Amelia Opdyke Jones collection

Amelia Opdyke Jones (1913-1993)², the freelance advertising artist who used the pen-name "Oppy," was the principal designer and creative spirit behind the Transit Authority's Subway Sun poster series after the Second World War. For twenty years, beginning in 1946, Oppy's signature cartoon figures and comic captions appeared throughout New York City's subway and bus systems—a precursor to Etti-cat (who appeared in 1962) and the MTA's "Courtesy Counts" do's and don'ts campaign that begin in late 2014.

Born Amelia Ross Opdyke, a descendant of New York’s Civil War-era mayor George Opdyke, she began drawing at an early age. Often housebound from asthma as a child, she entertained herself by endless sketching. After completing high school in Orange, New Jersey, she studied for two months at the Art Students’ League before entering the New York workforce as a novice commercial artist about 1930. Shortly afterwards she began bringing cartoon spot drawings to Fred G. Cooper, editor at the original Life monthly humor magazine. Cooper recognized Amelia’s talents: he purchased her work and published it in Life during the early 1930s, and he became her mentor as a cartoonist and commercial artist.

“Opdyke,” as she signed her early published work, created a single-panel daily cartoon, The Young Idear, for United Features Syndicate, which ran in newspapers from about 1932 through 1935, and was later included in United titles such as Illustrated Gags and Tip Top Comics.

In 1934, Amelia married William Jones, an insurance man with U.S. Fidelity and Guaranty in New York. After the birth of her first child the following year, she put her career as a commercial artist on hold, and like many professional women of that era, Amelia took on the role of full-time homemaker. When her two children, William, Jr., and Margaritta, were old enough to attend school in the early 1940s, Amelia resumed her cartooning and design work. Major clients included Bell Telephone, American Telephone and Telegraph, and the Health Insurance Plan of New York. One of her biggest clients was Public Service of New Jersey’s power, light, and bus systems, for whom she produced dozens of posters and brochures, including the “Reddy Kilowatt”™ comic strips, some of which featured cartoon renditions of her children. These corporate commissions led to her work on the renewed Subway Sun.

“Sugar Coated Sermons”³

In 1946, the New York Board of Transportation’s chairman Gen. Charles P. Gross approached Fred Cooper to revive The Subway Sun poster series. Cooper was too busy but suggested Amelia Jones for the job. Jones, now signing her work “Oppy,” after her father’s old nickname – and as a way of disguising her gender in a male-dominated field – proved an instant popular success.

During her tenure at the Subway Sun, Oppy collaborated with an “editorial board” headed by William Jerome Daly, secretary of the Board of Transportation, to select poster topics. Her illustration style, with its economy of line and striking letterforms, conveyed everyday infractions of courtesy in an effective way, leading the New York press to call her the “subway’s surrealist” and “the Emily Post of the subways” – whose posters were praised as “gems of subterranean subtlety”.

Commuting to the City two or three days each week, Oppy worked at home and occasionally at Cooper’s West Street company studio, producing designs for the two posters issued each month. Initially, eight thousand copies of each Subway Sun number were printed and posted. By the mid-1950s, poster runs had increased to 12,000 copies, but the number of yearly issues had been reduced to about fifteen. Oppy continued drawing and designing issues of The Subway Sun until she retired in the mid-1960s.

¹ Biographical information adapted from the New York Transit Museum exhibition 50 YEARS OF THE SUBWAY SUN: An Official Guide To Excruciatingly Correct Subway Etiquette. . . And Other Admonitions by Charles L. Sachs, 1998.

² http://www.nytimes.com/1994/01/01/obituaries/amelia-opdyke-jones-artist-80.html, retrieved 12/10/2015

³ Fields, Sidney. New York Daily News, 12/14/1949