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Southington Conn.

Jim Aparo, Batman’s Greatest Ally

Growing up in New Britain, Conn., Jim Aparo always wanted to be an artist. With only one semester of art school, he became a comic book legend, illustrating the exploits of Batman for more than a decade.

In the late 1980s, Aparo illustrated one of the greatest Batman comic-book novels, A Death in the Family, considered a milestone in American comic book art.

Jim Aparo

He was born Aug. 24, 1932, just before the dawn of the Golden Age of Comic Books. Superman first appeared when he was six. Aparo grew up loving the cheap, colorful magazines. Many, however, viewed them as disreputable. They were called ‘sadistic drivel’ and ‘the ten-cent plague.’

In 1954, a U.S. Senate subcommittee held televised hearings on how comic books led to juvenile delinquency. The next year, housewives in Norwich, Conn., held a public comic book burning.

None of that deterred Jim Aparo. He took art classes at New Britain High School while studying and copying comic books at home. He also took a semester at the Hartford Art School, but mostly he taught himself. After high school he started doing work for an advertising agency. Meanwhile, he submitted drawings to comic book publishers. For years he got nothing but rejection.

Finally around 1966 Jim Arparo got his big break. His work was accepted by Charlton Comics in Derby, Conn, a comic book publisher that existed from 1946 to 1985.

A Jim Aparo cover of a Batman comic

The Charlton Comics editor gave him his first assignment: a teenage comic strip character called Miss Bikini Luv. Eventually he was working full-time for Charlton. When his editor, Dick Giordano, moved to DC Comics in 1968, he brought Jim Aparo along with him and assigned him Aquaman.

Superheroes

That ultimately led to a 10-year stint illustrating a series that featured Batman, often with another DC superhero – a real challenge for an artist to research and render a different superhero every month. He also drew The Brave and the Bold, Green Arrow and the Spectre.

Aparo was an early adopter of the work-from-home ethos, producing most of his work at his home in Southington, Conn.

He won the Shazam Award from the Academy of Comic Book Arts for his 1972 work on The Demon Within for the House of Mystery series.

He illustrated his last cover in 2004 and died at home on July 19, 2005.

Images: Jim Aparo By MichaelNetzer – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16861406. A Death in the Family uploaded by Jimmy to Flickr, CC by SA 2.0. This story was updated in 2022.

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Images of New England Observing Memorial Day in WWII

New England observed Memorial Day during World War II with special solemnity. For many, the memory of fallen heroes was fresh, raw and intense.

The Roosevelt administration sent photographers into the field to record how Americans honored their war dead. They worked for the Office of War Information, and would go on to lead illustrious careers.

How Ashland, Maine Observed Memorial Day

Rural Aroostook County lost 239 young men in World War II, either missing in action, killed in action or killed in the line of duty.

Many of the young men from tiny Ashland, Maine, in the county were drafted, and so Memorial Day took on a somber significance.

Legionnaires and Boy Scouts

The town, a farming community, had fewer than 1,000 residents, so the ceremonies featured hardly any young men.

John Collier took these photos of the ceremonies in Ashland in 1943 for the Office of War Information. After the war, he became an anthropologist and an early leader in the fields of visual anthropology and applied anthropology.

In Ashland, Collier noticed all boys and young men marched in the Memorial Day parade. Almost none watched from the audience.

The parade about to begin

Below, a Congregational minister offered a prayer for divine guidance through the years of war.

Prayers

Though only a small farming center with a population under 1000, Ashland had a good band with lots of purple trim and gold braid for the Memorial Day ceremony.

Keeping the beat

A bugler sounded Taps during the ceremonies.

Honoring their sacrifice

Gloucester, Mass., on May 31, 1943

Gordon Parks took these photos showing how Gloucester, Mass., observed Memorial Day in 1943. Parks, then 30, was working for the Office of War Information. He would later become well known for his photo essays of the civil rights movement for Life magazine — and for directing the 1971 film Shaft.

