World's Largest Dick Tracy Mural
Pawnee, Oklahoma
Chester Gould created and drew the Dick Tracy comic strip. He was born here in 1900, but he didn't create Dick Tracy here. All that he did while he was in Pawnee was to paint advertising signs on barns and names on office doors.
Gould left town in 1919. He didn't start drawing Dick Tracy until 1931, when he lived hundreds of miles away in Woodstock, Illinois (Woodstock has its own Chester Gould/Dick Tracy Museum). Pawnee seemed to have forgotten about Gould, just as Gould had forgotten about Pawnee.
Then, in 1990, five years after Gould had died, this big mural appeared -- a nice recreation of Gould's style by Tulsa artist Ed Melberg. We couldn't figure out why until we remembered that 1990 was the year that the Dick Tracy movie came out.