Randy Enos – Page 2 – DarylCagle.com

Man’s Achievements in an Ever Expanding Universe

Randy Remembers the NCS

Tags Dan Piraro, editorial cartoon, Frank Ridgeway, Herblock, Hilary Price, Randy Enos, Vaughn Showmaker, Virgil Partch

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The Gray Lady (The New York Times)

Post author By Daryl Cagle
Post date June 26, 2019

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.

A detail from Randy’s Halloween cover, that he worked on for a year.

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!”

Randy’s Al Hirshfeld parody for “Not the New York Times.”

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.

Randy’s cartoon lino-cut about The New York Times banning editorial cartoons.

See Randy’s archive of editorial cartoons, email Randy Enos

Read many more of Randy’s cartooning memories:

The BIG Eye

Historic Max’s

The Real Moby Dick

The Norman Conquests

Man’s Achievements in an Ever Expanding Universe

Randy Remembers the NCS

Tags Al Hirshfeld, Carl Bernstein, David Suter, George Plimpton, Jerelle Kraus, Jerzy Kosinski, Nancy Kent, Nora Ephron, Not The New York Times, Randy Enos, Randy Jones, Robert Neubecker, Robert Zimmerman, Rube Goldberg, The New York Times, Tom Bloom

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The Big Eye

Post author By Daryl Cagle
Post date June 21, 2019

My brilliant buddy, Randy Enos remembers working for CBS, see Randy’s archive of editorial cartoons, email Randy Enos –Daryl

Around 1964, I did my very first animation job. It was for CBS and I got to work for the legendary Lou Dorfsman who shaped every aspect of corporate design for CBS in his 40 years there. I was tasked with creating ten, 10 second “teaser” spots which would be used at station breaks on the network.

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.

So, my first animation experience was to be the manipulation of three simple black type letters into 10 arresting filmic arrangements.

I zoomed a “V” from a tiny dot on the screen to full screenrevolving it upside down while it was joined by “P” which had slid in from the right side. The upside down “V” became an “A” with the addition of the crossbar while the “P” disappeared.

I panned a “V” onto the screen, in another spot, zoomed in to the blackness of the letter and zoomed right back out to reveal that it was now a “P”, then back in and out to reveal the “A”.

I continued on in this fashion, zooming, panning and twirling the letters around through ten variations avoiding the more obvious approach of actually just manipulating the forms into each letter. I kept the letters whole all the time, maintaining their dignity as type forms and not succumbing to “Walt Disney” anthropomorphic transformation or just melding from one letter form to the other.. I felt that it described the “style” of CBS to keep it simple, black and white, elegant movement and transformation.
As simple as it was, and maybe because it was so simple, it became, I think, the most creative endeavor of my short animation career. It’s so compelling to get caught up in the rhythm of a job like that where the ideas just start popping into your brain. It’s good to have a time constraint to work around that forces you to be basic, direct and clean. No time to get “junky” in 10 seconds.

For weeks and weeks before they revealed their proud program that was going to beat all the competition in vote projection, we watched my VPA’s dance around for 10 seconds at every station break.

I haven’t been to the CBS building in many years, so I don’t know what it’s like now, but when I used to go into the building in those days, it wasn’t like going into any other big corporate building; it was carefully designed by Dorfsman (I guess), in every detail. There was the “CBS” typeface that was used everywhere down to the elevator buttons. When you arrived at your floor, there was a spacious waiting area wherein a receptionist sat a plain, clean desk. the décor was of a black and white or subtle grey: floor, rugs, walls, ceiling, etc.. Radiating off this main area there were long corridors going off to the different offices. At the far end of each corridor was the shock of a big square very brightly colored abstract painting. That was the only color. All aspects of the offices were rigidly controlled. Receptionists told me that they couldn’t have even a stray paper clip on their desk. Everything had a place that was design controlled and policed.

When you stepped into that building, you weren’t stepping into a building, you were stepping into a huge, formal piece of graphic design –cool, clean, elegant, black and white.

Down the block sat the NBC building, my next network client, a virtual riot of peacock color.

See Randy’s archive of editorial cartoons, email Randy Enos

Read many more of Randy’s cartooning memories:

Historic Max’s

The Real Moby Dick

The Norman Conquests

Man’s Achievements in an Ever Expanding Universe

Randy Remembers the NCS

Tags animation, CBS, Columbia Television Network, Election 2012, interior design, NBC, new york, offices, Randall, Randy Enos, television, vote, Vote Profile Analysis, VPA

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The Norman Conquests

Post author By Daryl Cagle
Post date June 4, 2019

Here’s my buddy, Randy Enos writing about his designs for a Broadway play! -Daryl

“The Neil Simon of England,” Alan Ayckbourn, wrote a play called The Norman Conquests, or rather he wrote three plays, “Living Together,” “Round and Round the Garden,” and “Table Manners;” he called the whole thing, “The Norman Conquests.” It was all the SAME play seen from three different aspects: from the sitting room, the garden and the dining room of an English country home on one particular weekend.

An audience member can see all the plays if they wish and in any order they wish on alternate nights. The theater might perform the first play on Tuesday, the second on Wednesday and the third play on Thursday and on Friday, back to the first play again. It’s all the same plot seen from different locations. For instance, when you’re watching the play that takes place in the sitting room, you can hear action and dialogue in the background from the dining room. When you see the “Table Manners” play, you can see what was going on in that dining room that you only heard at a distance in the other play and so forth. It was a very clever idea. It didn’t matter if you saw just one of the plays or all three, you still got the whole story and the SAME story.

