Saturday, November 17, 2012

Mary (1903-1985) & Wallace Stover (1903-1983)

Wallace P. and Mary A. Stover were a husband-and-wife team of commercial artists and illustrators. Wallace Peter Stover was born on January 5, 1903, in Elkhart, Indiana, and graduated from Elkhart High School in 1921. He received a scholarship to the Herron School of Art in Indianapolis and received his diploma in 1925 after four years of study. Oakley E. Richey (later a teacher at Arsenal Technical High School), Mabel Bott (artist and wife of Earl Wayne Bott), and Josephine Hollingsworth were among the other students in attendance at Herron during the early 1920s.

Wallace Stover and Mary Alys Polk were married on August 31, 1929, in Manhattan. She was also an artist and a teacher in the Franklin, Indiana, schools. He was then living on Long Island and working in New York as a commercial artist and designer of costumes.

The 1930 census found the newlyweds living in Queens, New York. Wallace was then working as a magazine illustrator. By the 1940s, the Stovers were working together, illustrating inexpensive children's books and coloring books in a number of popular series, including the Wizard of Oz, Uncle Wiggily, and Raggedy Ann and Andy. They ran their own advertising firm, Mary and Wallace Stover Corp., in New York for forty-five years, retiring in 1971.

Wallace P. Stover died on January 13, 1983, in Princeton, New Jersey, and was buried at Florida Memorial Gardens in Rockledge, Florida. Mary Alys Polk Stover followed him to the grave in 1985. Their headstone is marked with the words "Together Forever."


Revised April 12, 2016; January 5, 2021.
Text copyright 2012, 2021 Terence E. Hanley

5 comments:

  1. I have linked to this article in a post I put up on Uncle Wiggiy, wherever possible I like to contact the people I quote and as a fellow blogspot member I owe you that courtesy.
    Nice work here, I could not find much about the Stovers so this was most informative.
    Yours,
    Paul K Davis

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    1. Hi, Paul,

      Thank you for the attribution. Not everybody does that kind of thing.

      TH

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  2. Ooops! Here is the aforementioned link - https://misterscribbles.blogspot.com/2016/05/uncle-wiggily-longears.html

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  3. They published with the Perks Publishing Co. in Silver Spring, Maryland. Does anyone know anything about that publisher? I think it was directed by Mary Perks. Was this a pseudonym for Mary Stover?

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    1. Hi, Adair,

      I did a search for Mary Perks and Perks Publishing Company and came up almost empty. The only reference I found was to Perks Publishing Company as follows:

      "Book paper, like newsprint, has been stringently rationed, and yet the WPB [presumably the War Production Board] has just granted Perks Publishing Co., on appeal, 385.4 tons to publish a line of 13 10-cent children's books." (Source: "Paper Allotted for Ten-Cent Children [sic] Books" by Chip Boutell, Dayton Daily News, Oct. 1, 1944, p. 21.)

      I can't say whether Mary Perks and Mary Stover were the same person.

      Thanks for writing.

      TH

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