My brilliant buddy, Randy Enos remembers working for The New York Times, see Randy’s archive of editorial cartoons, email Randy Enos –Daryl
I started doing illustrations for The New York Times around 1963 and continued on until 2016. In the late 70’s and early 80’s, I had to quit my part time teaching at Parsons because the Times would go so far as to call me there and ask me to come by before going home. It got so crazy I had to just stay home and freelance instead of trying to teach at the same time.
Working for the Times was different than working for any of my other clients because at the Times there was a “bull pen” opposite the art directors’ offices where 4 or 5 free-lance illustrators sat and worked at drawing boards every day. There was Robert Zimmerman, Randy Jones, Tom Bloom, Robert Neubecker, David Suter and others who would come in and hang out and eat lunch in the Times’ cafeteria. They might be delivering a job and then just hang around and likely pick up another job while there because it was so convenient for the A.D.s to just walk across and get a quick spot drawing. I, myself, did not do any illustrations there (well, only once, I think) because I was working in my linocut style and it was inconvenient for me to do my work other than at home, but it was fun to talk shop with the boys (I don’t remember any women there except Tom Bloom’s pregnant wife) and we had good times all sitting together in the cafeteria.
I remember a few notable illustrations I did for The Gray Lady, the nickname of the Times, among the many hundreds I did in those days. One was a ¾ page illo for the front page of the Wednesday Living Section, which was a section I often worked for under art directors Jerelle Kraus and later Nancy Kent. The subject simply was chicken sandwiches. The author had gone around to various famous high-scale chefs and asked them how they would make the humble chicken sandwich. The article went on to talk about inexpensive chicken as a food in general. So, I decided to create (in the large space I was given), the grandest picture of a chicken that the world had ever seen. I had overnight to do it. I rushed home and started working. I worked all night long without any sleep lino-cutting an intricate, highly decorative, complex vision of a big eye-catching chicken saying, in a tiny word balloon, “cheap.” By morning I had printed it out but felt that I still had time on the train to embellish further with a rapidograph pen, which I did in the hour-long trip to Grand Central Station. Jerelle was very happy with it and wondered what I could possibly do if I actually had a lot of time to do an illustration like this so she decided to give me an advanced assignment to do a Halloween front page a year in advance. I worked on a large apple tree, Halloween revelers, cider, trick or treaters and the like, in as much detail as I could for the whole year amidst all my other jobs. I lovingly drew every detail of the bark and every twig and leaf on that tree and every li’l kid in costume until it filled almost the entire front page of The Living Section. To tell you the truth, though, the chicken was better.
Another time, I was on vacation in California and Jerelle thought it would be cute to give me an assignment while I was out there. Through some fantastic Sherlock Holmes sleuthing she acquired my mother-in-law’s phone number and tracked down my number out there and found me in Los Angeles. I thought it was such a funny, perverse feat of art directorship that I actually accepted the job and had to go out and buy some lino cutters, lino block and printing ink and roller to do it.
It was so much fun to work for Jerelle. She really fought for the illustrators, constantly doing battle with the wordsmiths in the struggle for space on the pages. Later, she was on the Op-Ed and would get people like Folon and Andy Warhol to do pictures for her. She spoke about 6 languages and she seemed to know everybody –even Richard Nixon.
Jerelle asked me once to do a Santa Claus. It had to be a Danish Santa Claus… AND… it was to be in a long vertical space. So, I drew a tall skinny European-style Santa whose outfit was replete with intricate detail featuring symbols of the Danish Christmas. At the last minute, before going to press, she lost that space in the paper and ended up with a smaller, more conventional almost squarish shape for the art. No time for me to re-do it. She skillfully cut the top part of my picture and joined it to the bottom part (eliminating the whole central area). Because she was an artist herself, she was able to make it work. I liked it better than what I had done.
