Carey Orr was a newspaper cartoonist originally from Ada, Ohio. He studied at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, while also being a semi-professional baseball pitcher. He began his newspaper career with the Chicago Examiner before becoming a fulltime editorial cartoonist with the Nashville Tennessean at age 24. He began his longtime association with the Chicago Tribune in 1917 and stayed with the paper for 46 years. He created the 'The Kernel Cootie' strip that presumably ran from 1919 to 1922. He was the editorial cartoonist of the Chicago Tribune. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his editorial cartoons in 1961. Carey Orr offered this insight into the creation of his cartoons in a letter of 3 June 1966:
My fifty years as a political cartoonist has been unique in one respect in that I have always finished the drawing completely without submitting the idea to the editor beforehand. The normal procedure is for the cartoonist to submit two or three rough sketches, one of which the editor may O.K. for completion. This latter method is a great time waster, and causes the artist to depend on the judgement of others with regard to his own work. Eventually the artist loses the ability to distinguish a good idea from a poor one. It is a bad habit to be too dependent on others.
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