American newspaper humorist · syndicated NEA columnist of the 1920s
Tom Sims wrote “Tom Sims Says,” a column of miscellaneous jokes and observations distributed to American newspapers in the 1920s by the Newspaper Enterprise Association — the kind of daily filler that quietly supplied the language with a great many of its proverbs. Quote Investigator gives no biography of him, but the NEA humorist of that name is almost certainly the Tom Sims whom comics reference works date 1896–1972 and credit as the writer who took over the Thimble Theatre (Popeye) strip after E. C. Segar’s death in 1938. Either way, the line belongs to a working columnist filing copy by the inch, not to the famous humorist it drifted onto forty-five years later.