Victory Park
1201 N. Pershing Ave.
Stockton, CA  95203
(209) 940-6300   
info@hagginmuseum.org

While the Leyendecker exhibition celebrates the illustrator who captured the attention of the nation, a mini-display will celebrate Stockton’s own illustrator: Ralph O. Yardley.

Yardley grew up in Stockton in the late 1800s before he moved to San Francisco and contributed editorial cartoons, comic strips and full-color illustrations for the San Francisco Chronicle and other newspapers.

Like Leyendecker, who was his contemporary, Yardley moved to New York City for his early professional career, where he, too, worked as a commercial illustrator and created cover art for several national periodicals.

He returned to his hometown in 1922 and began a 30-year tenure as the staff artist for the Stockton Record, where he is best known for the weekly
“Do You Remember?” series. The Haggin archives hold more than 1,100 of these nostalgic and often whimsical pen-and-ink cartoons, which re-ran on a daily basis in the late 1960s.