in 1922 as a journalist at the Des Moines News, Hamlin worked for the Texas Grubstakers newspaper and the Fort Worth Record. His income in 1922 was $910. By 1923, he was a staff photographer, cartoonist and writer at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, where he created his first comic strip, The Hired Hand, and a sports feature, The Panther Kitten. Cartoonist Steve Stiles noted: The job only lasted a year. It was the Prohibition era and Hamlin and a friend were discovered using the paper's engraving equipment to make counterfeit labels for bootleg whiskey bottles. Hamlin moved on to doing art for an oil industry publication and one day, while wandering through the desolate landscape of the oil fields, began musing about the dinosaurs who had once roamed through the very same territory. Hamlin also acquired a lifelong interest in paleontology through conversations with geologist acquaintances. On December 24, 1926, he married high-school sweetheart Dorothy Stapleton, who became the model for the character Ooola in Alley Oop. Their daughter Theodora was born in 1927, followed by their son Jon in 1936. In 1928, he worked as a photographer for the Houston Press. When the oil industry magazine went defunct, the Hamlins returned to Perry, Iowa in 1930.The Cartoonists: V.T. Hamlin Alley Oop begins In Perry, Hamlin thought about those dinosaurs, and started drawing a comic strip titled The Mighty Oop. He was not pleased with his creation, and destroyed it. A year later, he tried again, submitting Alley Oop to a small syndicate, Bonnet-Brown, which launched the strip as a daily, beginning December 5, 1932. A few months later, Bonnet-Brown collapsed, bringing the strip to an end. NEA picked it up, and it started again on August 7, 1933. Success led to a Sunday strip, added on September 9, 1934. Dorothy Hamlin also worked on the strip, creating color roughs and contributing story ideas, including the important plot device of time travel, introduced April 5, 1939. Hamlin wrote and drew Alley Oop with the help of, Dave Graue, until his retirement in 1971. When Hamlin retired because of failing eyesight, Graue took over full-time. Graue had been assisting Hamlin since 1950, and he had been doing the daily solo since 1966, although it was co-signed by Hamlin. The last daily signed by Hamlin appeared December 31, 1972, and his last signed Sunday strip was April 1, 1973. From his studio