McCandlish, Edward Gerstell (sold)

Edward Gerstell McCandlish (March 10, 1887 - December 4, 1946) was an American artist, craftsman, toy-maker, and jack-of-all-trades. Born in Piedmont, West Virginia to Upton Beall McCandlish (1848 - 1915) and Margaret Lindsay Landstreet McCandlish (1855 - 1919), not much is known about McCandlish's childhood. He attended Maryland Agricultural College, the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts, and another professional art school in Baltimore. It is said that, early in his life, McCandlish worked as a sailor, lumberjack, and highway laborer. He established himself as a toy-maker in Piedmont and Hancock, West Virginia in the years leading up to World War I. By June 1917, when he was drafted into the 116th Engineers in the U.S. Army, he had moved to Baltimore, Maryland and was working as a painter at a local steel works. McCandlish spent most of his time with the Allied Expeditionary Force (A.E.F.) in France working on camouflage (which was hand-painted at the time) and in painting sets for A.E.F. theatre productions. After returning to the U.S., he began teaching art to wounded and disabled veterans at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C., and was active in the American Legion Veterans' Organization. After a move to Staten Island, New York, McCandlish and his wife Maybelle Bowen (1899 - 1973), whom he married in July 1919, moved to Stonington, Connecticut, where McCandlish established a new toy company, the Character Toy Guild of Stonington. He received copyrights on several of his new toys in June 1920. During the 1920s and 1930s, McCandlish worked as a cartoonist, illustrator, and children's columnist for the Detroit Free Press and the Washington Post, during which time he and his family lived in Northville and Ann Arbor, Michigan. By 1940, the McCandlish family (which now included seven children) had moved to Van Wert, Ohio, and would soon move to Geneva, New York. While in Geneva, in April 1941, McCandlish received a patent for a new roller skate design. By October 1942, McCandlish had elected to forego life as a commercial artist and instead took a job working at one of Curtiss-Wright's aircraft factories in Buffalo, New York. By early 1945, McCandlish had again moved on, after accepting the position of promotion director of the radio station WHEB in Portsmouth New Hampshire, a position he held until August 1945, when he resigned to form a new company, Allied Arts Inc. He is known for two important pictorial maps, the 'Bootlegger's Map of the U.S.' which went through several editions from about 1920 to 1944, and the exceedingly rare 'Ration Map of the U.S.' published in 1944. He died suddenly on December 4, 1946 near North Brookfield, Massachusetts, and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.