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The Bohemian Bohemian

My cartoonist buddy, Randy Enos remembers his talented mother-in-law.

She would just start in on whatever she was calling about. She was fond of calling me from parties with questions. I’d be in bed and the phone would ring with “What’s the capital of  Ecuador?” It’s not that she thought I was particularly smart, but she knew I owned a set of encyclopedias.

Email Randy Enos
Visit Randy’s archive –Daryl


Her name was Tecla Maria Marguarita Kolodziej. She was born in 1913 of Polish and Bohemian/Gypsy parents. When she was 15 years old, she was sent to live in a Catholic girls’ boarding school. She read everything she could lay her hands on. She was a bit of a loner.

She married Jim Walker (English, Irish, Dutch descent). As a young man, Jim was a champion amateur boxer whose trademark move was to rush out at the bell of round one and fell his opponent  with one solitary blow. He never lost a fight… not particularly popular with fight fans who perhaps wanted to see a little more action. During World War 2, he was in the last Texas Cavalry troupe which was formed into a tank destroyer unit while Tecla worked as an airplane designer for North American Aviation. Later on she became an assistant to a medical illustrator. She had her own cadaver.

They had one child, Leann ,who I married in 1956. If they had had any other children, I would have married them too.

After the war, Jim worked for the Texas Pacific Railroad as a dispatcher. Tecla had always wanted to be an artist and when she made her first oil painting (shown here in article) which won the first prize at a Dallas Museum of Fine Arts show, an art teacher at the convent told her that someday she should study with Jerry Farsworth. So, she finally made the journey from Texas to Cape Cod to study with the well known painter/teacher. She appeared with their outdoor painting class that summer on the cover of Life Magazine.

When Tecla died in 1993 of cancer (Jim had already passed on), we put her very first oil painting, a self portrait, in the newspaper instead of a photo.

While there on the Cape, she made some friends who invited her to visit them in Westport Connecticut. There she found a community of artists, illustrators, cartoonists, actors and writers. She fell in love with Westport and told Jim all about it. He quit his job, packed up a few belongings, left his car parked on the street in Dallas and took the train with his little daughter across the country to start a new life.

They had decided that since there were so many artists in Westport plus the fact that Jim had been successfully framing Tecla’s paintings, that a Walker Frame Shop might be in the offing. And so it came to be and for many years, it was the only frame shop in town and a fixture on downtown’s Main Street.

By the time I came into the picture, Leann’s parents knew all the famous illustrators, writers and cartoonists in town. Jim used to tell me about his friendship with Orphan Annie’s creator, Harold Gray.

Aside from being a framer and restorer (Tecla was very knowledgeable about old master techniques), she was an outstanding cook who would never let anybody in the kitchen while she was creating her culinary delights. We even got some off-beat appetizers like chocolate covered ants and fried grasshoppers. I couldn’t resist getting her dander up sometimes by proclaiming that, “Food is just fuel!” Regardless, she loved me and I, her.  She introduced me to my favorite childhood illustrator, the little known, Martin Burniston who was one of her best friends and she had kick-started my career by hooking me up with Popeye’s Bud Sagendorf, another of her close friends, who hired me into the Famous Artists  Cartoon Course thus starting me on the road to cartoonery.

Tecla did lots of self portraits, portraits of friends and portraits of me. I’ve included one of myself here that was painted without my knowledge as she sat on the floor outside my garret studio while I was trying to create a comic strip.

Tecla did lots of self portraits, portraits of friends and portraits of me. I’ve included one of myself here that was painted without my knowledge as she sat on the floor outside my garret studio while I was trying to create a comic strip. At this point in our life we all lived together in a big house. Later we had our own houses but only about a hundred yards apart on the same street. Our kids, on the way home from school, would go through her back yard into her back door, past the big bowl of candy and out the front door and down the street a little ways to our house.

Tecla knew that I kept long hours at the drawing board in those days and often in the middle of the day, I’d get a call. When I answered the phone, all I would hear was one word “STRETCH”! So, now I keep a photo of her in my studio with a word balloon saying “stretch”.

