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Catching Up with Jerry Dowling, Sports Cartoonist

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D. D. Degg Published: September 20, 2025 1 minute 0 comments

[Jerry] Dowling was The Enquirer’s sports cartoonist from 1967 to 1995, covering the best period of Cincinnati sports. The Reds of the 1970s, the Bengal’s beginnings and two Super Bowls, the rise and fall of Pete Rose.

At 85 he’s still drawing. I noticed on his drawing table unfinished caricatures of Courtis Fuller and the late Pat Crowley, a commission for The Greater Cincinnati Society of Professional Journalists’ Cincinnati Journalism Hall of Fame. Dowling was inducted in 2017.

Jeff Suess for The Cincinnati Enquirer interviews cartoonist Jerry Dowling. (Or here.)

Jim Schottelkotte in sports, knowing Dowling was Canadian, asked him to do a cartoon on hockey penalties, which went over well. So Dowling asked if he could do contribute a sports cartoon every now and then.

“I kind of forced my way into it, and wound up doing two or three sports cartoons every week,” Dowling said.

The article goes beyond Jerry’s sports cartoons and covers his caricatures for the paper. For example his full figure drawing of Elvis which appeared on the morning of Presley’s Cincinnati concert. Presley held up the page and commented on it during the concert.

Also noted is Jerry Dowling’s comic strip for The Enquirer.

In 1978 Dowling was asked to create a local comic strip in addition to his daily cartoons. Dowling came up with “F. Stop Fitzgerald,” about an Enquirer photographer. In the newspaper’s comic poll 14 months later, Dowling’s strip came in dead last. And that was that.

F. Stop Fitzgerald ran, daily only, from September 18, 1978 to November 3, 1979. Below is the first week.

And the last F. Stop Fitzgerald:

Later, from September 12, 1982 to May 8, 1994, Jerry drew a Sunday Pen-Pourri panel for The Enquirer, this was strictly sports oriented. The rat dingbat carried over from F. Stop Fitgerald to Pen-Pourri.

The job changed in the 1990s, he said. The Enquirer had Jim Borgman, fresh off a Pulitzer Prize. They said they didn’t need two cartoonists.