'Forgotten' artist sketched his way from Willmar to Disney and Bugs in California

Ralph Heimdahl sketched himself right out of Depression-era Minnesota, using his skillful right hand to illustrate his way from Willmar to Walt Disney's animation department in Burbank, Calif.

After working on cartoon classics like "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," "Fantasia" and "Pinocchio," Heimdahl spent three decades drawing the daily Bugs Bunny comic strip for more than 450 newspapers around the world, from Singapore to Saudi Arabia.

Today Heimdahl is "largely forgotten," said Tom Steman, archivist at St. Cloud State University, where the illustrator studied, graduating in 1930.

But Heimdahl's memory lives on at the school, to which his daughter, California artist Martha Slavin, donated 5,000 of her father's onion-skin paper drawings and even footed the bill for a student to arrange and describe the artwork now preserved in 51 boxes.

"I'm sure my father would be embarrassed but appreciative that his work is being preserved at St. Cloud State, which played such an important role in his life," said Slavin, 76.

Born in 1909, Heimdahl inherited his blond hair and blue eyes from his Norwegian-born father, Peter, who emigrated to the United States around 1900 and worked as a salesman and Kandiyohi County auditor. Ralph, the third of Peter and Clara Heimdahl's seven kids, graduated from Willmar High School before venturing to what was then called St. Cloud State Teachers College.

Heimdahl was "an attractive young man ... the all-American boy," St. Cloud State's longtime dean, John Weisman, recalled in 1985. He coached Heimdahl, who played halfback and studied art at the school from 1928 to 1930.

Graduating in 1930 just as the Great Depression descended, Heimdahl became a school principal in Miltona, Minn., a tiny Douglas County burg north of Alexandria. By 1936, he was teaching at the State School for the Deaf in Faribault.

In 1937, Heimdahl entered a national Disney competition, drawing Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck well enough to get hired and move to California. He met fellow illustrator Esther Belfi Canini, a cel inker in Disney's animation department. They wed in 1938 and would raise three daughters.

Heimdahl was considered an "in-betweener" in the animation world, Slavin explained, illustrating character action for the big screen. He also became an instructor at Disney.

"He was a natural teacher," his wife told the St. Cloud State Chronicle in 1985, crediting that teaching knack to his two years at the teachers college.

A strike at Disney prompted Heimdahl to quit in 1941, moving to a Vermont farm to work on comic strips of his own before taking a job as a mechanical engineer in upstate New York. After returning to California and working briefly as an engineer near Los Angeles, he started drawing again for Western Publishing Co., illustrating comic books. He began drawing the Sunday Bugs Bunny strip in 1947 and took over the daily strip in 1948, which he continued to draw until 1978.

Heimdahl didn't invent Bugs' wise-cracking character, according to his widow — that came out of the Warner Brothers studio creative team. But he adapted Bugs for the daily comic page format. He also illustrated a Yogi Bear comic strip in England and dabbled in filmmaking, winning an award with Martha for a 16-millimeter movie on American family life in 1962.

St. Cloud State gave Heimdahl its Distinguished Alumni Award in 1966 and invited him back for homecoming in 1967. When the parade was canceled due to snow, Heimdahl sat down and cranked out cartoons for friends, "one right after the other," Weisman recalled. Those drawings included one of Bugs in helmet and uniform, tossing a football, for the cover of the school's alumni magazine.

Heimdahl took flying lessons and was preparing for his first solo flight in 1979, but cancer nixed that dream. He died two years later in 1981 at 72.

Steman said about 90% of Heimdahl's massive catalog of artwork in the St. Cloud State archives are so-called underdrawings — rough draft pencil sketches to which he'd later add ink and color after consulting with comic strip writers Jack Taylor and Al Stoffel. St. Cloud State also has a handful of his final ink illustrations, but most of those are at Ohio State University.

St. Cloud State's collection of Heimdahl's sketches are worth about $250,000, Steman estimated. The university "seemed like the natural place for my dad's drawings," Slavin said. "I hope that the catalog will be help students learn how an artist develops ideas."

If you look carefully, she said, her father's personality shines through his artwork despite the limits Warner Brothers placed on its comic characters.

"My dad was a humble, quiet person but with wit and a sense of humor," Slavin said. "He was great with kids and never lost his childlike wonder, and that shows up in his drawings. They make you smile."

Curt Brown's tales about Minnesota's history appear each Sunday. Readers can send him ideas and suggestions at mnhistory@startribune.com. His latest book looks at 1918 Minnesota, when flu, war and fires converged: strib.mn/MN1918.