Emidio Angelo was born in Philadelphia, a year after his mother and father, a baker, arrived from Italy. He studied art from 1924 to 1928 at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Angelo joined The Philadelphia Inquirer as a political cartoonist in 1937 and worked there until 1954. He also drew cartoons for the Saturday Evening Post, Life and Esquire. Angelo drew a strip for the Philadelphia Inquirer entitled ‘Emily and Mabel’, which also ran in more than 130 other newspapers during the early 1950s. It was based on two women who worked in a South Philadelphia soda shop that Angelo had frequented in his youth. In the strip, Emily and Mabel were twin sisters who were unliberated spinsters. They wore the same upsweep hairdos and long Victorian dresses, and they had the same goal in life. "Their primary purpose in life was to snag a man," according to Donna Pierro, Angelo's daughter. "They were on the eternal quest, and they always struck out."
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