Here’s a story about Marcus in the Danbury News-Times, by Susan Tuz:

Jerry Marcus made up his mind to become a cartoonist after scratching his first drawings on the sidewalks of Brooklyn as a child.

“I always wanted to be a cartoonist,” Marcus told The News-Times in a 1972 interview. “Even when I was little. I sold my first cartoon at 13 to a Brooklyn bank and the year before that won a cartoon contest sponsored by a New York newspaper.”

Marcus, who went on to syndicate a daily comic about a put-upon housewife named Trudy, died on July 22 in Waterbury Hospital following a long illness. He was 81 years old.

“Trudy” appeared internationally, distributed by King Features Syndicate. She was called “Estelle” in France and “Maria” in Italy, but in every language Trudy was a young housewife with a dry wit.

Marcus said Trudy recalled his strong-willed mother. His father died when he was 3, and his mother, while suffering from crippling arthritis, raised four children in a cold-water flat in Brooklyn.

“Trudy,” a daily single panel that debuted in 1963, is distributed to more than 75 newspapers.

After serving in the Navy during World War II, where he saw action as a Seabee in the Philippines, Marcus attended the Cartoonists and Illustrators School in New York City. He began submitting magazine cartoons in 1947 and made his first professional sale to “Argosy” magazine, eventually supporting himself with free-lance work for magazines and trade journals.

Cartoons by Marcus appeared in the Saturday Evening Post and The New Yorker magazine, Look, McCall’s and the Ladies’ Home Journal.

“Dad was world-renowned,” said Marcus’ daughter, Jeremia Beucheimaier. “We’d travel around the world when I was growing up. We’d go to Denmark and Holland and he was like a superstar there. His cartoons run today poster-size in subway stations in Tokyo. He did a series for the Tokyo subway system five years ago.”

Later in his career, Marcus became interested in acting, and joined the Screen Actors Guild in 1970. He was an extra in the movie Exodus and had a bit part in Loving with Eva Marie Saint and George Segal. He did a number of commercials for major brands like McDonald’s, Rice Chex and Timex.

But his main source of income was always his cartoons.

“Jerry and I would take the train into New York City every week in the 1960s through the 1980s making the rounds. That was when cartoonists went into the city to see editors. We’d see up to 25 in a day,” recalled cartoonist Joseph Farris, who lives in Bethel. “A groups of us would go: Dana Fradon, Orlando Busino, Lee Lorenz, Jerry and me. It was a rough business. The odds were against you. Editors would see several thousand cartoons a week and they’d buy maybe 20 or 25.” [Click on links above for NYer cartoons by Farris, Fradon, and Lorenz.]

Marcus lived in Ridgefield at that time. In later years, he would move to Danbury and then to Waterbury for medical reasons.

“We stood out in Ridgefield,” Buecheimaier recalled. “Dad would drive around in his Cord, a classic car from the 1930s that had been totally refurbished. It wasn’t the norm. As I look back on it, I’m grateful that I had such interesting and unique parents but at the time, as a kid, I just wanted us to fit in.”

Marcus had a roster of well-known cartoonists for friends. A group met at Nick’s restaurant in Danbury for years, eventually moving the meeting to Bethel restaurants. For the past several years, they have met weekly at Plain Jane’s in Bethel.

“Jerry Marcus was an artist with a great natural sense of humor,” said long-time friend and fellow cartoonist Orlando Busino. “He was a true friend and we’ll miss him very much.”

Among Marcus’ many fans were comedian Jackie Gleason, presidential adviser Bernard Baruch and presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy, who had Marcus original cartoons hung in the White House.

Marcus is survived by his daughters Jeremia Buecheimaier of Brookfield and Julie Marcus of Phoenicia, N.Y., two sons, Julius Marcus of Westport and Gary Marcus of Palm Beach, Fla., and three grandchildren, Alex, Philip and Bridget Buecheimaier.

Contributions may be made in his memory to The Ridgefield Library.

Editor and Publisher adds:

It was Marcus who suggested the last name of Bailey for the title character in “Beetle Bailey” by Mort Walker of King. Saturday Evening Post cartoon editor John Bailey had published some of the early work of Marcus and Walker.

