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Shor e l i n e S
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2014 Vol :1
No one could confuse the Coosa River with the high seas,
but for several decades the meandering Alabama waterway
served as the playground for Popeye, the famed Sailor Man of
cartoon and comic fame.
The Coosa, home to a half-dozen Alabama Power lakes,
never made an appearance in the madcap stories that have
entertained readers and viewers almost continuously since 1929.
But Tom Sims, who wrote many of the spinach-loving sailor's
early adventures, said it was always on his mind. The cartoonist's
father had once captained a Coosa River steamboat named
Leota, plying the waters between Rome, Ga., and Gadsden.
"Fantastic as Popeye is, the whole story is based on facts,"
Sims is quoted in the 1944 book "The Coosa River Valley"
by Hughes Reynolds. "As a boy I was raised on the Coosa
River. When I began writing the script for Popeye I put
my characters back on the old 'Leota' that I knew as a boy,
transformed it into a ship and made the Coosa River into a
salty sea."
Popeye's unlikely Alabama connection offers a glimpse of
long-forgotten days when steamers traveled Alabama rivers,
Left: A Sunday comic strip of Popeye written by Tom Sims in 1950.
SIMS ADMITTED TO BEING A DAYDREAMER, AND KEPT A
DOG NAMED POPEYE, ALONG WITH A PET CROW, MULE AND CAT. HE EVEN
GREW SPINACH, THE SAILOR'S SECRET SOURCE FOR STRENGTH.
