REVIEWS
Scott Brown
Cartoonist
by
Christopher A. Kuntz
In Scott Brown – Cartoonist, Chris Kuntz traces the Brown family before immigrating to America, and presents their struggles and movement in Ohio. The story’s star is his grandfather, Scott Brown, a genius cartoonist, artist, and weather predictor. A must-read for Brown descendants, and a great read for others who are not.
Robert A. Carter, Ohio Historian
Scott Brown was a Mansfield native son who came of age in the Great Depression. He flavored the lives of generations of Mansfielders with cartoons and humor from behind the soda fountain of the family’s drugstore on Helen Avenue. His work appeared in national magazines. But he also freely shared his humor about his neighbors and the interesting people around him, Mansfield people, with whoever walked through the shop door. Brown had a love of history, the humorous side of history. His grandson Christopher Kuntz has brought it all together with a huge sampling of Brown’s illustrated humor alongside the history of his Ohio family.
When Scott Brown’s widow, Ann, prepared to move out of her home on Rae Avenue in Mansfield in 2002, she donated the cartoonist’s lifetime accumulation of artwork and related material to several local museums. This made it possible now, twenty years later, for Kuntz to deliver about the most entertaining family history one could imagine. Kuntz took aim at understanding his Ohio ancestors in terms of the events and conditions that surrounded them. He conveys this from the time they came to the region after the War of 1812 up until his last memory of his grandfather in 1982. This parallels the lives of many of our pioneer families, told by someone who clearly sought and found his piece of Richland County history.