Winsor McCay, while not a name commonly heard nowadays, was one of the pioneers in cartoon animation. Probably his best known feature was Gertie the Dinosaur (1914), although another one of his characters was ‘Little Nemo,’ a name which should ring a bell around these parts.
Anyway. . . his assistant was one John A. Fitzsimmons, who was probably the only living person who had known and worked with McCay, featured in a 1976 documentary short ‘Remembering Winsor McCay’ which aired recently on TCM. Info on Fitzsimmons is exceedingly scarce, although this findagrave page might be, but the dates don’t exactly jibe with filmmaker John Canemaker’s recollection that Fitzsimmons was 84 at the time.
Any info???
Well, I would like to thank everyone who contributed to this info on this forgotten animation pioneer, but a) the aforementioned filmmaker himself answered the question, and b) with the limited information I had at the time, I had the incorrect findagrave entry, but this is the correct one. (Not that anyone else seems to be curious!) 
I love that you came back and updated us regardless. Well done.
Winsor McCay deserves to be much better known than he is. As a newspaper cartoonist he created numerous strips – most notably Little Nemo i n Slumberland, which was in full color and took up the en tire sheet of the newspaper with its fantastic visions and fin de siecle architecture. But he also did the darker, black and white strip Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend and a Pilgrim’s Progress, among others. He went around doing “chalk talks”, where he repeatedly drew, erased, redrew, erased, etc. drawings on a chalkboard, practically animating in real time. So it wasn’t a big stretch for him to move on to animated drawings.
McCay at first didn’t come up with the idea of animation “cels”, where you put a transparent cellulose sheet over a fixed background, so he drew everything in the shot – background and all – over and over for every single frame. Drawing the background was the main job of Fitzsimmons. It was a simplified background, and it could be traced through the thin paper, but it was still a monumental task. They recycled several drawings when they could. But you never quite trace the background perfectly, so the lines “vibrated” with a sort of crackling life. (The TV animated series Dr. Katz copied this effect on purpose) McKay’s first animated cartoon was of Little Nemo and other characters from that strip in 1911 – and the film was hand-colored. McKay must have had manque figures made to help him in visualizing, because the characters have a wonderful sense of three dimensionality to them. And McCay mastered the discipline of “squash and stretch” right from the start. His very first extant cartoons were excellent.
There’s an episode of Walt Disney’s TV series I highly recommend – The Story of the Animated Drawing, which gives a highly detailed history of cartoons, which go back surprisingly far back, well before McKay, but most of this was highly obscure at the time. One of the features of the show is an animator (Dick Huemer, I think) recreating McKay’s vaudeville act with Gertie, which he had seen as a child. (There was a 2018 re-creation of it, as well, but I wonder if the ones doing that knew about Huemer’s re-creation).
Here’s the episode. The Gertie reconstruction starts about 17 minutes in
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sR3IZjPIfPw
You’d think I would have at least noticed this thread back in 2019 but I missed it.
That said, I wouldn’t have been able to help you with any information about John Fitzsimmons.
McCay must’ve had a hell of an arm. It would be one thing if he drew comparative doodles like Peanuts or BC that didn’t require any kind of precision. But this guy obsessively added intricate details that few even noticed. Newspaper comics, and editorials, and the afore mentioned animations. For decades. I believe he had an alien cyber arm of some kind. It’s the only logical explanation.
