This biography from the Archives of AskART:
| Born in Kensett, Missouri, Fred Lasswell became the creator of the "Snuffy Smith" and "Barney Google" cartoons. "Snuffy Smith" began in 1919 by King Features Syndicate and ran uninterrupted for nearly 60 years. Lasswell took over "Snuffy Smith" in 1942 after the strip's originator, Billy DeBeck, died.
Lasswell had begun working on the cartoon with DeBeck a decade earlier and felt that his experience in rural Florida helped inspire DeBeck's idea about the cartoon's fictional setting, Hootin' Holler, N.C. Together they came up with phrases like "Time's a wastin'," "shif'less skonk" and "bodacious" for the
strip's hillbilly characters.
The cartoon, which ran under the name "Take Barney Google, for Instance" before it was renamed "Barney Google and Snuffy Smith," appeared in twenty-one countries and nine-hundred newspapers.
Lasswell, a high school dropout, was a cartoonist for "The Tampa Daily Times," and was a radio operator for Pan American World Airways when DeBeck died. At the urging of the King Features Syndicate, he kept DeBeck's style but added his own flavor to the strip, making Snuffy a popular figure among American enlisted men in World War II.
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