Ripley, Robert

Ripley, Robert (b. LeRoy)

(1893–1949) illustrator, cartoonist, writer; born in Santa Rosa, Calif. He began as a tombstone polisher, worked on newspapers in San Francisco (1909–13), and moved to New York City to work for the Globe (1913). He changed his first name and began his Believe It or Not! cartoons of oddities (1918). His syndicated feature made him wealthy, and he lived on an island in Long Island Sound he called Bion, an acronym of Believe It or Not!