Bob Montana – Italian American Artist
Robert William Montana was born in 1920 in Stockton, California, to Italian American parents Roberta Pandolfini and Ray Montana. Both were in show business: Roberta had been a Ziegfeld girl, and Ray performed banjo on the vaudeville circuit. As a result, Bob Montana traveled extensively as a child. He attended Haverhill High School in Haverhill, Massachusetts and graduated from Manchester High School Central in Manchester, New Hampshire.
While freelancing at True Comics and Fox Comics, Montana created an adventure strip about four teenage boys and tried to sell it without success. Montana started working for MLJ Comics (which would later be known as Archie Comics). He was asked to work up a high school style comic strip story, featuring Archie Andrews. The success of the Archie and friends story in MLJ Comics’ Pep Comics (Dec. 1941) led MLJ to assign Montana to draw the first issue of Archie (Nov. 1942). Montana was soon drawing the Archie comic strip, doing both the daily and Sunday strip, which over the next 35 years ran in over 750 newspapers
According to Jane (Donahue) Murphy, a high school classmate of Montana’s, Archie and his friends were based on people from their hometown and high school. She said Archie Andrews was based on Donahue’s cousin, Richard Heffernan; Veronica Lodge on Agatha Popoff, the daughter of the local football team’s doctor; Jughead Jones on a mischievous teen named “Skinny” Linnehan; while Miss Grundy may have been based on a high school typing and shorthand teacher named Lundstrom; however, Haverhill’s school librarian is also believed to be the model for Grundy.
Montana married Peggy Bertholet and they had four children. He died at age 54 of an apparent heart attack while cross-country skiing near his New Hampshire home.