Gene Byrnes

American cartoonist

Eugene Francis Byrnes (March 18, 1889 – July 26, 1974) created the long running comic strip Reg'lar Fellers, which he signed Gene Byrnes. His humorous look at suburban children (who nevertheless spoke like New York street kids) was syndicated from 1917 to 1949.

Born and educated in New York City, Byrnes was ten years old when he entered a contest that involved drawing a picture in a store window and won the prize, a $5 suit. He took a job as an office boy at McClure's when he was 15, and a year later he went to work in his father's harness business and soon started his own business, making horse collars. He also worked as a bug spray salesman, shoemaker and shoe salesman, introducing electric shoe repairs to New York. Byrnes planned a career in sports, but after he broke his leg during a wrestling match, he began copying the cartoons of Tad Dorgan while recuperating in the hospital. He was a graduate of the Landon School of Illustration and Cartooning correspondence course, which displayed his name in its advertisements.

Byrnes met Winsor McCay who gave him a letter of recommendation which led to work as a sports cartoonist. At the New York Telegram where Things That Never Happen was part of Byrnes' larger feature, It's A Great Life If You Don't Weaken, syndicated by the New York Evening Telegram from 1915 to 1919. In 1917, this cartoon feature introduced the Reg'lar Fellers characters. In 1919, he began Wide Awake Willie as a New York Herald Sunday page, and this too featured Reg'lar Fellers characters. With Reg'lar Fellers running as a daily strip in 1920, he changed the name of the Sunday strip to Reg'lar Fellers. Byrnes and his wife lived in New York with a summer home in Lake Champlain. During a 16 day trip west by automobile in 1922, they saw Carmel, California and decided to live there. They acquired the stone house then known as the Foster house, built in 1906, and remodeled it. Byrnes, who was soon earning $25,000 a year, also did two topper strips—Daiseybelle and Zoolie. He overcame his limited drawing skills by hiring a phalanx of talented cartoonists to assist and ghost his strip, which continued to run in newspapers until 1948. Benjamin Thackston Knight (1895–1977), aka “Tack” Knight, was Byrnes' assistant on Reg’lar Fellers from 1924 to 1929.

In later years in New York, Byrnes lived at 570 Park Avenue. At the age of 84, he died at New York's Roosevelt Hospital of a heart ailment in 1974.

Byrnes' stone house exists today as the historic Stonehouse Inn, built in 1906, with its ocean view, glass enclosed porch, seven guest rooms, stone fireplace and hidden vault. It is located in Carmel at Eighth Avenue and Monte Verde Street.