In 2009, I got the job of creating a poster for the show when Kevin Spacey decided to bring it and the cast from the Old Vic in London to Broadway, New York. It played at Circle in the Square, a nice theater-in-the-round on Broadway. I got the job because the art director knew that I often did linocut lettering and she had the idea of doing the whole poster (title and all the credits) in free-hand lettering instead of using type, like most posters did. She told me that if I wanted to put a tiny figure of the hero standing on the lettering, really small, that would be alright too.

I did a bunch of sketches and in a couple, I did a little cartoon of “Norman” standing on the lettering. On one poster, I tried a rather larger figure of Norman standing beside the lettering. The client loved the cartoon of Norman and so the whole concept of the lettering dominating the poster changed. They also decided that this cartoon caricature of Norman should run through all the promotions, web-site, theater program and décor at the theater itself.

I didn’t have very good reference material except a small photo of the actor from England who had a little beard. they couldn’t tell me whether he would be wearing the beard or even that it was a certainty that it would be the same actor. I was flying blind. I decided to make him faceless and I went with the beard.

Norman was in and out of bed with three women during the play, so I thought he would wear pajamas. Why not red and white stripes? That would be lively and bright. They liked it. I said, “Is he wearing pajamas at any point in the play?” They didn’t know, but the art director said it doesn’t matter and I should go with it. As a matter of fact, they utilized the red pajama stripes throughout the whole campaign.

It turned out to be a great job for me financially because as time went on, they kept asking for more and more drawings for the program: for theater décor, for New York Times ads, and for products. I hadn’t been to a Broadway show for some time and didn’t realize that they sold a lot of products with the logos and poster art on them, like mugs, hats, key fobs and shirts of all types. Ours had normal tee shirts featuring my poster design and they also sold fancy, sequined women’s shirts.

My wife and I ended up seeing all three plays at a special Saturday showing. We saw one play just before noon, had lunch, then saw a second play and then the third in the evening. I saw Spacey and other famous actors in the lobby at the performances, but what knocked me out was seeing my crude linocuts blown up to amazing dimensions. My sloppy hand lettering paraded across the wall over the ticket booths. A giant poster on cloth was hung in their big front window that you could see from inside and outside of the theater.

Inside the lobby were big cut outs of Norman in various poses all over the walls.

I had mentioned to the art director that maybe they should suggest to the producers that they use striped red and white pajamas in the play (if there are any pajamas in the play) to be in keeping with the poster, website, etc. –I don’t know if that was ever accomplished so, as the play progressed I waited to see if they ever appeared. He never wore any pajamas in the play, but, at one point, some pajamas are presented to him in a store box. I waited breathlessly as the box was opened and the pajamas were removed.

They were just plain ol’ bluish pajamas.

Email Randy Enos

Read many more of Randy’s cartooning memories:

Randy Remembers the National Cartoonists Society

Tags Alan Ayckbourn, Broadway, England, Kevin Spacey, London, Old Vic, Randy Enos, The Norman Conquests

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How To Murder Your Wife

Post author By Daryl Cagle
Post date May 27, 2019

My cartoonist buddy, Randy Enos, shares his memories. How to Murder Your Wife is still my favorite movie. –Daryl

As a young kid who wanted to be a cartoonist back in the 40’s, I can’t tell you what a thrill it was when a cartoonist would show up in a movie I was watching. It happened only a few times but I’ll always remember the impact it had on me. Like everyone else, I liked the cowboys and the G-men but to see a cartoonist sitting at a big slanted drawing board at work on one those big comic strip panels, pushed all else aside.

My first favorite comic strip was Bringing Up Father featuring Jiggs and Maggie. The clean, ultra thin pen lines describing those wonderful exaggerated poses caused me to pick up a pen and try to emulate them. The cartoonist George McManus also did the most wonderful backgrounds and interiors with loving detail. So, imagine my excitement when, while watching a Jiggs and Maggie movie, the cartoonist himself made an appearance following Jiggs and making little notes in his sketchbook. He appeared again later peering in the window of Jiggs and Maggie’s home. Well, the movie got a whole lot more interesting at that point. McManus was following them around and sketching them! I found out later that he liked to appear in the movies made about his characters and I saw him a few times more. In another one of the movies, Maggie
was trying to ascend the ladder of society, as usual, but was being hindered by the fact that all her friends made her a figure of ridicule by pointing out that she closely resembled that awful nag Maggie in the comic strip. So, in the movie, she goes to visit McManus and demands that he stops drawing her in the strip. He promises to do so but, doesn’t –so she is forced to bring him to court. The movie was called “Jiggs and Maggie in Court.”

When you went to the movies in those days (25 cents), you were treated to a short feature, a newsreel and then the full length feature. The Red Ryder movies were some of those shorts. I got a jolt while watching one of them one day when suddenly the cartoonist Fred Harman himself appeared and was seen sketching Red and Little Beaver. There he was in a cowboy hat capturing his hero in action. It was great watching him actually drawing the pictures.

In 1950, there was a movie called The Petty Girl with Robert Cummings playing the famous pin-up girl artist George Petty. I used to see his illustrations in Esquire magazine and here was a Hollywoodized version of his life. Not a very good or accurate telling of his life I’m sure but, again, I got a kick out of seeing an illustrator at work.

In 1955, just as I was starting art school there was the great Martin and Lewis movie Artists and Models which again depicted a cartoonist at work.

