Tess Trueheart Talks About Being Married To Dick Tracy And Her Role In County Seal Campaign

September 23rd, 2008 at 7:30 pm · DrHGuy · Local · No Comments

Tess Trueheart On Cover Of Bride

Tess Trueheart Tells All In Magazine Interview

“All” includes the ups and downs of of her relationship with her well-known mate, Dick Tracy, heroic detective and current candidate for McHenry County Seal.

When Dick Tracy readers were first introduced to Tess, Tracy and Tess had arrived at the Trueheart home to announce their engagement. Instead, they find a gang led by Big Boy (modeled on Al Capone) robbing her father, Emil. Emil is killed and Tess kidnapped, leading Tracy to join the police, rescue Tess, and bring the villains to justice.

After that traumatic episode, Tracy’s workaholic ways not only delayed the wedding but led Tess, who served as a WAC in the 1940s and then opened her own photography studio, to break off the engagement and marry Edward Nuremoh, a baseball player (”Nuremoh” is “Homerun” spelled backward). It turns out that Nuremoh was planning to marry and then divorce her to grab rights to her inheritance. It was Dick Tracy, of course, who brought Nuremoh to justice.

Wedding of Tess Trueheart and Dick Tracy A Surprise Despite 18 Year Courtship

Dick Tracy Loves Tess Trueheart

Although the wedding of Tess and Tracy takes place nearly two decades after their engagement, family, friends, and readers are taken by surprise, as this excerpt from Daryl Cagle’s Blog - Big Events makes clear:

The Saturday Evening Post, for one, was cold-cocked. Shortly before Christmas 1949, the Post profiled Chester Gould and made a large point of answering the perennial question–When is Dick Tracy ever going to marry that nice Tess Trueheart girl?–with assurances that Tracy had no such plans at the moment. Barely days later, goofily beaming Tracy and radiant Tess announced to the world that they had officially tied the knot, after 18 years of notably chaste courtship. Furiously assailed by the foolish-looking Post, Gould publicly pleaded that the entirely unexpected nuptials had surprised him as much as they had anyone else; he’d had absolutely no idea, he insisted, that Tracy and Tess were talking wedding. Considering his day-by-day plotting habits, this was probably true. “Tracy never tells me anything,” Gould sighed.

The nuptials took place Christmas Eve 1949.

Marital Woes

As Tess reports, the wedding did not end the couple’s conflicts, most of which had to do with Tracy’s dedication to his job keeping him away from home. Matters came to a head in February 1994. A week before Valentine’s Day, Tess Trueheart served Tracy with divorce papers.

The New York Times reported on this turn of events in Dick Tracy Takes It on Chin: Wife Splits,¹ excerpts of which follow:

First it was Donald and Ivana. Then Loni and Burt. Now Dick and Tess.

Yes, comic strip fans, it is true. After 45 years of marriage, Dick Tracy and his wife, the former Tess Trueheart, are splitting up. Tribune Media Services, which distributes the strip, has announced that Tess will hit her heroic husband with divorce papers on Feb. 7.

Apparently, Tess, like so many other police spouses, is fed up with Dick’s long hours and lack of consideration. In recent strips, Dick spent the evening saving a luscious-looking fashion designer from attack; when he came home, after midnight, Tess had left him a note informing him that his dinner was in the freezer.

Michael Kilian, a reporter for The Chicago Tribune who has been writing the comic strip for the last year and a half, said he was introducing marital discord into the comic “to bring Dick Tracy into contemporary times.” In this, he and the artist who works with him, Dick Locher, are following other long-running comic strips that in recent years have taken up issues like sexual harassment and job security. A True Dilemma

Dick will be served divorce papers while he is attending the Federal Bureau of Investigation training school in Virginia, Mr. Kilian said. Just as he is trying to rush home to talk to Tess, the United States Capitol will be attacked by a gang of unemployed-stockbrokers-turned-terrorists, led by the evil Pig E. Bank.

“Dick will be torn between saving the nation’s Capitol or going back to Tess,” Mr. Kilian said. “And I’m not going to tell you the end of the story.”

Rest assured, though, that Tess will not be forgotten. “She is still the love of his life,” Mr. Kilian said.

Junior Tracy

…The Tracys have two children of their own, Bonnie Braids and Joe, and an adopted son, Junior.

Since news of Dick’s breakup began filtering out on Monday, Mr. Kilian said he had been overwhelmed by calls from reporters. “The phrase I keep hearing,” he said, “is, ‘How could you do it?’ ” (A similar question was posed to the writers of “Superman” comics when they announced in November 1992 that they would kill Superman. He was later brought back to life somehow or other.)

Happily, the couple reconciled, in part for the sake of their children, and have been blissfully joined ever since. The produced another child, Joe Flintheart Tracy, in 1979.