I had worked with Nancy Kent at Connecticut Magazine and then she went to the Times and I worked with her for many years until she retired. She worked the Living Section for a long time and was then given the special magazines to do. Those were great because I sometimes got to do covers along with interesting inside stuff for subjects like Travel, Health, Christmas, etc..
I worked on the Book Review section with Steve Heller and got to do covers there too. When Steve came to the Times, he had come from Screw Magazine. At Screw, he had called me one day (I didn’t know him yet) and said, “Will you do a cover for me for $100?” Then he named the important artists like Ed Sorel who had done $100 covers for him so I said “Yes.” He loved my cover and asked for a second one. Then he went to the Times to the Op-Ed page. When I found him there, I said, “How do you like working for The New York Times?” To which he replied, “It’s just like working for Screw!”
In 1978, the Times workers went on strike. They were out for quite a while. No New York Times! Some guys from the Lampoon plus the author Jerzy Kosinski, Carl Bernstein and his wife, Nora Ephron and George Plimpton and other notables decided to try a parody of the Times and have it printed up to look exactly like the Times. They even got some of the actual pressmen from the Times to lay it out and compose it. The famous writers all wrote parts of it and a small number of artists like myself were asked to join the fun. Everybody thought we’d be sued so the contributors were allowed anonymity. I decided to take a chance and use my real name in doing a parody of a Hirschfeld cartoon and another parody of a typical “vague and incomprehensible” op-ed cartoon. In the Hirschfeld, I decided to draw “Nina” and hide the name “Hirschfeld” in the picture the way he used to hide his daughter’s name, Nina in his caricatures. I later found out that Hirschfeld saw my parody and said, “Very interesting”.
The parody of the Gray Lady was hilarious. There were takes on Bloomingdale ads, ridiculous TV listings, ads for movies, the “Living” section became the “Having” section and gave tips on furnishing your loft with old newsstands. The front page featured two main stories. The first was New York blaming overweight marathon runners for destroying and collapsing the Queensboro bridge complete with a photo of the bridge collapsing. The other major story was the death of the new Pope. At that time, we had a new Pope taking office after the incumbent Pope died and shortly thereafter the new Pope died, so, on the front page we had “ Pope Dies Yet Again” showing a THIRD Pope (a picture of Lampoon editor Tony Hendra) who had the shortest reign ever… 19 minutes.
We didn’t get sued and we had a big party for all contributors at George Plimpton’s townhouse on the upper east side.
As I sat reading my copy of Not The New York Times on the train out of Westport one day while the strike was still on, an excited commuter leaned over the back of my seat and started shouting, “The New York Times is back?” I said, “No, this is Not The New York Times”. He said, “But, that’s The New York Times!!” Finally, I carefully pointed to each word on the masthead, Not… The… New… York… Times”! He slunk back in his seat utterly confused and dejected.
As of late, the art in the Times (on Sundays especially), often consists of big, splashy nonsense. Even Ralph Nader wrote a letter to them condemning the waste of space on frivolous and meaningless art that cheats the reader of valuable news items that could occupy the wasted space.
And now, most recently we see that the Gray Lady has dispensed with all editorial cartoons in her foreign editions. The once glorious art-laden Lady is no more.
The Gray Lady has gotten a lot grayer now.
See Randy’s archive of editorial cartoons, email Randy Enos
Read many more of Randy’s cartooning memories:
Man’s Achievements in an Ever Expanding Universe
The Smallest Cartoon Characters in the World
Brought to You in Living Black and White
Art School Days in the Whorehouse
The Card Trick that Caused a Divorce
8th Grade and Harold von Schmidt
The Funniest Man I’ve Ever Known
Read “I’m Your Bunny, Wanda –Part One”
Read “I’m Your Bunny, Wanda –Part Two”
Famous Artists Visit the Famous Artists School
Randy and the National Lampoon
The 
CBS had just created a break-through technology they called VPA (Vote Profile Analysis) which would hopefully predict the outcome of elections, shortly after voting had begun, with supposedly, a high degree of accuracy. It was top secret. They were going to reveal it when the time was right and the job I had been assigned was to tease the public and build up curiosity until then. We would throw out the letters V P A to the viewers and make everybody wonder what the hell it meant in ten second bits between programs. We also popped the words “Vote Profile Analysis” in small letters in the last few seconds at the bottom of the screen.