She would never say “hello” when you answered her calls. She would just start in on whatever she was calling about. She was fond of calling me from parties with questions. I’d be in bed and the phone would ring with “What’s the capital of  Ecuador?” It’s not that she thought I was particularly smart, but she knew I owned a set of encyclopedias.

When Tecla died in 1993 of cancer (Jim had already passed on), we put her very first oil painting, a self portrait (shown in this article), in the newspaper instead of a photo.

Tecla only painted for herself with only a very occasional commission like the painting of Simone Bolivar’s mistress Manuella Saenz for a book cover… and the fake Gainsborough she did. She had an opera singer  friend who owned a Gainsborough and had fallen into hard times… she had to sell it. She loved it so much and had gotten so used to living with it that she had Tecla paint an exact copy of it for her. Tecla spent weeks and weeks on the woman’s screened- in porch, meticulously imitating the painting to perfection. She had to paint it at the woman’s house because, of course, she couldn’t let anything that valuable off her premises until the sale.

Tecla only painted for herself with only a very occasional commission like the painting of Simone Bolivar’s mistress Manuella Saenz for a book cover …

Hardly any of the customers who brought their homely little watercolors into Tecla’s frame shop knew of her extraordinary talent in painting. She never entered shows or exhibited anywhere. She was very modest and didn’t discuss her own work with anyone outside of the family.

After she died, we decided that the citizens of Westport should see her work (she would have hated this). Leann and I put up a show of a ton of paintings, drawings, sketches and sculpture in the hallways and corridors of the town hall. The show was up for months and months and hundreds of locals stood agog with their jaws dropped open while they looked at these paintings by a woman they thought they knew.

The one story about Tecla that sticks in the mind was the time that we (Leann and I, our two sons and their girlfriends) were all skinny-dipping in a small river one evening. A police car pulled up near our vehicles up on the road at the top of the river bank. A young cop,  large flashlight in hand, descended the bank coming toward us. No one was supposed to swim here… we knew that. He pointed his lamp at Tecla who was emerging from the water stark naked. He said, “Y’know you all have to take off!”

“TAKE OFF WHAT?” Tecla raised her hands in a shrug.

He just laughed and got back in his car and drove off.


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Read many more of Randy’s cartooning memories:

Take it Off … Take it ALL Off!

I Eat Standing Up

The Funniest Cartoon I’ve Ever Seen

The Beatles had a Few Good Tunes

Andy Warhol Meets King Kong

Jacques and the Cowboy

The Gray Lady (The New York Times)

Hardly any of the customers who brought their homely little watercolors into Tecla’s frame shop knew of her extraordinary talent in painting. She never entered shows or exhibited anywhere. She was very modest and didn’t discuss her own work with anyone outside of the family.

The BIG Eye

Historic Max’s

The Real Moby Dick

The Norman Conquests

Man’s Achievements in an Ever Expanding Universe

How to Murder Your Wife

I Yam What I Yam

The Smallest Cartoon Characters in the World

Chicken Gutz

Brought to You in Living Black and White

The Hooker and the Rabbit

Art School Days in the Whorehouse

The Card Trick that Caused a Divorce

The Mysterious Mr. Quist

Monty Python Comes to Town

Riding the Rails

The Pyramid of Success

The Day I Chased the Bus

The Other Ol’ Blue Eyes

8th Grade and Harold von Schmidt

Rembrandt of the Skies

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 Remembers Tomi Ungerer

Randy’s Overnight Parade

The Bullpen

Famous Artists Schools

Dik Browne: Hot Golfer

Randy and the National Lampoon

Randy’s Only Great Idea

A Brief Visit to Outer Space

Enos, Love and Westport

Randy Remembers the NCS


 

Categories
Blog Newsletter Syndicate

I Yam What I Yam

My buddy, Randy Enos, shares his memories of Popeye below. For me, Popeye was about Tom Hattan who inspired me to draw cartoons since I was about three years old, watching The Popeye Show on channel 5 in Los Angeles. I was delighted to meet and talk to Tom many times in later years through the National Cartoonists Society. Tom passed away only a couple of months ago. He was a gentleman, and he inspired lots of cartoonists like me.  That said, Randy’s Popeye experience is entirely different!