Marcus’s wife, the radio broadcaster Delphine Marcus, died in May; she had a fascinating life, too. (There’s a photo here.) Her mother’s name was Estelle, which suggests it was the inspiration for Trudy’s French alias. A bit more about Marcus’s White House presence and his life in Connecticut, from the Ridgefield Press:

In 1960, Gary Powers’ U-2 spy plane flight was shot down over Russia and Premier Nikita Krushchev cancelled a summit meeting. Soon after, President Eisenhower made a speech in Portugal that began, “Have any of you seen that recent cartoon that said: ‘The next speaker needs all the introduction he can get?” The cartoon was by Jerry Marcus, and thereafter it hung in the White House, the first of two to be so honored. The other, which appeared just after John-John Kennedy was born, showed two guards outside an otherwise darkened White House, with a single brightly-lit window. “It’s probably the 2 o’clock feeding,” one guard says. Since 1947, Jerry Marcus’s gag cartoons have appeared in every major magazine, from The New Yorker to the Paris Match. While most successful cartoonists stick to either magazine gags or newspaper strips, Mr. Marcus is unusual: he’s been successful at both…. He came to Ridgefield in 1956 and worked here more than 40 years before moving to Danbury. He often appears with fellow cartoonists in programs at schools and libraries in the area, and hundreds of his cartoons have appeared in The Press, especially during the 1960s and 1970s
when his work ran weekly.

Jerry Marcus drawings [Cartoon Bank] [Update: the first drawing above is from The New Yorker (the September 23, 1991, issue); the third is not.]
Jerry Marcus, 1924-2005 [The Comics Reporter, via The Great Curve]
Comic creator: Jerry Marcus [Comiclopedia]
Trudy [About and archives, King Features Syndicate; also from King, a longer bio of Marcus.]

Categories: NYer, Cartoons, Obits

From the St. Paul Pioneer Press:

Rowland B. Wilson, cartoonist

Rowland B. Wilson, whose watercolor cartoons were instantly recognizable to readers of Playboy, the Saturday Evening Post, Esquire and the New Yorker, died on June 28 at Scripps Memorial Hospital in Encinitas, Calif. He was 74 and lived in La Costa, Calif.

The cause was heart failure, his daughter Megan Wilson said in a statement. His sketches for a new cartoon for Playboy were on his drawing board when he died, she said.

Long a mainstay of Playboy, Wilson’s full-page color panels often were playful but generally tamer than those of fellow artists in the magazine. He enjoyed drawing dragons, poker-playing reindeer and Santa Claus, whom he once depicted, surrounded by elves, accepting an award “on behalf of all the little people who did so much to make it possible.”

Wilson’s cartoons poked fun at the blandness of human response to trauma and danger. “You think I’m obligated to come across now, don’t you, you male chauvinist pig!?” says a disenchanted damsel to her exhausted knight and rescuer in a Playboy cartoon. In another one, an airplane pilot’s view of the landscape is a Monopoly board.

In the early 1970s, Wilson moved to London, where he worked in animation. After returning to the United States, he was an animator on the Disney films “The Little Mermaid,” “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” “Tarzan” and “Hercules.” He was awarded a daytime Emmy for his animation on “Schoolhouse Rock!” His cartoon collection, The Whites of Their Eyes, was published in 1962.

The New York Times and Los Angeles Times contributed to this report.

On the discussion board Animation Nation, an illuminating post by Michael Hirsh:

Oddly enough, I read this news just as I finished optimizing some scans of the painting guides he handed out to us background painters at Don Bluth’s studio in Ireland. (Link in post below)

Rowland was a good mentor to me in those days. As well as contributing to the art direction of Thumbelina, he also acted as the live action reference for one of the characters in the film; King Colbert.

As they say in Ireland: “His likes will not be seen in these parts again”.
…
If you would like to view the background artist’s painting guides written and illustrated by Rowland, you can download them here:

Layout Composition (3 pages)
Illusion of Space (4 pages)
Painting Light (4 pages)

These scans have been optimized for printing out onto A4 paper. They are around 1Mb each.