In 1965, along came the movie How To Murder Your Wife with Jack Lemmon playing a well to do cartoonist living in a New York townhouse with a garage for his car. He had a man-servant played by Terry Thomas. In this movie you see the cartoonist at a large slanted board in his high-ceilinged studio penning his strip “Bash Brannigan” in large panels. He never asked his character to do anything he couldn’t do so he would costume-up and enact all the action by hopping around on roofs and chasing imaginary villains while his man-servant followed with a shot-gun camera recording it all to be later used as reference pictures for his realistically drawn strip. I loved the whole atmosphere of his studio and equipment and slept through the love scenes with Virna Lisi.

In 1997, the movie Chasing Amy depicted the world of the independent comic book artists of the times. Ben Affleck played the artist-writer of his comic book with Jason Lee playing his inker and colorist. At the beginning of the movie, there is a confrontation with a fan at a Comic Con wherein Lee is ridiculed for being just a “tracer.” Now, we all know the inkers of comic books are a highly respected, necessary and valuable breed all to themselves and earn special credit on the covers, so I found it a little implausible that a comic fan would be so insulting to an inker of a famous comic book, but aside from that, I enjoyed seeing them at work in their studio. Lee appears to be inking with a Sharpie, the pen of choice of the modern generation of comic artists. Their drawing boards are back to back so they are facing each other as they work. I thought that was a good touch because I happened to know the cartoonists Stan Drake (The Heart of Juliet Jones) and Leonard Starr (On Stage) who worked that way in their shared studio in a cloud of cigarette smoke that was unreal. Later on, when they both became the cartoonists of Blondie (Stan) and Little Orphan Annie (Starr), they continued facing each other –and continued smoking up a storm.

After I had been an illustrator and cartoonist for many years, the Westport illustrator, John McDermott saw his book “Brooks Wilson Ltd” made into the movie Loving in 1970. It starred George Segal as a Westport illustrator and Eva Marie Saint as his wife. This was probably the most realistically portrayed movie about the life of an illustrator that I ever saw. They didn’t even shy away from showing the artist using a belopticon, the machine that projected photographs onto the illustrator’s paper or canvas for tracing. Pretty much all the illustrators, except a few like von Schmidt and Fawcett, used this device and usually hid them away from visitors to their studios (Norman Rockwell was one of few illustrators that admitted to using one). And, here in “Loving” we see Segal using one to trace a photograph of himself and his wife posed for an illustration.

Westport was taken over by the movie company for a while during shooting of that movie. When we went down to the train station, we would see cameras ready to record Segal waiting for the train and cameras poised to capture the oncoming train. Bernie Fuchs‘ studio was used as the illustrators studio and if you went down to our only art store, you’d find that the movie company had purchased every portfolio in the place.

But, of course, there was a teensie-weensie little, itty-bitty flaw in the otherwise flawless movie and I caught it. At one point, Segal is crossing the street in New York with his portfolio in hand and there is a bit of a wind. The wind catches the portfolio and lifts it up revealing that it was weightless… light as a feather… nothing in it as he supposedly was on his way to his agent with a big job.

Ah, Hollywood.

Email Randy Enos

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Art School Days in the Whorehouse

Post author By Daryl Cagle
Post date April 25, 2019

Here’s a memory about art school, from our storied cartoonist, Randy Enos.

As my second (soon to be my last) year in art school approached, I decided to live with a homogeneous group of art students instead of the un-homogeneous group I had been with in my first year. So, four of us found an apartment on Dartmouth Street above Back Bay Station in Boston. It was not a long walk down Huntington Avenue to our school, The Boston Museum School of Fine Arts.

The furnished apartment consisted of one long room culminating in a big wall window looking down on the street from the second floor. Entering our $75 a month apartment there was a little cooking alcove, consisting of an old stove and tiny refrigerator to the left, and a tiny bathroom with claw-foot tub to the right; there was also a long room with four beds perpendicular to the wall down the right side. There was a small amount of room left for sitting before the grand window which formed the back wall.

The apartment building was above Dave Finn’s Irish Bar which had a garishly large green shamrock in the window. The bar and building were owned and operated by our landlord, Dave Finkelstein. Every night the bawdy sounds of music, drinking, fighting and other general ribaldry wafted up to our grand window and managed to deprive us of any quiet or sleep until the bar shut down around midnight.

Across the street was a charming little art store called Hatfield’s Color Shop and to its left a cigar and cigarette store featuring cigarettes from all around the world. My favorites were the strong pungent ones from Turkey. Every morning on my way to school, I would purchase my breakfast which consisted of one of their fat, five-cent cigars augmented by a 5th Avenue candy bar bought at the drugstore next door. That was the breakfast I munched on every morning, finishing off my fat smelly cigar in drawing class where we would draw from a nude model until noon.

In the entrance-way to our apartment building was a small hotel desk (because, in fact, it was sort of a hotel) manned by a little crippled poet named Bob. Facing Bob and his desk was a small rickety elevator which took us to our room. On our second floor there were a few other tenants (I don’t remember ever seeing any of them). On the third floor were rooms for transients and I think, there was a fourth floor, also for transients. There was one of our fellow art students on the third floor among the transients, named Arthur Foley who was also a jazz drummer. Because I talk a lot Arthur dubbed me “Lip-Jazz”, a nickname that stuck with me that whole second year. The transients were exclusively bar and street hookers and their sailors (there were an awful lot of sailors around at that time).

I didn’t eat or sleep much in those days and I really took a liking to Bob with his poetry and intelligent conversation so I hung around his desk often into the wee hours of the morning. We watched the endless parade of hookers with their drunken sailors file in every night. Sometimes the girls would ditch them only moments later, seeking greener pastures and leaving the abandoned sailor boys alone in the room until, finally, they’d stagger back down to Bob and me and ask if we saw the girl they had come in with. It was usually, ”She said she was just going to get some cigarettes.”