Randy Inking Olive Oyl’s skirt.

It all started with Popeye –my career, that is! My first teacher and guru of cartooning was my boss, the head of the cartoon course of The Famous Artists Schools, Forrest Sagendorf (known to everyone as “Bud”). He, aside from managing the cartoon course, drew the Popeye comic books. His relationship with Popeye started back in the 1930’s when he was a high school kid. Bud’s sister somehow knew Elzie Crisler Segar, Popeye’s creator. She suggested that he should hire her brother as an assistant because he was very interested in drawing. Segar did just that and later on as he got to know Bud , they both realized that he was the corner newsboy that Mr. Segar had bought papers from each morning for a few years.

At first, Bud’s duties around the studio were small chores like sweeping up and keeping things in order but as time went on and Bud started driving, he was enlisted in taking Mrs. Segar shopping etc..

Little by little Bud learned how to draw the various characters of Thimble Theater and he became a full blown art assistant on the strip while still going to high school. Until the day he died, Bud’s only drawing style was the Popeye style. It’s the only experience in drawing that he ever had.

Bud went to school during the day and worked on the strip in the evenings until wee hours of the morning. Soon he was frazzled with exhaustion and lack of sleep. It affected his school work. Since Bud was making good money (more than any of his teachers) he quit school to work full time on Popeye. The sailor man who was to become the star of the strip had only entered “Thimble Theater” a little over a year before Bud came on board so he was in on the creation of a lot of characters who were to be part of the American experience like the Jeep, the Sea Hag, Swee’pea and Wimpy. When Segar was looking for a name for the Jeep, Bud suggested “Eugene” as an inside joke for his former classmates who knew that Eugene was the kid who became a rival for the attentions of Bud’s future wife, Nadia.

Years later when Segar died, his funeral was attended by many famous folks including Krazy Kat’s creator and an idol of Segar’s, George Herriman. Herriman came into the church and chose a pew way in the back, sat silently and left early.

After Segar’s death, the strips continued to flow into King Features in New York. They didn’t know that Segar had an assistant. They summoned Bud to New York and offered him the daily strips with a writer or the new comic books which he could do on his own. He took the books. The strips were handled by a succession of artists and writers after that with even Al Capp (Li’l Abner) taking a stab at the writing. He was fired after he introduced a white slavery theme in the strip.

Bud continued on for many years doing the comic books as well as becoming the comics editor at King. Bud once told me how Percy Crosby (Skippy) used to do his strips downstairs in a bar and was always late with them. Bud would have to send someone down to urge him on and collect the strips. Crosby eventually had mental problems and Bud knew that the end had come when Crosby submitted a week of strips that were all identical.

 I lived next door to Bud in Westport and while I worked at the Famous Artists Schools, he started to give me freelance work helping him with the comic books. We would work, in the summer time at two drawing boards, side by side on his screened in porch. At first I was only assigned the blackening in of Olive Oyl’s skirt. Sounds simple, eh? Not with Bud as task master. Bud had a fetish about really dense blacks. No greys were allowed to enter the premises of those skirts. I had to give them several coats. Bud taught me a lot –like, for instance, if you are cutting a lawn and you make the outward perimeter nice and short, the interior of the bed of grass will appear to the casual eye as being the same length. So, if you make the perimeter of Olive’s dress nice and juicy black, it might give the feeling that the whole skirt is the same.

Later on I graduated to creating minor characters that would enter the stories. In each comic book there would be one page which was a short story written by Bud and illustrated with only one picture. I used to marvel at how he would get up from his board and go up to his bedroom to lay down for 5 or 10 minutes to think up a story. He never failed to come back with a beaut’. He was a real pro.

As we worked, Bud would tell me great stories about his life in California and how Segar would hang out with the movie stars like Gary Cooper who he was in a gun club with. Bud missed California.

He had a few hobbies. He collected Juke boxes and he built doll houses and other miniatures like Popeye’s house which had a mother-in-law room upstairs with no windows or doors. The details in these houses were amazing. Every little object, like the rolled up newspaper on the lawn thrown by the paper boy, was infused with loving detail.

