The Other Bugs

Does Bugs Hardaway deserve more recognition than he gets?

About all he’s known for these days is he gave his nickname to a rabbit, who, within a few years, was completely re-designed in appearance and attitude to become a different Bugs Bunny than Hardaway started with. And his rabbit's personality suspiciously resembled Woody Woodpecker, whom Walter Lantz always took credit for creating.

Hardaway died long before animation historians existed, so he didn’t leave behind recollections to them. But allow us to pass along two newspaper pieces and something from the Schlesinger cartoon studio. The first is from the Nov. 18, 1916 edition of the Kansas City Post, which employed him at the time. His birth date was actually May 21, 1895.

ONE Halloween several years ago some naughty boys took a soap stick and drew a picture of a certain druggist on the front window of his store.
The druggist liked the art work so well he called in some painters who touched up the portrait and there it is to this day—on the same drug store front window.
The youth who drew the portrait was much pleased at the reception given his work of art and straightway gave up his newspaper route and applied for a position on The Kansas City Post.
He started out by drawing sport cartoons. His work drew favorable comment and he's been at it ever since.
Thus was the beginning of "Bugs" Hardaway, whose work you often have seen in The Post sporting pages.
Bugs' real front name is Benson, which he will admit after rigid cross examination, he was born at Belton, Mo., in 1894 [sic], but at an early age and without his consent his parents brought him to Kansas City. He attended ward school and Manual until two years ago, when he started his work on The Post.
Bugs is a student of the school of Goldberg and other famous cartoonists who follow the extravagant style of drawing. He spends all of his leisure hours playing baseball and is one of the valuable players in the Kansas City Athletic club league.

Hardaway served in the 129th field artillery in France during World War One. The Post of Nov. 4, 1918, noted he had been wounded overseas, but “the wound was not serious.” He resumed his work on the Post after the war. Here are several of 1915 sports cartoons, the death of the Federal League being a target.



How did Hardaway end up in animation? The Schlesinger newsletter, The Exposure Sheet, explains in its first issue in 1939.

A DIRECTOR: J.B. "Bugs" Hardaway, better known as "Laughing Boy", was first heard from when his mother entered him and his brother in a Baby Contest at a County Fair in Belton, Missouri. Bugs walked away with the grand prize - a calf - for being the ugliest infant in the contest!!! His brother only won a ribbon for being the prettiest.
Two years of school on a farm went by before Mother and Father Hardaway - with eight little Hardaways - moved to Kansas City. With school finally completed, a paper route was the first business enterprise for Bugs. To be a baseball player was the big dream at the time, and this was later realized.
When he was sixteen, he rode a bicycle from Kansas City to St. Louis, a feat for the papers. (Get him to show you his clippings) In 1912 he worked for the first suburban picture-show in Kansas City as janitor, ticket-seller, and when the projectionist was "indisposed", Bugs did his work, too.
Next we find him traveling day after day on the Santa Fe from Kansas City to Denver. You might not have recognized the deep, bass that barked: "Ice cream, cream without ice, sandwiches - or maybe an orange." All was sweet profit until the day they changed trains and Bugs lost a crate of apricots! That spelled "finish" to his career as news butcher. Then his dream came true: he joined a girls' baseball team -the original "Boston Bloomer Girls". Try to picture Bugs as a girl in bloomers (?) and a wig! He next joined the Oklahoma Indians’ baseball team, and was the only blond Indian in captivity!
From here we jump to the Kansas City Slide Company. Here Bugs placed black borders around slides that were to be used between reels three and four. To wit: "LADIES KINDLY REMOVE YOUR HATS". Or: GENTLEMEN WILL PLEASE REFRAIN FROM SPITTING IN THE AISLES." Then on to the Kansas City Post. His boss was none other than Griff Jay. Fay King, whose work now appears in the Los Angeles Herald, was also there as a cartoonist. The owners of the paper were the two famous characters in Gene Fowler's book "Timberline", Tammen and Bonfils, who later took over the Sells-Floto Circus.
The next time Bugs looked around, he was in the army where he remained for 26 months, 14 of those were spent in France with the 35th Division.
On his return to the U. S., he went back to the Kansas City Post where he remained until it was sold to the Journal. Then followed a year of selling advertising. This led to the Film Ad Service, there he found himself working with Walt Disney, "Tubby" Millar, Ub Iwerks, Hugh Harmon, Art Gobel, "Frizz" Freleng, and many others. In 1928 Bugs became Branch Manager for this firm in the Milwaukee branch, and for the next four years all was rosy. Then the stock market -- and all went black! When the smoke cleared, Bugs was in Los Angeles, working for Ub-Iwerks. Then came Walt Disney's, and in 1933 Bugs came to roost at Schlesinger's. As far as hobbies are concerned, Bugs is a whizz at pool, and he takes to the Santa Anita ponies -- and vice versa.