Life was frugal for us in those days. About our only form of relaxation was hiding Jack’s thick glasses from him in the morning and watching him stagger around blind as a bat cursing us and our ancestors. Ronnie was an avid rock climber who actually slept with a beautiful, recently purchased and gleaming “rock-climbing axe.” And there was Steve Chop, our “cook,” who we all mercilessly kidded about wanting to have a career in advertising art.

We shared our interesting apartment with about a million cockroaches who would line the rim of our bathtub and watch us take baths. The flooring of our palace consisted of large black and white tiles. When we would open our door to enter, the whole room seemed to move as the cockroaches dove toward the black squares.

One particular night, I pushed the “starving and drinking” routine a little too far. Around 2 or 3 in the morning, as I stood talking to Bob at the desk, I started to feel slightly woozy. I told him I’d better get to bed. I remember opening the elevator door and entering. The next thing I remember is waking up to loud pounding. A frightened Bob face looked through the little elevator window at me laying on the floor of the elevator. He said I had hit every wall in there before collapsing. Ah, the halcyon days of the art school life.

One morning we looked out of our glorious window down to the street and we saw one of our teachers. He had come on the train into Back Bay Station and was proceeding up the street toward Huntington Avenue to walk to school. We were excited to see him. We banged on the window and shouted out our morning greetings to him. He completely ignored us. He looked straight ahead and kept walking. We knew he had heard us; we weren’t that high up away from the street.

Later we arrived at school and confronted him about it.

He said, “I heard you guys but I’m not going to wave to you up there in that whorehouse above the bar!”

Read more more of Randy’s cartooning memories:

Randy Remembers the National Cartoonists Society

Tags 5th Avenue candy bar, apartment, art college, art school, Dave Finn's Irish Bar, Hatfield's Color Shop, Randy Enos, sailors, student, The Boston Museum School of Fine Arts, whorehouse

Blog Newsletter Syndicate

The Mysterious Mr. Quist

Post author By Daryl Cagle
Post date April 19, 2019

Here’s another Randy flashback. See Randy’s editorial cartoon archive here. –Daryl

In the late 60’s and into the early 70’s, I became aware of a series of pretty avant-garde children’s books being published by someone named Harlin Quist. I think I first saw them in Graphis, an international magazine published in Switzerland and also in a similar publication, Gebrauchsgrafik, from Germany. Quist was an American publisher with offices in New York and Paris. I couldn’t believe how beautiful these books were. Many of my favorite artists were doing work for Quist, people like Reynold Ruffins, Murray Tinkelman, Eleanor Schmid, Phillipe Weisbecker, Charlie Slackman, Stan Mack, Edward Gorey, Étienne Delessert, Alain Le Foll, Alan Cober and Heinz Edelman. It was revolutionary! Realism was fading from the illustration field and in its place was a vibrant, refreshing breath of graphic grandeur. I wanted in.

So, I found Quist’s phone number and called him up for an appointment. He told me to come by on Thursday. Thursday found me in front of an ordinary, rather bleak-looking old brownstone with my trusty portfolio in hand. I was surprised to see that his office was in his apartment. I climbed the stairs and knocked on his door. It took a while for the door to be opened a crack. It was dark in the apartment.

I couldn’t see anything but a hand that had opened the door. Then I could make out an eye peering out at me.

“Mr. Quist is not here” said the voice in answer to my, “I have an appointment with Mr. Quist”.

“He’s in Paris” said the voice behind the door. “You can leave your portfolio until next Thursday!”

It was fairly common practice in those days to sometimes leave a portfolio for a week. I was disappointed but I agreed to leave it and a hand emerged snatching it from my grasp. The door shut. I needed that portfolio but I had high hopes that I would soon be joining that stellar group of outstanding illustrators in the Quist pantheon.

A week went by and I again climbed the stairs to the ominous apartment and knocked on the door. Nothing. I knocked again… and again. No response. The whole apartment building was soundless. No one seemed to be around. I didn’t know what to do. I went downstairs to see if I could find a door that said “Super” on it … or something. NOTHING. I went outside and looked for an entrance to a basement where I might find someone to give me assistance. I found a door that looked promising. I opened it and entered going down a few steps into a dark musty basement. It was EXACTLY like being in one of those horror movies. There were passageways, overhead pipes, electrical fuse boxes. It was dank, quiet, dark and eerie. After trying different paths that wound through the vast basement, I started to hear faint music coming from a radio. I followed it to a small room where I surprised an old fellow who was sitting there. I enquired about Mr. Quist.

“He’s gone” the super said.

“But … but” I stammered, “I need my portfolio that is in his apartment”.

“NO” he said, “He doesn’t pay his rent. We kicked him out and everything in that apartment belongs to us.”

I explained that I didn’t even know Harlin Quist. That I had never even met him. That I had just left MY portfolio for him to look at. It belonged to me. I had nothing to do with Mr. Quist. He replied that nothing could be done. Everything in the apartment was confiscated. I guess I started pleading, maybe even sobbing, about how my livelihood required that portfolio and etc. and etc., because he grudgingly relented and I followed him up the stairways to the foreboding apartment which we entered and finally found my portfolio, among others strewn about the place. I showed him my name on it and I left.

Now, I see that Quist has died and that my good friend Étienne, who had done four books (sometimes written by his friend Ionescu) for Quist, has written in a recent interview that Quist and his partner Francois Ruy-Vidal were con men, crooks and charlatans that didn’t pay proper royalties (if they paid anything at all) to their contributors and even though many illustrators were warned by Etienne and others of this fact, the illustrators continued to flock to his door hoping to do one of the beautiful, Harlin Quist award-winning books.

