Idaho news. In response, Collias launched "Round About the Boise Valley," a hand-drawn and hand-lettered local news feature that ran in 50 installments from October 1950 through September 1951. In the 2010 book John Collias: Round About the Boise Valley, author Nick Collias describes the feature thusly: The "artist-reporter" covered boxing matches, beauty pageants and cattle brandings. He relayed personal anecdotes about random meetings on the street, dutifully acknowledged holidays like Flag Day and Dairy Month, and relayed seemingly every joke he overheard and ironic window-sign he spotted along his daily route. Each installment was capped off with a large and unapologetically accurate portrait of a local citizen, creating an overall impression somewhere between a yearbook and a phonebook. It was pure, unadulterated local color, screaming postwar-return-to-innocence in hand-drawn lettering across the Saturday evening edition. Each cartoon included a portrait of a local citizen of Collias’ choosing, ranging from the local police chief to a maitre’d at a popular local restaurant. The feature also followed the rise of Harry "Kid" Matthews, a local heavyweight boxer who was rising to national prominence at the time. Collias’ feature covered the buildup to Matthews’ bout with then Heavyweight World Champion Rocky Marciano, who defeated Matthews handily in Madison Square Garden on July 28, 1952. Collias’ feature morphed soon after into simply "Portraits," a feature focusing largely on imminent Idaho businessmen such as J.R. Simplot and Idaho Power president Tom Roach. In 1953, Collias moved to Chicago to be closer to his ailing mother, and his affiliation with the Idaho Statesman ceased for the time. During most of the 1950s and early 1960s, he attempted to find work as a commercial artist during the so-called Golden Age of advertising in Chicago. He drew cigarette billboards and submitted work to Coca-Cola and other prominent companies with ties to marketing firms in Chicago, but as none were accepted, Collias turned to factory work to support his family. His advertising work from this period was recently collected in the book John Collias: Round About the Boise Valley. "A Portrait of a Distinguished Citizen" and later work Collias moved back to Boise in 1961, and after two years working as a cowboy for his father-in-law in remote Idaho, he and Statesman editor James Brown started up the "Portraits" feature again, this time under the title "A Portrait of a Distinguished Citizen." The feature was reader-nominated, and over its