His crowning achievement, however, was his art museum. It had rooms galore, in which hung drawings by every artist that Bud knew or could wrest a drawing from. Nadia worked full time, writing to Fellini, Salvadore Dali, and every artist she could think of. I know Fellini donated a drawing and so did many others. We were all asked to do a small drawing that was only one square inch big. Bud framed each picture with tiny pieces of molding and hung them in his museum. When finished, the museum travelled to many venues. Years after Bud died, I heard that Nadia sold it.

At the elbow of this master cartoonist, I started my own career. He was always so supportive of me and taught me so much. As a result, the character Popeye has always held a special place in my heart and a little ripple of familial recognition wafts through me brain when I see his image. He’s like an old old friend or a family member. Popeye’s special way of speaking with mangled spelling was a boon to a cartoonist like Bud who was a very bad speller and actually lettered the strip with a dictionary on his lap.

When I go to the grocery store, my list has often been concocted with Popeye in mind when I write “Englitch muffings” or “sanrich meat”.

And a dog is always a “dorg”.

And, I always eats me spinach!

Email Randy Enos
 


Read many more of Randy’s cartooning memories:

The Smallest Cartoon Characters in the World

Chicken Gutz

Brought to You in Living Black and White

The Hooker and the Rabbit

Art School Days in the Whorehouse

The Card Trick that Caused a Divorce

The Mysterious Mr. Quist

Monty Python Comes to Town

Riding the Rails

The Pyramid of Success

The Day I Chased the Bus

The Other Ol’ Blue Eyes

8th Grade and Harold von Schmidt

Rembrandt of the Skies

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 Remembers Tomi Ungerer

Randy’s Overnight Parade

The Bullpen

Famous Artists Schools

Dik Browne: Hot Golfer

Randy and the National Lampoon

Randy’s Only Great Idea

A Brief Visit to Outer Space

Enos, Love and Westport

Randy Remembers the National Cartoonists Society

Categories
Blog Newsletter Syndicate

Chicken Gutz

I loved Chicken Gutz when I was in high school and college –by my buddy, our brilliant cartoonist, Randy Enos. Randy writes about the strip here …


If I’m ever remembered for anything at all, after I pass on to that great slanted drawing board in the sky, it’ll most likely be for Chicken Gutz, the comic strip I created for The National Lampoon in the early 1970’s. Shortly after I started illustrating for them, they instituted their Funny Pages. They asked me and a goodly number of other cartoonists to come up with some strips that would run every month. My contribution was Chicken Gutz. He was a little man who wore a tall black hat upon which stood a bird. The bird was never named and functioned as a spokesman (or spokesbird) commenting on and criticizing  the various goings on that unfolded below him. The little man in the hat was totally unaware of the bird but the bird was certainly aware of the man.

The name Chicken Gutz came from a phrase my high school friends were always saying, “suck chicken guts”. The idea of a bird on someone’s head came from a photo I once saw of a girl in a Greenwich Village club that had a big crow standing on her head. I started doing a little man with a bird on his head. Chicken Gutz first appeared in an animated commercial I had done for an insurance company. Later when I worked at Pablo Ferro Films, I did a painting that was on a piano hinge to cover our rear projection screen. The painting was of a man with a bird on his head confronted by a bird with a man on his head.

My intention with the strip was to create a really different kind of comic strip than was being seen in the venues of the day. I wanted to break some rules. I wanted it to be totally free to pursue any avenues I wished to pursue.

The first thing that was different was that I lettered most of the balloons in cursive or what we used to call “long-hand.” I left myself free to smudge the ink, spatter it, blob it, and to generally create a mess. In Chicken Gutz, trees and brooks and rocks could talk, God or the Devil might make an appearance, the characters could talk to the reader and even the very structure (the panel outlines, word balloons etc.) of the strip could be subject to break-downs. Gravity and other laws were always ignored in favor of, hopefully, a laugh. I indulged my interest in the nostalgia of the old radio days and my love of the old early comics. I didn’t want it to look like anyone else’s style and I think I succeeded. The strip could be a nightmare to the copy editor, the long-suffering and wonderful Louise Gikow, who once advised me to just put a comma after every word because it would be easier to remove the unnecessary ones than to put in all the necessary ones. But, she was great because she always understood the purposeful misspellings.