Every month Max’s two front windows would feature the work of one of the artist/customer’s work. I can’t say it was all fun and games … yes, I can … it WAS all fun and games. One day 
When you were born and raised in New Bedford, Massachusetts, as I was, you grow up in an atmosphere of whaling history. At one time back in the late 1840’s, New Bedford was the richest city in the world. That’s right –not the country but, the world! It all came from a Quaker business, the collection of whale oil. The oil generated by the New Bedford (and earlier the Nantucket) fleets of whaling ships supplied the street lights of the world, the lamps of Italy’s opera houses, buggy whips, canes, perfume enhancers, candles and hundreds and hundreds of other products. The oil from the Sperm whale is the finest machine oil that has ever appeared on this planet.
So, when you’re a kid in New Bedford and you go to the library or you accompany your parent to the bank or you go to a municipal building or go to school, you see all around you, paintings of the whale chase. Whales heeled over snapping whaleboats in their mighty jaws, hapless seamen falling through the air, mighty ships plowing through rampaging seas. Out in front of the New Bedford Public Library is the symbol of New Bedford, a sculpture of a strong whale man in the prow of a whaleboat, with his sharp harpoon in hand, ready to dart it. Now, on the other side of the library, stands a statue of a black harpoon maker named Lewis Temple. There are no existing pictures of Temple so the sculptor used a picture of his son as the model. This man invented a harpoon that revolutionized the whaling industry because it was designed in such a way that once thrust into a whale’s hide it stuck and didn’t pull out which was the problem with the harpoons that preceded it. It’s called the “Temple Toggle.” I own two 1800’s examples of this iron.
As the years went on, I started thinking about my childhood and heritage and I began reading some whaling books. It was startling to me because I found such a connection to it. I was reading books that constantly mentioned New Bedford and mentioned the whalecraft shops that I realized were right in the neighborhood that I had grown up in. In the later days of whaling, the American-Portuguese had, pretty much taken over the business. The captains had Portuguese names that I was familiar with. I started to discover a history that I really never knew existed wherein the whaling industry, playing a big part in the Revolutionary War (that tea-party adventure in Boston was on a whaleship), the Civil War, the Gold Rush and more. History teachers tell me that they too have been unaware of this rich history.
In my extensive readings on whaling lore, I discovered a whale named “Mocha Dick.” He was a white whale who rampaged through the Pacific in the 1800’s eating whaleboats and whale men seemingly seeking vengeance on the enemies of his brethren. He was based around Mocha Island off the southern coast of Chile. Mocha is pronounced with a “cha” sound rather than a “ka” sound because it’s Spanish (but try to tell that to the rest of the folks out there who study whaling lore). All the whale men of the era knew of Mocha, including Melville who later used a version of his name for his great Moby Dick.
An art director friend from The Wall Street Journal, Dan Smith asked if I’d like to do a book with him in his newly formed “Strike Three Press.” Dan loves books and he even likes to “make” books –I mean he binds them, hand stitches them etc. He asked me what I would like to do a book about and I quickly said “Mocha Dick”.
Later, around 2013, the award winning designer, Rita Marshall was at my house and saw a big picture of Mocha Dick that I had made. Months later she told me that she couldn’t get that picture out of her head and also said that they had a manuscript from a writer named Brian Heinz on Mocha Dick. And, so, another Mocha Dick book was crafted for her company Creative Editions. It’s a rather sophisticated children’s book. Thanks to some great starred revues from places like Kirkus and some mentions on important websites like Brainpickings.org and the Atlantic Magazine’s, we got so many advanced purchases on Amazon that we sold out the first edition two weeks before the book was even released. I was blessed to have a great writer on board that trip around.