Harlin Quist passed away in 2000 at the age of 69. Read Harlin Quist’s obituary in the New York Times. –Daryl

Read more more of Randy’s cartooning memories:

Randy Remembers the National Cartoonists Society

Tags Alain Le Foll, Alan Cober and Heinz Edelman, Charlie Slackman, Edward Gorey, Eleanor Schmid, Étienne Delessert, Eugene Ionescu, Harlin Quist, Murray Tinkelman, Phillipe Weisbecker, Randy Enos, Reynod Ruffins, Stan Mack

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8th Grade and Harold von Schmidt

Post author By Daryl Cagle
Post date March 27, 2019

Here’s another cartooning memory from my buddy, Randy Enos.

When I was in the 8th grade, we had desks that had lids. You lifted the lid and there inside were your pencils, notebooks and school books.

A Saturday Evening Post had come to my house with an amazing double-page Harold von Schmidt illustration. I cut it out and took it to school to paste on the inside of my desk so I could look at it every morning. It depicted a stalwart cavalry soldier standing astride a fallen comrade while he faced, rifle in hand, what seemed to be the entire Indian nation bearing down on him. The hopelessness and drama of the situation gripped me. I was enthralled by the terrifying way the action was depicted. Each morning, I would lift the desk top, look at the picture and then over to my right where my friend Ottello sat and say, “He’s still standing!”

Years later, I met the illustrator who everybody called “Von” when I worked at the Famous Artists Schools. He lived nearby in Westport and would visit the school frequently. A former cowboy, he would ride a horse in our Memorial day parades.

When Von died, his son Eric came down from Boston and moved into his father’s studio and rented out the big family house across the driveway. Eric and I became good friends. He was also an illustrator, painter and a well known blues and folk musician. He was close friends with all the famous folk people of the day like Joan Baez and Bob Dylan (Eric taught Dylan the song “Baby, Let Me Carry You Down” and is mentioned by name in Dylan’s introduction to the song on his first Columbia record). Another great friend of his was Ramblin’ Jack Elliott (called “Ramblin’” not because he travels a lot but because he rambles on and on when he talks). I got to play music with him one time at Eric’s studio/house.

The studio was a fantastic place where, every New Year’s Eve, Eric would throw a humdinger of a party where, it seemed like, hundreds of people would cram into the small studio with the big dusty north light window and where the Indian headdresses and drums and racks and racks of big canvases depicting scenes of the old west competed with space alongside easels, drawing boards, a model stand and an old piano. You could barely move in there when more and more people would show up as the evening wore on. Musicians also filled the room. There were banjos, guitars, gut-buckets, washboards, fiddles and mandolins… and, of course, the piano manned by a crippled fellow also named Eric. Chance Browne, who draws Hi & Lois, would always be there playing his great blues guitar and as the morning hours approached, Guy Lombardo’s nephew would arrive from his gig in New York all dressed up in a tuxedo. We always ended the evening with a very loooooong rendition of “Irene Goodnight”. While everybody always sang the accepted version “I’ll see you in my dreams”, I always insisted on singing Led Belly’s original lyric which was “I’ll GET you in my dreams”.

One year, Leann and I went to the party early before the crowd arrived because I wanted to ask Eric something. I told him about loving that picture of the lone cavalryman standing his ground in the face of certain death. I asked him if he knew the picture. I said that I’d really like to see it again. It didn’t register on his memory but he said, “Let’s take a look at these books I have of my father’s work and see if we can find it”.

We went through a few books and suddenly there it was. What a jolt it was to see that old familiar picture again! The memories flooded back… of the 8th grade and my daily morning ritual of opening my desk to that dynamic flurry of stampeding hooves, howling Indians and the one Indian who was bearing down on the poor cavalryman with his rifle pointed dead at him.

And then Eric said … “Oh, yeah, I posed for that cavalryman. I remember standing on that model stand over there while my father painted me”.

Read more more of Randy’s cartooning memories:

Randy Remembers the National Cartoonists Society

Tags Chance Browne, Guy Lombardo, Harold von Schmidt, Led Belly, Ramblin' Jack Elliot, Randy Enos, The Saturday Evening Post

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Rembrandt of the Skies

Post author By Daryl Cagle
Post date March 22, 2019

Another memory from my cartoonist buddy, Randy Enos.

When I was not old enough to work on summer vacations (as I did later on as a caddie and a Western Union boy and putting jelly in jelly doughnuts and in the lab of the Titleist golf ball factory) my dad would often take me downtown with him to where he worked at an insurance company. I would go across the street to the Empire Theater and hang out with the old guy who would be cleaning up the movie house before the folks would come in at noon. When the movie was about to start he’d sneak me into a seat and I’d enjoy a free movie. This was my favorite thing to do. I loved movies and I still do. I’ve affected my two boys with that same fever so much that my oldest son is now a movie cameraman.

But, that’s not what I came here to write. I came here to write about a different adventure when I accompanied my dad down to his office one summer morning; he told me that he had a surprise for me. After Dad did a little business at the office we drove down to the south end of the city. We parked the car and got out. He pointed up in the air across the street; there, high up on a scaffolding in front of a big billboard, two men were painting an advertisement for Sunbeam Bread.

“You want to watch?” my dad said. Of course I wanted to watch. So, he left me there supplied with a tuna fish sandwich for lunch while he went about collecting the 10 cents a week payments for life insurance from the poor Portuguese living in the south end of New Bedford.

