greatest creations." The strip made its debut on Monday, May 26, and was immediately successful, according to the editor, steadily picking up papers and running in more than fifty by summertime. Then, on August 13, the "pleasant, easygoing" Cole, whose forty-three-year-old life was described by pop-culture historian Ron Goulart as "outwardly the stuff of which Jimmy Stewart movies are made," shot himself in the head with a .22 caliber pistol. He had mailed one letter to wife Dorothy which has never been made public, and one to Hugh Hefner which stated "I cannot go on living with myself and hurting those dear to me." The last strips he produced were run on September 7 (daily) and September 21 (Sunday). Chicago commercial cartoonist Dwight Parks, who had been trying to sell his own strip, was hired by Field to continue Betsy and Me through the end of 1958. The final installment was published on Saturday, December 27. Stan Lee and Dan DeCarlo were also approached to continue the strip. They were developing their own strip Willy Lumpkin for the associated Publishers Syndicate, at that same time. Together they produced a week's samples, lettered and dated from September 9. Characters and story The series was narrated by the leading male character, befuddled daydreamer Chester B. Tibbit, who suffered in a dead-end job as a department-store floorwalker. He started by relating the story of how he met his wife a few years earlier ("I’ll never forget the day I met Betsy. Let’s see... was it June or August?"), followed by their courtship and marriage, and then the birth of their son. Next came the accounts of Farley's babyhood, and it was obvious before he could walk or talk that the boy was a supergenius. After a little over two months of introducing the family, Chet shifted the storyline to the "present," when Farley was a pompous and cynical five-year-old with no patience for clueless adults like the family's sarcastic swinging-bachelor friend, Gus. Readers experienced the Tibbits' sudden "need" for their first car (a 1945 "Huppmobile") after realizing that everyone else already had one ("We were the last of a dying race"), and then their plan to move to a new tract house in suburban Sunken Hills. Many strips began with well-intentioned but delusional bumbler Chet sitting in his living room talking directly to the reader. He tended to romanticize his narration, and the