Dennis Ketcham was born Dennis Lloyd Ketcham in 1941 to famous cartoonist Hank Hank and Alice Ketcham in Carmel, California.
He is the inspiration for the comic strip Dennis Ketcham, created by his father Hank Ketcham [1], Dennis was only 4 years old when he refused to take a nap and somehow messed up his whole room. Hank tried many possible kid names for the character he was drawing in his desktop in his home at Carmel, and translated them into some his rough pencil sketches, but they seem unsuitable for a character of such immense depiction, until his studio door flew open and his then-wife Alice, in utter exasperation, exclaimed, "Your son is a menace!" Thus the "Dennis the Menace" name was used, the "menace" epithet and the image of the tornado stuck. The character of Henry Mitchell even bore a striking resemblance to Ketcham himself, who also became a fixture in the strip.
While Dennis may have been in storybooks, he did not lead a storybook life. As a boy, he had learning disabilities. His mother was an alcoholic, and his father's work schedule left little time for his son. In 1959, shortly after his mother filed for divorce, Dennis was sent to boarding school. A few months later Alice Ketcham died of an accidental drug overdose at the age of 41. Hank Ketcham remarried and moved Dennis to Switzerland. He had such a difficult time in Swiss boarding school that his father sent him to boarding school in America while he and his new wife remained in Europe [2].