1920–2009 · Ballplayer, world table-tennis champion, sportscaster
Robert Garnett ‘Buddy’ Blattner won world table-tennis doubles titles in 1936 and 1937 before playing five major-league seasons for the Cardinals, Giants and Phillies, then spent a quarter-century in the broadcast booth — calling Game of the Week alongside Dizzy Dean and later doing the Angels and the Royals. He is not remembered as a comedy writer, which is part of why this credit evaporated: when Collier’s reprinted the cartoon in February 1948, it noted that the gag had been sold to the magazine by Blattner, then a New York Giants infielder, and farmed out to the cartoonist. The punchline outlived the credit by about eighty years.