When he was thirteen years old, Thomas Aloysius Dorgan lost the last three fingers of his right hand in an accident with a factory machine. While recuperating, he drew a lot of cartoons as manual therapy. A year later, he found himself a job as staff artist on the San Francisco Bulletin. In 1902, he was employed by the prestigious San Francisco Chronicle, where he created his first weekly comic strip, 'Johnny Wise'. He was hired away by newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst and put to work at the New York Journal as a sports cartoonist.
Soon he was loved by the public, not only for his sports features, but also for his prose (he wrote a column called 'Daffydills') and his cartoon gags about dogs, of which 'Judge Rummy' was the best known. Eventually, the dog comics ran under the title of 'Silk Hat Harry's Divorce Suit', accompanied by a one-panel gag series called 'Indoor Sports'. Due to ill health, Dorgan had to retire in the early 1920s. He died of a relatively minor case of pneumonia in 1929.
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