One important feature of the Gutz strip was the use of commentary around the edges of the panels in which I would write notes to friends, fake advertisements, and all sorts of ridiculous space fillers. I couldn’t seem to be able to tolerate empty space in the panels. All this seemed to appeal to my readers who would write to me in an effort to get their names in the strip. One fellow wanted to propose to his girlfriend through the strip –so he did. I lost a wallet in a taxi in New York (again) and I thanked the driver, Nelson Cisneros in the strip when he returned it to me. Another guy named Gene mailed me an old advertisement depicting a 50’s woman opening a refrigerator. He said that he was hoping to get his name in the strip by doing so. I replied (in a border of the strip) that “No, Gene, you don’t get your name in the strip by mailing me a lousy advertisement of a woman opening a refrigerator!” One of my friends “Kathryn from Nantucket” almost became a regular character in the strip because I mentioned her so much. In the strip shown here in the column, you can see my reference to her singing at the “Brotherhood of Thieves” in Nantucket over on the right side of the last panel. Because of this note, an old high school friend of hers reunited with her by showing up one day while she was singing.

I got a lot of fan mail on the strip even years and years after it had ceased publication. I also got presents from fans like a 16” high stained glass replica of Mr. Gutz. I got a little stuffed Chicken Gutz doll, an embroidered Gutz and also a denim shirt with a large Gutz embroidered on the back. I got an actual laboratory slide of chicken guts and some sort of a partial rubber face (medical?) and a big set of colorful Mexican cards that have pictures of animals, humans and objects with the Spanish names. I lined the doorway of my studio with them. My biggest fan was a girl named Snooki that wrote me voluminous tomes. She was very creative sometimes writing in mirror image. I never met Snooki but I was privy to every turn in her life from being a Black Oak Arkansas groupie to finally a married woman with a daughter. Snooki wrote to only three people, Charles Manson, David Bowie and me. She threatened to come to visit me a few times but never did. She phoned me once or twice. I actually heard from her a couple of years ago.

Gutz appeared as a half- page for a while and then a full page (or the other way around. I forget). He appeared only once in color in a Christmas issue.

He also appeared later on in two long features in the same issue of the Fantagraphics “Blab” (issue 18).

He has also appeared in a new magazine called American Bystander.

A while back, I wondered what it would be like to do a daily strip because I have never done one. So, I created a blog where I could resurrect my old tall hatted friend and do a strip a day. I think I did about 45 or so but got derailed by a big children’s book project. You can see my aborted daily strip efforts here: http://chickengutz.blogspot.com/

One experience with the fans sticks in my mind. Bobby London who did a strip for the Lampoon (and also Playboy) called Dirty Duck was staying with Leann and me for a while. I introduced Bobby to Bud Sagendorf who drew Popeye. Many years later after Bud died, Bobby ended up doing Popeye.

One day I got a letter from a Gutz fan and having nothing else to do that day, I suggested to Bobby that we both draw some fantastic pictures for the college kid. We spent all day making the most elaborate drawings and sent them off knowing that it would blow this kid’s mind. I was right –he sent back the most fantastic letter describing his incredulity when he opened our package. He promised to be our slave, wash our cars, etc., forever and ever.

You see, cartooning can sometimes be a whole lot of fun.

“Don’t neglect that right back fender there!”

Email Randy Enos
 

Read more more of Randy’s cartooning memories:

Brought to You in Living Black and White

The Hooker and the Rabbit

Art School Days in the Whorehouse

The Card Trick that Caused a Divorce

The Mysterious Mr. Quist

Monty Python Comes to Town

Riding the Rails

The Pyramid of Success

The Day I Chased the Bus

The Other Ol’ Blue Eyes

8th Grade and Harold von Schmidt

Rembrandt of the Skies

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 Remembers Tomi Ungerer

Randy’s Overnight Parade

The Bullpen

Famous Artists Schools

Dik Browne: Hot Golfer

Randy and the National Lampoon

Randy’s Only Great Idea

A Brief Visit to Outer Space

Enos, Love and Westport

Randy Remembers the National Cartoonists Society