's horse and the high brown wall are in the background. When
the stand-up scene is viewed from the front, the yellow bricks are
horizontal and don't show. Other prizes in his Nursery Characters
series were: Mother Goose, Cat and Fiddle, and Mary's Lamb. Each
stand-up has the appropriate nursery rhyme on the back.
Cloud's Goofy Circus book was available for 10 cents plus the foil seal
from the lid of cans of Chocolate Flavored Ovaltine. Within the
book were 58 cut-outs, including some that moved, such as the Rocking
Circus Horse. His Soco game (1946) used green, red-orange, and
black colors, and the same colors were used on many Cloud prizes from
that period.
Another prize was an owl shaped paper whistle, one of a series of
ten. The Cracker Jack Company ordered these embossed paper
whistles from Cloudcrest in 1948 and again in 1949. Other
whistles in the series have illustrations of a boat, a cat, a clown, a
long-necked crane, a Scottie dog, an open-palmed hand, a monkey, a
train, and a wolf. They are all red and off-white. Each of the
whistles has a different design on the back, and all in the series are
marked "CRACKER JACK WHISTLE.
Cloud wrote about the difficulty in perfecting these paper whistles in his autobiography, Cloud Nine (published 1983):
"Once I designed a paper fluted whistle. They said it couldn't be
done. I had to find the right weight and quality of paper that
would stand sharp embossing. This accomplished, we went into
production of several million. However, we found that about every
twentieth whistle failed to sound. They had to be one-hundred
percent whistle-able. Frustrating as growing days: 'Go where the
knowledge is.' I went to the Hammond Organ Company, in Chicago, taking
along a handful of whistles. I asked to see their engineer and
was ushered into his office; I told him my problem. He
patiently took several whistles apart. Then he told me what the
problem was, as simple as it was. We made the correction and had
no further trouble.
None of the whistles in this series had any indication on them that
they came from Cloud's company, Cloudcrest, which was unusual, as Cloud
generally made sure that his creations were identified.
Also moveable were the many pop-up books which he designed and
illustrated, several in collaboration with Harold Lentz (Little Red
Riding Hood (1934), Goldilocks and the Three Bears (1934), etc).
In addition to creating Cracker Jack prizes through his Cloudcrest
Studios, C. Carey Cloud worked in the 1930s for Blue Ribbon Publishing,
the company that
introduced the term "pop up" for their three-dimesional children's
books whose characters 'popped up'. For Blue Ribbon, Cloud
illustrated the pop-ups Puss in Boots and with Harold Lentz, Little Red Riding Hood, both published in 1934.
As a Brown County, Indiana fine-art painter, Cloud exhibited landscape
scenes with the Hoosier Salon between 1931 and 1968. Among his
titles were Autumn Evening, September Hills and Autumn Comes to the Village.
Sources:
Jim Davis and the website: members.cox.net
the website americanvision.org
Website of Blue Ribbon Publishing Company
Rare Books Online
Judith Vale Newton and Carol Weiss, A Grand Tradition: The Art and Artists of the Hoosier Salon, 1925-1990, p. 182
C. Carey Cloud, Cloud Nine
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This biography from the Archives of AskART:
| The following, submitted February 2005, is from Sylvia A. Straub whose
source is a brochure given to her by the artist and likely written by
him:
My husband and I met Carey Cloud in the mid seventies on the the day we bought an oil painting titled Picnic
in Brown County, IN. We simply went to his home on the southern
edge of Nashville, IN, where he lived (on a hill called Cloudcrest) and
knocked on the door. When we told him of our purchase, he invited
us in, and told us a few things about his life.
He was born in
Indiana and in his early years, tried to make a living as an artist,
but because of the Depression, found it difficult. Without giving
up his art, he went to work designing and manufacturing the metal
Cracker Jack toys. He continued that work for many years, into
the late forties or early fifties I believe. He was the only
designer and manufacturer of the toys during the period in which the
Cracker Jack company used metal toys. After that, they were made
of plastic.
He considered his art to be in the same school of
realism as that of Andrew Wyeth. Mr. Cloud seemed happy for the company
and for our appreciation of his work. He must have been in his
eighties at that time. A delightful gentleman.
Dr. Karl
Bookwalter of Indiana University has written about Carey Cloud.
He described his studio as being "log cabin type nestled among tall oak
trees above the valley . . . just one mile away" from Nashville,
Indiana. From this studio, he does "nostalgic paintings of
Americana" that "possess an air of peace and calmness so rare for these
harried times. . . ."C. Carey Cloud is identified with no school of
painting. He is self-taught. He pays little attention to the 'isms' in
art or the popular forms and accepted concepts; he paints entirely to
please himself and has found the public receptive to his way."
Cloud
was born on a farm four miles south of Warren, Indiana. He began
his career after World War I with a newspaper in Cleveland and then
moved to Chicago where he designed children's books, greeting cards and
did magazine illustrations. He was also an Art Director for a
publisher.
After this, he got into the toy manufacturing
business, and he patented several toys that were sold widely by chain
stores. For a quarter of a century, he designed and produced
millions of toys for Cracker Jack boxes. In 1948, he moved to
Brown County, Indiana but continued his toy designing for Cracker Jacks
until 1964 when he decided to devote full time to painting. Since
then "he has been painting in near-microscopic detail which he calls
Realism in Depth, a mixed media: tempera, acrylic, sometimes glazed in
oil".
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