Buster Brown and Me-1965

 

One of the very first comic strip characters with staying power was Richard Felton Outcault's Buster Brown, seen here with his dog, Tige. Buster was created way back in 1902 and while the strips faded after a couple decades or so, a 1904 alliance with the Brown Shoe Company kept the characters in the public eye. 

By the time I came along in 1959, Buster was seen in print ads like the above (with famous little person Jerry Maren as Buster), in TV commercials, and in specialty comic books like the ones below. They weren't newsstand comics at all, but rather were distributed through various shoe stores carrying Buster Brown Shoes. 

In 1965, I was in Kindergarten and toward the end of the school year, our class put on a play--my first acting experience (outside of one line in a Christmas pageant). The play was apparently a standard one in Kindergarten circles and was based on a 1929 song entitled "The Wedding of the Painted Dolls."

 One of the song lyrics was: 

"It’s a holiday, today’s the wedding of the painted doll

It’s a jolly day, the news is spreading all around the hall
Red Riding Hood and Buster Brown
The jumping jack jumped into town
From far and near they’re coming here"

Me, I was cast as Buster Brown, a character I only knew at the time from shoe commercials. My mother somehow got hold of a brown Little Lord Fauntleroy-style outfit which was close to Buster's traditional look. I felt silly in it but I refused to wear a blond wig to complete the effect!

I've often wondered what I might have looked like had I gone whole Buster and today, thanks to ubiquitous AI, we have an idea.