I did not have (or could not find) the colour version of the Illusion of Space painting guide, but it still makes sense if you take the time to read it. [Smile]

The guides are delightful, not to mention beautiful and useful, both for visual artists and the rest of us. “Leave some air or breathing space for the eye to rest in.” “In the best Disney layouts, the lights describe the objects. The light-struck parts emerge from basically one tone of shadow. Study them.” “The importance of harmony cannot be overstressed.” “Be a witness. Make your picture what the witness saw.”

Gallery of Wilson images [theispot]
Eight Wilson illustrations [Graphic Collectibles]
Rowland B. Wilson, R.I.P. [Cartoon Brew]

Categories: NYer, Cartoons, Magazines, Obits

This just in from Minor Tweaks: the first draft of O’Connor’s resignation letter. Also, from the current Time:

Self-reliance was also a political value: her father Harry was a staunch opponent of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. And it was a reason to respect knowledge: O’Connor’s mother Ada Mae, a college graduate, would read to her from the New Yorker and the Wall Street Journal, and when Sandra was 5 years old she went to El Paso, Texas, where she lived with her grandmother and went to Radford, a private girls’ school. All this and more…

Where it will all end, knows God.

Categories: NYer, Law

Henry Gould notes, re: Anthony Lane’s piece on “The Disappearing Poet”:

An article on Weldon Kees in this week’s New Yorker.

Kees articles tend to surface mysteriously, periodically, on some kind of comet cycle of decans.

Everything can be explained, probably, by Nebraska.

Categories: NYer, Issue, Poetry, Lane

Special report from the Seattle and Chicago airports:

From today’s Times, a nice obituary for Herbert Warren Wind, a New Yorker and Sports Illustrated legend and the “dean of American golf writers.”

Mr. Wind was a short, slender, serious man who wore a tweed jacket, shirt, tie and cap on the golf course, even in the hottest weather. A graduate of Yale with a master’s degree from Cambridge, he wrote with an elegant but straightforward style that showed respect for his subject, whether it was golf, his first love, or other sports like tennis and baseball.

“Every time you read him, you get a history lesson, a golf lesson and a life lesson,” the professional golfer Ben Crenshaw said.

Mr. Wind’s narrative powers were displayed in a profile of Arnold Palmer for The Sporting Scene in The New Yorker of June 9, 1962.

“Let us say he is a stroke behind, with the holes running out, as he mounts the tee to play a long par 4,” Mr. Wind wrote. “The fairway is lined by some 10,000 straining spectators – Arnold’s Army, as the sportswriters have chosen to call them – and a shrill cry goes up as he cuts loose a long drive, practically lifting himself off his feet in his effort to release every last ounce of power at the moment of impact. He moves down the fairway toward the ball in long, eager strides, a cigarette in his hand, his eyes on the distant green as he considers every aspect of his coming approach shot. They are eyes with warmth and humor in them as well as determination, for this is a mild and pleasant man. Palmer’s chief attraction, for all that, is his dashing style of play. He is always attacking the course, being temperamentally incapable of paying it safe instead of shooting directly at the flag.”

Mr. Wind was a staff writer for The New Yorker from 1947 to 1954. He left to write for the new magazine Sports Illustrated. In 1962, he returned to The New Yorker and stayed there until he retired.

His first writing in The New Yorker was a poem in 1941 and his last was a review of the 1989 United States Open tennis championship. Of the 141 articles he wrote for the magazine, 132 were for the section called The Sporting Scene. Although those reports appeared well after a competition ended, they were eagerly awaited by the participants, fans and colleagues in the news media.
…
The author John Updike was Mr. Wind’s colleague at The New Yorker.

“He really gave you a heaping measure of his love of the game,” Mr. Updike said. “He was so knowing, so perceptive. He could play, too. About a decade ago, I took him to the Myopia course in Hamilton, Mass. He walked with me when I played a few holes, but I couldn’t get him to hit the ball. I suspect he didn’t think he could do it as well as he once did.”

Mr. Wind’s love affair with golf and the Masters never waned. At age 84, more than 10 years removed from his last trip to the Masters, he asked another golf writer, “Tell me, is Augusta still beautiful?”

