Celebrity farming back in the waybacks, at the Buster Brown Orchard

The orchard is long gone, and if it was still around and under its original name people would probably vaguely associate it with kids shoes. There's only the house at the former Buster Brown orchard left to show Bridgeport's brush with celebrity and celebrity farming, and how the more things change the more they stay the same.

The orchard was planted about 1909 or 1910 and was named after one of the biggest pop culture phenomenons of the day; Buster Brown was a star in newspapers all over the country.

Back in the day newspapers reported the news all right, but they (along with magazines) were also the equivalent of movies and television and the Web. Along with news they printed short stories and continuing stories and lots of pictures (rotogravures, they were called, because of the process used in making them) and competition was fierce, so editors tried to come up with new and different tricks to attract readers. Editors at the New York World came up with the idea of a comic strip; the first one debuted in 1895.

The artist was Richard Felton Outcault, who was a technical illustrator for Thomas Edison and a magazine illustrator on the side before he got into newspapers. Comic strips were a smash hit, and every newspaper in the country started buying from syndicates and printing their own. Comic strip artists were eagerly sought after, and Outcault was considered one of the best; he moved to the New York Herald, where in 1902 he created a little boy named Buster Brown, his sister Mary Jane (yup, that's where those t-strap shoes get the name) and his dog Tighe, a Boston terrier. Buster may have been named for Buster Keaton, who was a vaudeville star at the time and later became one of the biggest movie stars of the 1920s.

Buster is a direct ancestor of characters like Dennis the Menace and - in a slightly different way - Calvin and Hobbes; Buster is the kid designed to drive his parents crazy. He was based partly on Outcault's own son and partly on a boy who lived in Outcault's neighborhood in Flushing, N.Y. Buster's mama was a fan of the novel Little Lord Fauntleroy; the novel was very popular at the time, and millions of little boys all across the country were subjected to big hats, lace collars and long hair, just like the little boy in the novel. (Actually, maybe Buster's mama deserved everything she got.)

Buster just got into trouble sometimes - he once put syrup in Mama's perfume bottle - but mostly he was the kind of kid who did exactly what his mama told him to do, and did it in a way designed to drive her right over the edge. In one Sunday comic strip he joined the Boy Scouts and his mama was very impressed with their lesson about being respectful to adults, so much so that she hung a big sign inscribed with that principle over his bed. So when an adult burglar woke Buster up in the middle of the night, Buster respectfully led him straight to the family silver. Not exactly what Mama had in mind, as the dog Tighe observed; nobody has nailed it down, but Tighe is probably the first talking animal in a cartoon strip.

Buster and Tighe, Mary Jane and their perpetually harassed Mama were funny (they still are) and Buster was a smash hit. For a while there were two Buster comic strips, one drawn by Outcault when he moved to a rival newspaper, and one drawn by another artist at the New York Herald. Outcault retained the rights to the character; out in the Midwest Buster caught the attention of the Brown Shoe Company.

A Brown Shoe Company executive named John Bush had a brilliant idea; maybe Buster could sell shoes. So the company named its children's shoe line "Buster Brown" and put a picture of Buster and Tighe on the insole. The new Buster Brown line debuted at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis. The company is still in business and still making children's shoes with Buster and Tighe on the insole, although their look has been updated a little. (There are lots of pictures of Buster, but they're all trademarked. They can be found on the Internet, however. Buster Brown Shoe artists drew Tighe, or Buster, or both, with popeyes for a while and that look is vaguely alarming. But Outcault's illustrations and updated versions have normal eyes.)