Bet you didn’t know the character famous for saying “I yam what I yam and that’s all what I yam” worked the Coosa River in Alabama! Well, the man who was the inspiration for the character did, anyway. “Fantastic as Popeye is, the whole story is based on facts,” Cartoonist Tom Sims told Hughes Reynolds in a 1944 interview for The Coosa River Valley from De Soto to Hydroelectric Power (The Hobson Book Press). “As a boy I was raised on the Coosa River. When I began writing the script for Popeye I put my characters back on the old Leota that I knew as a boy, transformed it into a ship and made the Coosa River a salty sea.” Tom’s father was the captain of the Leota, formerly the steamboat Annie M., which was built by the River Iron Company of Gadsden to push barges to the furnace. After she was purchased by the Federal Government and renamed Leota, the steamboat was used to help rebuild low lift dams on the Coosa River. Tom began drawing the comic strip “Thimble Theater” after the strip’s creator, Elzie Segar, died in 1938. The storyline was centered on the Oyl family, who owned a shipping business. One of the sailors who worked for Commodore Oyle was a “wise cracking, spinach eating, chap” named Popeye. Tom took that character and spun it off into its own comic strip, “Popeye the Sailorman.” He and his wife lived in Ohatchee, Ala., during most of the time Tom wrote the strip. Tom did all his work for King Features Syndicate by mail and never considered the strip a big deal.
Tom liked to use local Ohatchee residents in his strip, including a neighbor who tied a cow to a tree in his yard to be used as a “live lawn mower.” Tom also spent a couple of years writing the “Blondie” comic strip, provided ideas for Amos and Andy, and wrote the script for their motion picture, “The Big Broadcast.” He also wrote for the animated “Tom and Jerry” movie cartoons.
Amme M /Leota