Hardaway was a writer for Schlesinger when he arrived, then given eight Buddy cartoons to direct, starting in 1934. Buddy vanished a year later and Hardaway went back into writing. He got a story credit (though it seems all writers pitched in at the time) in Daffy Duck and Egghead, released in 1938. When Friz Freleng left for MGM, Cal Dalton was named a director working, first, with Cal Howard, then Hardaway.

You’ll notice no mention of Bugs Bunny. The late Martha Sigall, in her wonderful book Living Life Inside the Lines (University Press of Mississippi, 2005), had personal knowledge of what happened.

I had heard he [Hardaway] was going to be directing, and I wished him luck. It was at this time that he told me he would be doing a Porky Pig hunting cartoon and that he was going to "put a rabbit suit on that duck." I got it, a character who would look like a rabbit, but have the crazy personality of Daffy Duck. A few months later, our department was painting a lot of scenes with a white rabbit. Soon after, "Porky's Hare Hunt" was shown in our projection room and received many laughs. I also saw that cartoon at the Warner Bros. Theatre in Hollywood and the audience just loved it. Of course, I reported this to Bugs the next time I saw him. He seemed pleased, but he never showed much emotion one way or the other. I think our studio was more than pleased however, because the publicity people at Warner's received lots of calls and letters from fans wanting to see more "of that rabbit."

Schlesinger wasn’t happy. He induced Freleng to return. Hardaway was bumped back into the story department, where there was a sense of self-preservation and maybe insecurity. Mike Maltese spoke to Mike Barrier about it in 1971.

When Maltese started in the story department, he recalled many years later, it occupied two rooms, one for "the Kansas City boys"—Ben Hardaway chief among them—and the other for a younger, looser crew—Pierce, Monahan, Richard Hogan, and Cal Howard. The Kansas City boys tried to freeze him out, Maltese said; they were working on a Porky Pig cartoon about a bullfight (apparently Clampett's The Timid Toredor, released in 1940), and they scornfully rejected every gag he suggested. "I got wise," he said. "I wrote down all my gags." After two weeks, Schlesinger's assistant Henry Binder summoned Maltese, "and he said, 'Mike, you didn't work out .... Bugs Hardaway says you didn't open your mouth once. You didn't make any suggestions: I said, 'Is that so?' Ta-dah! I whipped out pages of gag material. 'Look—two weeks' work.’ ” When Binder sent him back to the story department, Maltese said to Hardaway, "who the hell did you expect, Mark Twain?"

Hardaway didn’t last much longer. He joined the Walter Lantz studio on August 12, 1940, three and a half months before the first screen appearance of Woody Woodpecker. Given the time it takes to produce a cartoon, it appears he wrote Knock Knock as a freelancer.

We mentioned his war service. Battery D of the 129th Field Artillery was under the command of another Kansas Citian named Harry Truman, who went on to bigger things. The Valley Times used the connection to profile Hardaway in its issue of March 17, 1947