I settled down on the curb and for a few hours, I watched mesmerized by the two men working high up on the billboard. One of them was slowly and methodically painting Little Miss Sunbeam biting into a slice of Sunbeam Bread while the other fellow was painting in a large expanse of background color. Watching that head of the girl slowly emerging increment by increment was the most amazing thing I had ever seen. The painter was consulting a picture he held in his hand as he worked. It was obviously the master drawing that had been “squared” off and he was “enlarging” it by painting in each corresponding square on the squared off billboard. It wasn’t like a painter standing at an easel and, perhaps broadly stroking in fairly large areas and then working detail into them. This guy was finishing off each little section at a time. I was fascinated. A positive thrill was coursing through my brain as I watched the smiling face of the familiar Little Miss Sunbeam slowly emerging.

Randy draws his Dad.

I could barely appreciate my tuna sandwich when lunchtime rolled around. Finally, I watched them finish the job. I don’t think they ever saw me across the street seated on the curb. The “master” painter ended by signing his name, “Joe Martin” down in the lower right corner. Later on I was to see his signed billboards all around New Bedford.

That was the first time in my very young life that I had ever seen an artist at work. It stays with me to this day. To me, he wasn’t just a commercial artist doing a mundane advertising billboard.

To me, he was like a Rembrandt of the skies.

Read more more of Randy’s cartooning memories:

Randy Remembers the National Cartoonists Society

Tags advertisement, billboard, connecticut, paiting, Randsall Enos, Randy Enos, rembrandt, Sunbeam Bread

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The Funniest Man I’ve Ever Known

Post author By Daryl Cagle
Post date March 17, 2019

Somewhere back in the 70’s I was awakened one early morning by a phone call. The gruff, low voice said, “Is this Randall Enos the illustrator?” When I answered in the affirmative, he went on, “This is Gene Hoffman.” This was a familiar name to me. I had seen his illustrations and sometimes our work had been featured side by side in Graphis, the international art magazine based in Switzerland.

Gene Hoffman by Randy Enos

He went on to tell me that he knew a lot of the illustrators in Westport and that he had always wanted to look me up because he knew I lived there. He said he was in town visiting. I asked him where he was and he said, “The Sherwood Diner”. It was only a few minutes from my house. I rushed over and entered and spotted a heavy-set “mountain- man”- looking bearded fellow in bib overalls.

I sat down with him and said, “Let’s have breakfast”. The waitress came over and asked what we wanted. Gene, reading from the menu, said, “Two eggs any style, toast and coffee”. She asked how he wanted the eggs done and he replied, “Any style!” When she pressed him further on how the eggs were to be done he finally answered, “Basted. Just put a little basting stitch around the edge.” At mid-meal the waitress returned to ask how everything was. Gene answered, “Well, I don’t know about this trouble in the Middle East”. Right then and there I decided that Gene should stay and visit us for a while. I took him home and introduced him to my Leann.

We owned two houses in Westport at that time and we were renting one out. We told Gene that we had to go over to the other house to clean up a bit because we were expecting a new tenant. He said, “Let me help. I can do the work of two men … Laurel and Hardy!”

So began my years and years long friendship with my best friend, who lived in Colorado. Gene always had me laughing. He told me that when he was young, he was so lonely that his mother had to tie a pork chop around his neck to get the dog to play with him. When he got to know me better, he said that I was as useful as a screen door on a submarine. When I would call him and ask if he was busy, he’d say, “I’m as busy as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.” These bon mots would just flow out of him constantly. One time in a telephone conversation, I said that it looked like Ted Kennedy might run for President. Without missing a beat, Gene said, “Well, we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it!”

Every year or so, Gene would spend a week or two with us. We got to know each other and our comedic rhythms so well that when we would go out to the supermarket etc., we would entertain cashiers, bag boys, store managers and the like with non-stop patter that sometimes had surprising results. We were in a beauty salon picking up some hair conditioner that I liked and our conversation was clicking along so well at one point that a woman under a dryer laughed so hard that she actually fell off her chair onto the floor. Another time, we were in restaurant with a girlfriend of Leann’s who asked Gene what his “sign” was. With no hesitation, he said, “Feces!” A woman at an adjoining table fell forward and landed with her face in her soup. I am not exaggerating.

Hoffman was known for illustrations made of an assembly of found parts; this crab was an award winner.

People in stores would say, “Are you guys a comedy team?”

Everywhere we went, Gene would chat up anyone we came into contact with. Everyone loved him and he was genuinely interested in every person he met from a famous cartoonist to the kid picking up the shopping carts at the grocery store parking lot.

When Gene would win a gold medal at the Society of Illustrators, he would come in from Colorado and take me as his date to the award ceremony. One time, he was at the podium receiving the gold medal and said, “Gosh, I can’t wait to get this home and have it bronzed!”

Sometimes his witticisms would fly high over the heads of the recipient as in the case of the guard at the Museum of Modern Art. When we got there, we found the employees on a picket line. We didn’t want to cross it so we spent over an hour conversing with all the strikers. Finally we each gave them a $10 donation to their organization and asked their permission to cross the picket line because we hadn’t seen the museum for a long time. They cheered us on. We went directly to the garden to see the Rodin Balzac sculpture. It wasn’t there! We asked a young guard standing nearby. He said he didn’t know because he had just started the job that morning.

“Survived the hazing of the frosh, have you?” Gene said.

WHOOOOOSH… right over the kid’s head.

Speaking of “Whoosh”, Gene and I had a running secret joke between us. He mentioned one time that a friend of his had said that everything was to no avail because it’s all going to be sucked into a black hole someday. So, every time Gene and I would be at an art show (and we went to many) and I would look at a label and say, “Oh look, it’s an original silverpoint drawing on acid-free, museum-quality, non-perishable hand-made paper”, we would both pass our hands over our heads and go “WOOOOOOOSH!” Into the black hole it goes.

