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The Rest is History

Here’s a yet another new story by the great Randy Enos.

Email Randy Enos
Visit Randy’s archive
 
–Daryl


Randy’s lino-cut print of his mother and father among the workers at the Goodyear factory.

Everybody worked in a factory. In New Bedford, where I was born; we had shoe factories, woolen mills, a Revere Copper & Brass, the golf ball factory, tool and dye factories and many many others including where my mom met my pop, the Goodyear plant. When she first laid eyes on him, she didn’t like him. She thought he was a showoff because he would chin himself with one hand, up and down up and down on a bar that went across the doorway to the men’s room. This was all part of my poor father’s self-improvement regimen that he had adopted for himself along with scrubbing his teeth with some abrasive to keep them clean and white, sending away for Charles Atlas muscle-building equipment and reading all the non-fiction books he could get a hold of to make up for his lack of education.

Randy’s father, from his lino-cut print below.

My father had come from the old country when he was 10 yrs. old and he had only one year of schooling in a class for immigrant kids that couldn’t speak English. That was it. He started out as a newspaper boy selling papers on the street; then delivering coal; then in a bowling alley setting pins; then he went to  work for “old man Weeden” who he liked very much. The Weeden Toy Factory made great little steam engines that are now represented in a special display of antique toys in the New Bedford Whaling Museum. 

My father was always trying to make up for his lack of education by reading. He never read a book of fiction in his life. When I was a kid, I read the same books he read because they were there in our house. Some of them were the following: The Life of Madame Curie, The History of the World by H.G. Wells, Microbe Hunters by Paul DeKruif, How to Write a Business Letter, High School French Self Taught and a set of the World Book Encyclopedia (which my father read from A to Z).

As he got older he went to work in the mills but one day at his sister’s house he met her insurance man who encouraged him to seek a job at the insurance company. Eventually, many years later, my uneducated father became an insurance executive when he was finally forced to become the district manager in New Bedford of the Boston Mutual life Insurance Company when there was no one else to ascend to the position. Everyone he hired as agents had to have college degrees which he thought was ironic.

My mom worked in a number of factories, Goodyear, the Titleist golf ball factory and a venetian blind factory. My grandfather, her dad, worked in woolen mills and died of lung congestion. He married my grandmother when she was 13 yrs. old and she was illiterate her whole life working as a domestic and cook in the homes of wealthy people. She lived with us while I was growing up because my grandfather had died just before I was born in 1936. She died at the age of 86.

Okay … back to the Goodyear plant where my mom and pop worked. My mother, as I said, thought my dad was vain and a showoff until one day she saw him sitting alone at lunchtime with nothing to eat. She shared her lunch with him … and the rest is history.

Randy’s mother and father among the workers at the Goodyear factory.

On my studio wall I have a photograph of all the workers in one division of the Goodyear plant. My father is in the back row, my mother is sitting down in the first row right next to her sister, my aunt Laura. I don’t know whether or not my mom and pop knew each other at the time this shot was taken. I decided to make a picture of this group. I named it “Portrait of My Mother and Father.” It’s a linoleum cut. I drew it directly from the photograph so when I printed it of course it came out in reverse. I did it mainly with brown ink on brown wrapping paper to give it a bit of an aged, old fashioned look. The heads of my mother and father (which I had circled), I printed in bright colors on bright colored paper. It was a challenge to try to get a caricature of each individual. They stand and sit in such interesting attitudes. There are the tough guy workers, my father among them, with sleeves rolled up, a few guys in caps for some reason, some office workers and obvious minor bosses.

Later, when I was about 5 or 6, the second world war was waging and my mother was working on the large rubber rafts that were dropped down to the water for the use of the parachuting troops that would follow. The strong rafts would hold all the provisions the troops would require.

I don’t know what my father was working on but he was probably still chinning himself with one hand.


