Graffiti: Cornbread loves Cynthia

In 1968 Darryl McCray, AKA Cornbread
set in motion what was surely one of the more determined wooing projects of the latter 20th century. He stole a look at her roster and arrived to all her classes before she did, writing Cornbread loves Cynthia on her desk. He also wrote it all down the block where she lived, and all along the bus route she took to school.
- Haegele Katie, No Rooftop Was Safe, Philadelphia Weekly Online, Copyright ©2007 Review Publishing 25 Nov 2007

Cynthia’s father eventually moved her to another school and the relationship ended, so Darryl shortened the tag to simply
Cornbread.

Writing it all over Philadelphia became an obsession for him. His name became part of the local urban landscape, and the first example of a bombing run.

Where previous tags had been extremely limited in geographic distribution because of gang rivalries, cornbread enjoyed a greater freedom of movement due to associations he had made while incarcerated as a juvenile.

Basically, he knew enough people in the various neighborhoods to allow him to roam the whole city. As his notoriety increased, so did his freedom of movement.

Cornbread’s Philadelphia fame grew to the point where when one of his friends, Cornelius aka Corn was murdered, the local papers ran a story that the infamous vandal was dead.

This greatly exaggerated report of Cornbread’s death led him to engage in a series of his most notable stunts.

When the Jackson 5 were in Philadelphia, he managed to tag their airplane by infiltrating a crowd of autograph seekers. The tag was still on the aircraft when it landed back in California.

He tagged the 30th floor of a skyscraper that hadn’t yet been completed, and he tagged both flanks of an elephant at the Philadelphia zoo.

As if that were not enough, he had a friend stage a fake crime so that he could tag all of the police, fire, and ambulance vehicles that responded.

The audacity of his exploits led a Hollywood film company to track him down to offer him a movie deal, but he wasn’t adept at working with production people, and the deal fell through.  A movie titled Cornbread, Earl, and Me was made in 1975, but it was significantly different from the project that was originally pitched to Daryl.

Despite this setback, the general notoriety Daryl enjoyed as Cornbread spawned a seemingly infinite number of imitators, and the phenomenon was spread to New York City.