Cyrus LeRoy Baldridge

Cyrus Baldridges life was a great adventure. When he was very young, he traveled from city to city while his mother worked as a seamstress and peddler. In Chicago, Charity Eliza Baldridge marched Cyrus to the School of the Art Institute and persuaded an instructor to take her boy on. His drawing of a child in a haystack was pronounced the best in a class of older, more experienced students. Baldridge served as a staff illustrator in the First World War, capturing the swagger of American doughboys who perished on the fields of Belgium and France. In Paris as the war wound down, he met Caroline Singer, a Californian who had served in the Red Cross. Together, they forged a partnership, traveling to China and Japan, across the Middle East and into Africa. Caroline wrote books about their journeys and Cyrus contributed the sketches he had made as they wandered. Baldridge was a top illustrator in New York from the 1920s until 1952, when he and Caroline retired to Santa Fe, whose walled streets reminded them of Peking (modern-day Beijing). Caroline died of Alzheimers in the early 1960s, and Cyrus shot himself a decade later, after contracting cancer.