We need your support for Cagle.com (and DarylCagle.com)! Notice that we run no advertising! We depend entirely upon the generosity of our readers to sustain the site. Please visit Cagle.com/heroes and make a contribution. You are much appreciated!


Read many more of Randy’s cartooning memories:

The Rest is History

Randall Enos Decade!

Never Put Words in Your Pictures

Explosion In A Blue Jeans Factory

The Garden of Earthly Delights

Happy Times in the Morgue

I was the Green Canary

Born in a Volcano

When I was a Famous Chinese Watercolorist

My Most Unusual Art Job

A Duck Goes Into a Grocery Store

A Day With Jonathan Winters and Carol Burnett

Illustrating the Sea

Why I Started Drawing

The Fastest Illustrator in the World!

Me and the GhostBusters

The Bohemian Bohemian

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)

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

Never Put Words in Your Pictures

Here’s another gem from my cartoonist pal, Randy Enos.

Email Randy Enos
Visit Randy’s archive
 
–Daryl


I think this was the most satisfyingly creative picture I’ve ever made… full of improvisation. I had been trying to think of a unique way to illustrate my favorite book “Moby Dick” and I had hit upon this idea of doing a large picture consisting of just words… the first page of Moby Dick. Mystic Seaport sells giclées of it along with my whaling picture called “New Bedford Boys At Toil”.

Back in 2005 when my wife and I visited my ancestral homeland, the Azores, at one point, we stayed on the lovely island of Fayal in a hotel which was once a fortress right on the water’s edge replete with cannons on an upper deck next to a big swimming pool and a castle-like entrance. One afternoon we encountered an American artist and his small group of watercolorists. I’ve known a few guys that did this European tour-thing with a gaggle of amateur artists/students who would sign on for a package deal of touring various countries, lodging, visiting museums and painting with critiques from their instructor-guide. The instructor was an amiable chap and he invited us to sit in on a critique of that day’s watercolors by his little gang of students. One woman had put some words into her picture for some reason which prompted the admonition from the instructor, “Never put words in your pictures!” He explained to her that written words have no place in a piece of art and that it had ruined her picture.

I wondered what he would think of a picture I had made 4 years earlier which I named “Call Me Ishmael” (the most famous opening three words of any American novel). I had been trying to think of a unique way to illustrate my favorite book “Moby Dick” and I had hit upon this idea of doing a large picture consisting of just words… the first page of Moby Dick.

The picture is 26″ X 40″. It’s a linocut. What I like to call a “linocut-collage” because I print on a variety of colored papers inking the block in a variety of colored inks. Then I select parts of each print and paste it all up to create my full color picture.

I penciled in the words in mostly capital letters, inventing shapes with them using positive and negative spaces as the forms presented themselves to me. It’s very hard to exactly explain so I am submitting here a few details from the picture along with a photo of the whole thing to show what I mean.

After I had carved all the lettering, I proceeded to ink the block and print on the colored papers. I stuck to mostly greenish and bluish, waterish colors. I made a blue print, a green print, a purplish print, black print, white print on black paper and so forth. I kept inking the block different colors and printing on many many Pantone papers until I had this bunch of prints. Now all I had to do was select parts of those prints and paste it all up as a collage. First I used one of the prints as a “master” to paste the other little letter forms from the big prints on to it.

I think this was the most satisfyingly creative picture I’ve ever made… full of improvisation.

Mystic Seaport sells giclées of it along with my whaling picture called “New Bedford Boys At Toil”.

When I show this picture to people, I tell them that I’m illustrating Moby Dick and that this is the first page… and I have only 822 pages to go!

Amidst my picture puzzle of letter forms in “Call Me Ishmael”, I have buried a few whaling images. There’s a harpoon, whaling spade, killing lance and a small white whale.

I guess the admonition to me would have to be… “Don’t put pictures in your words!”

We need your support for Cagle.com (and DarylCagle.com)! Notice that we run no advertising! We depend entirely upon the generosity of our readers to sustain the site. Please visit Cagle.com/heroes and make a contribution. You are much appreciated!