At the Modern, we came to a room that had an installation artist’s wooden bed in the middle. In earshot of the serious-looking guard, I said, “I’m going to lie down a bit, Gene, I’m real tired!” The guard wasted no time in rushing over and telling me sternly that I better not even think about touching that bed. Well, we talked to the guard for a while and when we finally departed, he actually hugged us both.

Gene could tell the most amazing jokes. He knew elaborate obscure Russian ones that he would grandly embellish with minute detail as to the decoration on a Faberge drinking cup and so forth. The best joke teller that I have ever heard.

Randy Writes: When the judges vote on a piece to make the final judgement, they use poker chips. My friend Murray Tinkelman was on the jury for this piece and he said that when they tried to tally up how many poker chips were on the poster as it lay on the table they couldn’t tell because the chips blended in with all shapes in the Indian face, some of which were poker chips, I think. They had to crouch down and look at it from an angle.

Gene was a graphic designer, cartoonist, illustrator, sculptor, and composer. He was the most well-read person I have ever met. His skiing posters were so important to Colorado that the mayor of Denver once declared an official “Gene Hoffman Day”.

When Gene would go to an event where we would get those little name tags that said “My name is…”, Gene would always write in “of German origin.”

His medium of choice for most of his later work was constructions made solely from the things people throw away… rusty nails, Tide bottles, paper clips, plastic forks, drinking straws etc.. When I’d take walks with him, he would stop and pick up old rusty things and fill his pockets with them.

The last time he visited me, I awoke to find him not in the house but out in the middle of the driveway staring at something that was very tiny in his hand. I approached and he called my attention to this tiny tiny little sprout gripped between his large fingers.

“Look at this, Randy, look how beautiful it is… look at those little veins!”

The last joke he ever told me was the one about the skeleton that goes into a bar and orders a beer and a mop.

When he had a heart attack and died, I wrote an obituary for him that was posted at the Society and eventually found its way to the internet where his daughter saw it. In it, I referred to “the late Gene Hoffman”. To show that the acorn doesn’t land far from the tree, his daughter wrote to me to say, “Randy, you know my father was never late to anything”.

More about Gene Hoffman here.

Read more more of Randy’s cartooning memories:

Randy Remembers the National Cartoonists Society

Tags Gene Hoffman, gold medal, illustration, Randall Enos, Randy Enos, Society of Illustrators

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I’M YOUR BUNNY, WANDA –Part One

Post author By Daryl Cagle
Post date March 10, 2019

Here’s another story from my cartoonist buddy, Randy Enos

In the late 50’s, as I started my career, I would promote myself by mailing out samples of my work to a
lot of magazines, large and small, one of which was Playboy. I sent Playboy photostats of two pencil caricatures. One was Frank Lloyd Wright and the other was Brigitte Bardot.

Two years later, I got a call from Art Paul, the Playboy art director who said, “Those two caricatures you sent me…” My mind reeled back in time, trying to recall what I had sent. He went on, “I have a job that requires a bunch of caricatures. Seymour Chwast at Push Pin tried it and Hugh Hefner didn’t like his approach. Then Paul Davis gave it a try and Hefner didn’t like his either.

“I rummaged through my drawers and found these two caricatures you sent me. I showed them to Hef and he likes your style for it,” Art Paul said. He went on to tell me that it would be two vertical rows of heads, one on each side of the page. They were celebrities like Sophia Loren, John Kennedy, Elizabeth Taylor, Fidel Castro, etc. There were about 23 or so. Then Art said that since we had never worked together, perhaps I’d like to send a sketch first, but if I didn’t want to I could just do the finished job and send it in, which I did posthaste.

A few days later, when he would have received the art, I got a phone call. My wife said, “It’s Playboy.” I thought, “Oh no, he hates what I did!” Art said, “I’ve got another job for you, can you be on a plane tomorrow morning and get out here to Chicago and stay here a week to do it?”

“Of-course,” I said, “Of-course.”

I still worked at the Famous Artists Schools so at 10:00 that evening, I called my boss and said that I needed a week off to fly out to Playboy. I had never been on an airplane and the next morning I found myself running late across the tarmac to a waiting plane and a stewardess frantically waving me aboard.

I arrived in the windy city and went to the newly opened Water Tower Inn where a nice room awaited me. After unloading my suitcase, I took a walk down the street to 232 E. Ohio St. where a small brick building housed the famous magazine. I rode up in the elevator to the art department floor and when the elevator door opened, I was knocked off my feet. There sitting at the receptionist’s desk, facing the elevator, was the most famous Playboy model of the day, Janet Pilgrim. I could barely get the name “Art Paul” out of my astonished mouth. As I sat waiting for him to come out to get me, I watched Miss Pilgrim opening a stack of manila envelopes containing cartoon submissions. She would just open the top and without even pulling them out, she would glance in and shunt the envelope aside to one of two piles she was creating. I realized that she was filtering out the obviously amateurish-looking cartoons from the thousands upon thousands of submissions they received.

As I walked back to the art dept. with Art Paul, I was treated to miles of Playboy cartoon originals that lined the walls of every corridor. And over each secretary’s desk, I could see big beautiful original illustrations.

Art explained the job to me. Every year the magazine had a Jazz Poll whereby the readers would select their favorite jazz musicians … favorite drummer, favorite trumpet player, favorite soloist. etc. My job was to draw each performer and put them all in a big, double-paged spread as one big orchestra. The reason I was asked to work on it at the magazine was because nobody had bothered to invent the internet yet and I would have had a devil of a time finding photos of some of the lesser known performers like Joe Morello the drummer. Playboy had hundreds of pictures of all of them. Also the reason I was there was because the votes were still coming in and I had to draw them as they were finally selected as the winners.

