Cyrus LeRoy Baldridge is one of the four men on the Kewanee Authors’ mural now residing on the north side of the Kewanee Public Library. While he only lived in Kewanee a short time, graduating from Kewanee High School in 1907, he left an impact on our hometown before he left for Chicago.
When World War I began, Baldridge traveled through occupied Belgium and France as a war correspondent and illustrator, riding bicycles, horse carts and horses. He then served in the National Guard along the Mexican/American border in 1916 to repulse Pancho Villa and in 1917 he joined the French Army as a stretcher bearer.
When the U.S. entered the war, he transferred to the American Expeditionary Forces, and joined the Stars and Stripes newspaper. He became the chief artist and traveled freely to intimately observe the war, capturing the full range of emotions of soldiers facing death. He was called the greatest illustrator of the War.
Baldridge’s battlefield drawings appeared on many covers of Leslie’s Weekly and Scribners, two of the nation ‘s most well-known magazines. He reached an audience of 530,000 soldiers weekly by the end of the War.
After the war he published a collection of his sketches, “I Was There with the Yanks in France.”
This seven-minute audio-video captures all of the sketches Baldridge included in his book. The book is also available at the Kewanee Public Library.
I’ll be writing more about this man, considered by many as one of the most interesting artists of the first half of the 20th century.