Read many more of Randy’s cartooning memories:

Never Put Words in Your Pictures

Explosion In A Blue Jeans Factory

The Garden of Earthly Delights

Happy Times in the Morgue

I was the Green Canary

Born in a Volcano

When I was a Famous Chinese Watercolorist

My Most Unusual Art Job

A Duck Goes Into a Grocery Store

A Day With Jonathan Winters and Carol Burnett

Illustrating the Sea

Why I Started Drawing

The Fastest Illustrator in the World!

Me and the GhostBusters

The Bohemian Bohemian

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)

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

Why I Started Drawing

Learn why my cartoonist buddy Randy Enos started drawing!

Email Randy Enos
Visit Randy’s archive –Daryl


It all started with the son of my father’s best friend, Jose. The kid’s name was Jerry and he was about my age. I must have been 8 or 9 when Jerry seriously stole my father’s affection by being very skilled at drawing. Jerry would go to the zoo, come back home and draw all the animals from memory. My father would rave about these drawings.

As I mentioned in another story, I would read the comics every Sunday with my dad and he would pour over the details of the drawing in the strips. He didn’t know much about art but wanted to. So this kid, Jerry, was encroaching on my territory with my father. One day, my father showed me a pencil drawing of an ear of corn that Jerry had made. It was, honestly, pretty damn good, with lots of neat shading and detail. My dad said that Jerry was taking classes at The Swain School of Design, New Bedford’s only art school. He asked if maybe I’d like to take some classes there. I wanted to get some of that admiration from my dad, so I went to the Swain school one summer and it was the most boring, tedious and frustrating experience of my life. The only thing I remember about the teacher was that he had one eye that refused to look in the same direction as the other one, which was a little unnerving. I was forced to hone my pencil to a wedge shape with a sandpaper block and then to draw smooth, even,  parallel strokes close together. I filled page after page of these pencil strokes only to be told that they weren’t up to par. We also made strokes that graduated from light to dark –over and over and over again. We would not be allowed to draw anything else until we mastered these exercises. I was failing miserably. I quit.

When I was about 10, I think, I was walking with a fellow classmate, Barbara Camara, down at the bottom of the street where I lived and where her father had a hardware store. All of a sudden, I saw a new little shop that hadn’t been there before. It was just a tiny place next to the hardware store. It was a store front with two windows, one on either side of the doorway. It seemed to be the studio/shop of a commercial artist. A small sign said “Art Lessons”. I went in and met the artist inside seated at a drawing board. He told me the price of lessons. It wasn’t very much. I rushed home and told my dad and he agreed to me taking some lessons there.

This was a whole other world from the Swain school. I went down to the shop once or twice a week and the guy sat me on a stool at a drawing board right next to his and encouraged me to draw anything I wanted. I wish I could remember his name but it escapes me. He gave me India ink and a brush and a pen with which to draw. I told him what interested me and he helped me in that direction. Milton Caniff was making a big impression on me at that time so our efforts were on replicating some facsimile of Caniff’s brushwork. I didn’t know cartoonists used brushes as well as pens until this fellow told me about it. He showed me how to draw half-lock folds. He showed me how to crosshatch. He inspired the hell out of me. He had a friend who often dropped by and they would include me in their “art talk”. I realized, at a certain point, that their main source of work was in drawing the corny little spots you see in the phone book. They were two very small-time commercial artists but they had big hearts and they shared my enthusiasm about drawing and comics etc.. I was finally getting excited about the world of art and illustrating and cartooning. They showed me books and discussed the leading artists of the day.