The next day, Hefner came back from a trip and I was introduced to him. He asked me to come and work at the mansion instead of at the office because he loved cartoonists and he had drawing boards right there at his house.

Later, Art told me that Hef was an amateur cartoonist and had published some of his own cartoons in their first few issues and that they were terrible. Hefner told me that he loved having cartoonists around the house and that Shel Silverstein was often there. Now, all the time he’s telling me this, Art is standing behind him furiously shaking his head “NO” and drawing his finger across his throat in the “CUT” gesture. Then Art blurted out, “No, no, Hef, Randy’s fine here in the studio where we have him set up with a nice drawing board and he’s at the Water Tower where he’s turned his bureau drawer upside down to create a drawing board. He’s good, he’s fine!”

So, Hef left it at that and after he walked out, Art said, “Do not go to the mansion, the place is full of naked babes running around jumping in the pool and they got pillars and fancy stuff all over the place, you’ll never get anything done over there and we’ve only got a week to get these 25 musicians selected and drawn!”

So, that’s as close to going to the Chicago mansion that I got.

The week rolled on as I worked day and night on the caricatures in pen and ink and colored pencil. At one point, as I was sitting at my board drawing away, I became aware that there was a small group of people standing behind me watching. It was Art and some of the other executives of the magazine. Now in those early years, I had developed this tendency to draw eyes on my characters with no eyeballs kinda like Orphan Annie except not round … more Egyptian oval-like.

As I worked on, one of the publishing execs said out loud to Art, “Could Enos draw eyeballs in those eyes?”

Art leaned down to my ear and whispered, “Randy, can you draw eyeballs in those eyes?”

I replied, “I don’t draw eyeballs!”

Art straightened up and said, “Enos doesn’t draw eyeballs!”

And, there was not another word about it.

After the job was finished, Art took me to the Chicago Playboy Club one night which you’ll read about in Part Two of “I’m Your Bunny Wanda”.

Tags Art Paul, Hugh Hefner, Janet Pilgrim, Jazz, Playboy, Randal, Randy Enos

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Famous Artists Visit the Famous Artists School

Post author By Daryl Cagle
Post date February 27, 2019

Here is another memory from Randy Enos‘ tenure at the Famous Artists School.

The Famous Artists Schools had five correspondence art courses, cartooning, illustrating, painting, writing and photography; they always wanted to do sculpture too but couldn’t figure out how to deal with the student submissions of assignment work.

Each course was laid out the same way. The school had 12 famous practitioners in each field as their “Guiding Faculty” who were the ones that created the texts and assignments that I and the other “instructors” would criticize by means of written, drawn or painted corrections and advice on the lessons.

The Guiding Faculty, of course, didn’t work in our Westport, Connecticut office buildings but they did visit from time to time and give us lectures on their own work and look at some of our student critiques. Some of them who happened to live locally came over to the school frequently like Robert Fawcett (who got friendly with me and would give me tips on my own work). Harold von Schmidt also came to visit quite often to see his friend Al Dorne our fearless leader and principal founder of the schools. A few of our cartoon course Guiding Faculty like Whitney Darrow lived in Westport.

The cartoonist Virgil Partch (VIP) would come from California to visit and Milton Caniff (Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon) and others would come, and when they did, Dorne would take our small group of cartoon instructors and the visitor out to lunch at a very high class restaurant in Westport. I remember going out once with Rube Goldberg and after we had our lunch we all sat there and smoked great long cigars.

One notable visit was from the legendary sports cartoonist Willard Mullin, who decided that he’d like to try a critique of one of the students’ works before we went out to lunch. He sat down at my drawing board and a lucky student got an original Mullin drawing of a baseball pitcher. I watched in awe as the master started with the pitcher’s throwing hand extended forward in the throw and drew a sweeping arm line down to the pitcher leaning into the thrust.

Young Randy Enos (left) watches legendary sports cartoonist Willard Mullin draw.

When the painting course’s Ben Shahn would visit, I would show his slides of paintings to invited guests from the Westport Womens Club. I was chosen to do that because I was the only one in the building who knew Shahn’s work so well that I could navigate, looking at and putting each individual slide into our antique slide projector one at a time (it only held two slides). I did the same thing for the famous Chinese watercolorist Dong Kingman who used to make believe he couldn’t speak English well enough to answer the dumb questions from the audience (more about Dong in another story).

I think the funniest visit was from our superstar Guiding Faculty member … the one and only Norman Rockwell. He visited about once a year but the visit I remember best was when my friend and car-pool buddy, Zoltan raised his hand to praise Mr. Rockwell’s work. Zoltan was the schools’ staff photographer. He shot stuff for the text books mainly; it was pretty pedestrian stuff. Zoltan was a nice, simple soul, not very well versed in the art that surrounded him at the school.

Zoltan stood up and said that his favorite work of Rockwell’s was his annual Santa Claus in the Coke ads. Rockwell answered that he didn’t do the Coke ads. Zoltan’s reply was, “Yes you do … you know those great Santa Clauses… I love them!” Rockwell reiterated that he was not the illustrator that did the Coke Santa Clauses. To which, Zoltan replied, “Yes you do… the Coke ads!” Now, Zoltan was arguing with Rockwell. Finally after a few more back and forths, Zoltan quietly sat down.

I know that Zoltan was never convinced, like so many other Americans, that Rockwell didn’t do Haddon Sundblom’s Santa Clauses.