Film Gagman Truman Buddy in First War
President Harry Truman and Joseph Benson Hardaway, North Hollywood film cartoonist and gagman, have two things in common—they served in the same Army outfit in World War I and each, according to Hathaway, is a "hot" piano player.
Harding [sic], a neophyte pianist in his early entertainment career, explained that he has first hand information on the president's keyboard talents, having been entertained with Truman piano selections at an exclusive Los Angeles breakfast in 1944.
Occasion for the breakfast was a get-together of Southern Californians who had served under the president, then Capt. Harry Truman, in Battery D, 129th Field Artillery, 35th Division.
Got Telegram
A telegram notified Hardaway and the six other Los Angeles members of old Battery D of their former commanding officer's pending arrival. "Fall in, Battery D" it read and was signed "Capt. H. Truman."
Hardaway and the other World War I veterans met the train and ttok priority over a batch of politicians when Harry Truman stepped off at Union Station. Truman "ordered" his former GIs to breakfast with him at the Biltmore, where in due time the future president improvised for their edification on the piano.
"Mr. Truman is a wonderful fellow," Hardaway reminisced. "He's down to earth, honest as the day is long, loyal and all that . . . but he is a 'corny' piano player."
Identification Cards
Hardaway said that so many outsiders are claiming to have served in old Battery D that the bona fide members have been forced to issue identification cards to distinguish the real from the phoney veterans of the organisation. His card, number 47, was issued in 1945 and bears the signatures of Harry Truman and Ernest L. Schmidt, secretary-treasurer of Battery D.
Before the Armistice of 1918, Hardaway rose from corporal to sergeant major- He was in the service 26 months and participated in five engagements during thirteen months overseas under Truman's command.
Hardaway, who lives at 11211 Kling st., North Hollywood, said his own "mildness" at the piano is traceable to an arm injury received when he was a semi-professional baseball pitcher as a youth.
"Every since then," he explains, "I have not been able to play properly with my right hand." At one time, however, he played the piano in a movie theater.
Music In Family
That music runs in the Hardaway family is attested by the eminence attained by his son Bob, 19, who played the saxophone and clarinet with several name bands before joining the Army. Currently, Bob plays with the Army Air Force band at Bolling Field, Washington, D.C. Both Bob and his sister, Mrs. Jack Evan Kirby, are graduates of North Hollywood high school.
Hardaway himself came to the Valley in 1931 and since has been associated with animated cartoons in the motion picture industry. Although he never took an art lesson in his life, he created "Bugs Bunny" in 1938 and has had the satisfaction of seeing the animal character win popularity with newspaper comic strip readers as well as motion picture fans.
Story Editor
Hardaway is story editor for Walt Lantz Productions at Universal Studios, where the animated cartoons "Woody Woodpecker" and "Andy Panda" are filmed. He also is the "voice" of the woodpecker character.
He got into motion pictures via newspaper cartooning. He was political and sports cartoonist on the old Kansas City Post for seven years before becoming associated with the United Film Ad Service of Milwaukee, where he worked twelve years.
Walt Disney also was once employed by the Milwaukee firm and through a friendship formed there, Hardaway later was employed at the Disney studios in the Valley.

Lantz laid off his creative staff for a planned three months on December 15, 1947, and Mike Barrier’s Hollywood Cartoons says the studio never really reopened again until it closed completely at the end of 1948. For Hardaway, that meant the search for work. Evidently, he thought his Truman connection would help. E.O. Costello discovered Hardaway applied for a government job during the shutdown. However, he ended up back at Warner Bros.; the Warner Club News of December 1948 said he had been hired to write in the Freleng unit.

Hardaway received only one screen credit for story, on A Bone For A Bone, not released until 1951. Freleng’s unit was in a state of story man flux. There is no story credit on A Stooge For a Mouse (1950) and Cal Howard has a co-story credit with Warren Foster on Canned Feud (1951). Before all this, Freleng had been using Tedd Pierce, who ended up being switched with Foster in Bob McKimson’s unit, as was announced in the May 1949 edition of the Club News.

When and why Hardaway left Warners may be buried somewhere; in 1950, there is no occupation next to his name in the U.S. Census, while his wife was running a restaurant. In 1954, he was advertising a cartooning course.

He finally found work in cartoons again. He was writing stories for Pow Wow the Indian Boy cartoons produced by Sam Singer’s Tempe-Toons. He died of a heart attack at his home on Feb. 4, 1957. He was 61 (all his newspaper obits claimed he was 66).

So what are we to think about Hardaway? Setting aside Buddy and Pow Wow, he seemed to favour out-of-control hecklers—Daffy Duck, Woody Woodpecker and his Bugs-Bunny-In-Name-Only. He liked corn—witness the groaners and puns in his early Lantz cartoons. He was demoted twice as a director at Schlesinger, then returned to Warner Bros. as a writer, only to vanish for unknown reasons.

He clashed with Shamus Culhane at Lantz, who complained Hardaway’s sense of humour was unsophsticated, while Hardaway couldn’t understand Culhane’s style of direction. (He called a scene in The Barber of Seville “a Chinese goulash.” Hardaway does not seem to have liked Chinese food, referring to it in an extremely racist term in a 1920 cartoon for the Post). When Lantz started hunting for staff in July 1950, to get his operations going again for Universal-International, Hardaway was not brought back.

We wrote about Hardaway in an earlier post. And Tom Klein put together more information in this post some time ago on Cartoon Research. It's a shame we don't have his own story in his own words.