One memorable sunny day, they said that they were going out to paint watercolors in the outdoors. They asked me if I wanted to go along. Do bears do poo poo in the woods? Of course I wanted to go along and paint with two professional artists, so off we went. We arrived at a farm house. We trudged out into a field and split up, each finding something interesting to paint. So, I’m there with my little watercolor box and my brushes and I settle down to paint the barn I see before me. Halfway into my very enjoyable foray into the plein arts, I became aware of a presence off a way to my left. I turned my head to see a big cow bearing down me! I had never had a large cow bearing down on me before and didn’t quite know what to do about it. She very determinably strode directly at me and was gaining speed all the while. I leaped up and stepped away from my watercolors, brushes and watercolor pad which were on the ground. The cow didn’t seem interested in me but, rather my painting of the barn, because she didn’t come at me anymore, but strode directly at my painting and stopped. She lowered her head to my picture. Then, this giant cow tongue came out of her mouth and slurped across my freshly painted watercolor. Then, she looked at me and walked back from whence she came. My watercolor had this big “splootch” right across the barn.

Afterwards, I enjoyed showing people the watercolor that a cow helped me paint.

And, Oh … remember Jerry back up there in the beginning of this story, the kid who was a drawing genius ? He became a car mechanic and never drew any more.

 


We need your support for Cagle.com (and DarylCagle.com)! Notice that we run no advertising! We depend entirely upon the generosity of our readers to sustain the site. Please visit Cagle.com/heroes and make a contribution. You are much appreciated!


Read many more of Randy’s cartooning memories:

The Fastest Illustrator in the World!

Me and the GhostBusters

The Bohemian Bohemian

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)

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

The REAL Moby Dick

By my brilliant buddy, Randy Enos  –Daryl


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.

Herman Melville
Randy Enos with his “Temple Toggle.”

Another thing you do, while growing up in New Bedford, is you sing whaling songs in glee club. There was no escaping the pull of the whaling adventure. In New Bedford, we have the best whaling museum in the world and I practically lived in it as I grew up walking the deck of the largest model whaleship in the world.

Another factor was that I was born of Portuguese parents –Azorean Portuguese parents to be exact. The Azores are the nine, tiny volcanic islands that sit in the middle of the Atlantic 800 miles off the coast of Portugal. These islands produced the greatest of the world’s whale men. The New Bedford and Nantucket ships always stopped at these islands to pick up food, and boatmen. When they returned from their 3 and 4 year voyages to the Pacific, many of these whale men came to the U.S. instead of returning home. Thus, a huge population in New Bedford were Portuguese, mostly Azorean. As a side note, my father was born in a tiny village nestled in a volcano crater. I visited it once.

I left all this behind when I moved to Connecticut but as I started my illustration and cartooning career, thoughts of the whaling started drifting back to me and I found myself doing my first promotional mailing which was a woodcut whaling scene which I entitled “Fetching Whale Oil.” It was a joke because the word “fetching” hardly was adequate to describe the violent scene in the picture.

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.

My first real elaborate whaling picture, “New Bedford Boys At Toil”, was made in 1994. I did a border design around the picture which was my habit sometimes in those days (the art directors loved my border designs) and Mystic Seaport in Connecticut later made 6 necktie designs, mainly from that border, utilizing the whale and whale men from the picture which they still sell online and in their store. along with some of my whaling pictures.

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”.

Dan went forth and studied up on Mocha Dick and 19thcentury whaling so he could get the “feel” of it for the structure of the book, the typography and so forth.

Dan, with the help of his wife, Virginia Cahill, bound and stitched 32 copies of the book until they ran out of steam (tough job). I had helped them pick out the paper and the cover boards etc. and I executed a suite of 11 linocuts and wrote a brief history of Mocha on each page opposite. We had a wonderful signed and numbered, limited edition of  “The Life and Death of Mocha Dick” the hero white whale of the Pacific.

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.

The first book, “The Life and Death of Mocha Dick” also sold out it’s 32 copies for $200 each.

It pleases me now that when someone looks up Moby Dick or Mocha Dick on the internet, my name often pops up. I’m so glad I was able to make a connection with this whale and bring his story to more people that didn’t know of him before.

Email Randy Enos

Read many more of Randy’s cartooning memories:

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 National Cartoonists Society