Fred Rhoads’s Working Trip at Sea

A working trip aboard the Forrestal

A letter from cartoonist Fred Rhoads brought news of an unusual working trip to his father in Shamokin. On November 2, 1963, the Shamokin News-Dispatch reported that Rhoads was going to sea aboard the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal to gather material for a new cartoon character. The paper identified him as a former local resident and the son of H. J. Rhoads of North Market Street.

Rhoads told his father that he was leaving Norfolk, Virginia, aboard the carrier. He expected to be flown back to the mainland after the ship had traveled several hundred miles out to sea. The newspaper described the purpose of the journey as getting background for his work; it did not name the new character.

Cartooning after the war

The report linked Rhoads’s civilian cartooning to his service with the Marines during the Second World War. It said he continued drawing Gizmo and Eight Ball for Leatherneck, the Marine publication. The planned carrier journey belonged to that ongoing working life, taking a cartoonist familiar to the paper’s readers from a drawing assignment onto a ship at sea.

The short dispatch also preserved a continuing hometown connection. Rhoads’s work and travel were reaching beyond Shamokin, but a letter to his father still became local news. In that exchange, the town’s newspaper followed both a family connection and the practical search for material behind a cartoon.