He also composed music and wrote fiction and poetry. His best known work is The Learning Tree, an autobiographical novel about a poor young African American growing up in segregated rural Kansas during the late 1920s and early 1930s. He received 20 honorary doctorates before he died in 2006 at the age of 93.

Here he captures one of the speakers at the Gloucester Memorial Day ceremony.

Solemn words

Gloucester, a fishing community, also held memorial services for fishermen lost at sea. Here relatives of fishermen wait their turn to toss flowers into the water.

Waiting their turn.

A Legionnaire played Taps during the Gloucester ceremony.

Again

When the parade ended, the ROTC band took a rest.

Southington, Conn., 1942

These Memorial Day photos of Southington, Conn., were taken by Fenno Jacobs during World War II for the Office of War Information. Jacobs, born in Waltham, Mass., was a rebellious child who didn’t get past the eighth grade. He joined the Merchant Marine, then took up photography. By the time the OWI hired him he had worked for Time, Life and National Geographic.

Jacobs belonged to a team of photographers who spent the month in Southington, Conn., taking pictures of residents at work and at leisure. The photos were compiled into a booklet designed to show friends and enemies in Europe the traditions and values of typical American families. Military planes dropped thousands of copies over Europe during the German occupation.

The photo below shows the parade marching past the Southington Town Hall on Memorial Day in 1942.

The flag at half-staff

Southington had a large number of residents with German, Polish and Italian ancestry. Their immigrant ancestors came to work in the mills during the 19th century.

A nicely decorated bicycle on the left

The Catholic congregation gathered in the St. Thomas cemetery for an outdoor Mass.

Remembering those who have passed

After World War II, Southington became a bedroom community and the population grew to over 42,000 people.

After the parade

Photos courtesy Library of Congress. This story was updated in 2022.

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Flashback Photo: Queen of the May, 1942

Queen of the May, 1942. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Fenno Jacobs took this photograph of a Queen of the May school celebration in 1942 as part of a war propaganda campaign. He was part of a team of photographers who spent the month in Southington, Conn., taking pictures of residents at work and at leisure. The photos were compiled into a booklet designed to show friends and enemies in Europe the traditions and values of typical American families. Thousands of copies were dropped over Europe from military planes during the Nazi occupation.

Jacobs titled the photo ‘Queen of the May’ and noted, ‘Half kids polish, half Italian.’

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Flashback Photo: Nick Grillo and his Thornless Roses

Nick Grillo and his Thornless Roses. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

The Thornless Rose was an age-old dream of floriculturists, one that Nick Grillo achieved even as he realized the American Dream.

Nick Grillo was born in 1888 in Tusa, Messina, Italy. As a boy he longed to come to America, and managed to save enough money for boat passage to emigrate. He started his own florist business in Southington, Conn.

Grillo had arrived as the wave of Italian immigration to Connecticut crested between 1900 and 1916. Italians first came to the state in numbers in the 1870s when a group of about 100 came to New Haven, most to work for a hardware manufacturer. Others worked on the railroad or as truck gardeners. In two years the population doubled and by 1880 there were 500 Italians living in New Haven. By 1907, the hardware factory that brought the first group over employed nearly 3,000 Italian workers, and a rubber plant nearby had about a thousand.

In 1916, there were 60,000 Italians living in the state. By 1938, Connecticut’s 227,000 Italians comprised the state’s largest ethnic group. Today, 19.3 percent of Connecticut — 694,00 people — is of Italian descent, making it the second most Italian-American state in the country next to Rhode Island.

The photo was taken by Fenno Jacobs in May 1942 as part of a government-sponsored photo essay about the Town of Southington. The War Department highlighted the town in a propaganda booklet called Southington, Connecticut —Microcosm of America. Jacobs and other photographers took pictures of residents at work, at leisure and in their homes and churches. The booklet was designed to show friends and enemies in Europe the traditions and values of typical American families. Thousands of copies were dropped over Europe from military planes during the Nazi occupation.

Nick Grillo arrived in Connecticut sometime around World War I. The caption to his photo reads, “Today, after 22 years, he is one of the world’s outstanding floriculturists, developer of the famous Thornless Rose, an age-old dream of his craft.”

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