‘Mary Worth’ Comic Strip Artist Kenneth Ernst Dies

Kenneth Ernst, the artist who took a middle-aged comic strip heroine named Apple Mary and transformed her from an impoverished apple seller into the matriarch of the funny papers, is dead.

Ernst, who began illustrating “Mary Worth” in 1942, was 67 and had trained another artist, Bill Ziegler, to take over the strip when he learned that he had pancreatic cancer.

He died Tuesday at the home of his son, Kenneth Jr., in Salem, Ore.

With Allen Saunders, who did the story lines, Ernst made a penniless victim of the Great Depression into a stout but regal middle-aged woman whose affairs were closely interwoven with the hundreds of characters who populated her world.

Under Saunders and Ernst, Mary Worth, who had begun in 1932 as Apple Mary, a woman reduced by economics to selling apples on street corners, became the conscience, adviser and confessor in a pen-and-ink world. The strip was retitled “Mary Worth’s Family” in 1940, when Saunders first began writing it. The name was later shortened to “Mary Worth,” as Mary gradually became upwardly mobile into the middle class.

More Than 500 Papers

The strip appears in 491 papers in the United States and Canada and dozens more overseas.

On a visit to Los Angeles from his office in Chicago in 1952, Ernst was asked to explain the strip’s popularity. He didn’t answer the question directly but did relate the time an obviously confused woman had written him to ask if she could possibly obtain a letter of introduction to Mary Worth so Ernst’s sagacious protagonist might help her ease life’s burdens.

Saunders retired in 1979 and turned the continuity writing over to his son, John, who on Wednesday recalled his father’s longtime partner as more than a business associate.

“In addition to being a fine artist, Ken was a working partner in every sense. His comments on the plots and his acute sense of propriety were invaluable assets to the production of the feature and helped mold the character of Mary Worth.”

In addition to his son, Kenneth, Ernst is survived by his wife, Jeanette, another son, Michael, and two daughters, Michelle Armstrong and Lauren Sproul.

Michelle Armstrong’s husband is an artist who also helps draw Mary Worth and her changeless friends.