Toby The Ambitious

Young America was a newsweekly for school children created in 1935 by Stuart Scheftel, one-time director of the New York Post. It looked like a dignified, grownup, twelve-page tabloid newspaper, with plenty of pictures, cartoons, maps, charts and was the forerunner of the Weekly Reader. Syd’s first cartoon strip, Toby the Ambitious, ran in Young America magazine between 1935-37, and appeared under Ludwig Bemelmans’s cartoon strip Silly Willy, according to his grandson John Bemelmans Marciano.