Who Was Robert Ripley? An artist? An explorer? A collector of the cool and crazy? How about all of the above?RobertL.Ripley was born in Santa Rosa California in 1890. He was an artist and a baseball player from a young age and even tried out for the New York Giants but an injury forced him to end his baseball career. What started as a job as a newspaper sports cartoonist turned into a lifelong pursuit of the weird and wacky.Ripley first worked as a cartoonist drawing pictures to accompany stories and events for newspapers since photography wasn’t a part of newspapers in those days — the technology was too expensive and transferring photos to newspapers was too complicated. SoRobert drew pictures to accompany the articles.