I’m going to see if I can get hold of that poem. Wind also wrote the foreword for P.G. Wodehouse’s The Clicking of Cuthbert (1922). One review says, “Herbert Warren Wind’s Foreword is a sparkling biography of Wodehouse and a splendid way to start the book. Wind did a profile of Wodehouse for The New Yorker magazine and spent a good deal of time with him while researching his essay. It was later published in book form in England under the title, The World of P.G. Wodehouse.”

Update: More memories of Wind, with new interviews and content, in the Enterprise (which covers his hometown of Brockton, MA):

“He was not a loud talker for himself but for the sport that he loved,” said his brother, Jack Wind, from his home on Rock Meadow Drive…. Wind, 85, said when his brother would arrive at a prestigious golf tournament, including the Masters and U.S. Open, people “just crowded around him for information.”

And in the Augusta Chronicle (annoying signup process):

Wind was one of the most famous golf writers and he covered the sport for The New Yorker and Sports Illustrated. He covered every important golfer from Gene Sarazen to Ben Hogan to Jack Nicklaus before retiring in 1990.

“Herbert Warren Wind was one of the greatest golf writers that ever lived,” Augusta National and Masters Tournament chairman Hootie Johnson said. “For many years he wrote wonderful stories about the Masters and the players that competed in the tournament.”

In the April 21, 1958, edition of Sports Illustrated, Wind used the phrase Amen Corner to describe the action from that year’s Masters. He got the name from a jazz recording titled Shouting at Amen Corner from a band directed by Milton Mezzrow.

There’s another obituary in Cybergolf: “Wind was on a first-name basis with the legends of the game: Bobby Jones, Sam Snead, Gene Sarazen, Jack Nicklaus and Ben Hogan. ‘He was a great historian of the game and a terrific writer,’ Nicklaus said Tuesday. ‘You look back on how golf has been written over the years and there have been three or four guys who really stood above the rest. He was certainly one of them.’ “

Golf Writer Herbert Warren Wind, 88, Dies [NYT]
The Fateful Corner: A reflective look-back at the Masters confirms history’s affinity for the 12th and 13th [Wind, Sports Illustrated, April 21, 1958]
Books by Herbert Warren Wind [Alibris]

I liked this Times obit of the 83-year old Hoffman, who championed good poetry during a time when lady editors were quite a bit more hampered by lady-ness than they are now:

Elizabeth McFarland Hoffman, who as poetry editor of Ladies’ Home Journal sandwiched the work of W. H. Auden, Adrienne Rich and Sylvia Plath in between “Is Your Marriage a Masquerade?” and “Bing Crosby’s Kitchen for His Bride,” died last Thursday in Philadelphia.
…
While Ms. Hoffman was at Ladies’ Home Journal, from 1948 to 1962, the magazine published at least a half-dozen poems in each monthly issue. Major 20th-century writers whose verse appeared there included Marianne Moore, John Ciardi, Mark Van Doren, Randall Jarrell, Maxine Kumin, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Walter de la Mare, Galway Kinnell, Maxwell Anderson and John Updike.

Ms. Hoffman’s own poems, published under her maiden name, also appeared in the magazine. She left Ladies’ Home Journal in 1962, after its new owners stopped publishing poetry.

I had to go back and read that again myself: six poems per issue! No one does that anymore. What a loss for the women who read these magazines. The young Plath, and many more with literary gifts (Mary Cantwell comes to mind), would likely not have become distinguished writers if the women’s magazines they worked for in the fifties hadn’t been distinguished publishers of fiction and poetry themselves. Young women have always collected trivia about beauty secrets that take up considerable space in the brain (in which direction should eyebrow hair be tweezed? I know you know the answer, fellow trivia-gatherers), but at least they could turn to a good short story afterward. Not that there wasn’t a bit of cognitive dissonance:

Usually set in a box in the middle of a page, the poems created some arresting juxtapositions. In the August 1950 issue, “Secrets,” by Auden, follows an ad for Velveeta. In September 1956, “Where the Bodies Break,” by Mr. Kinnell, shares a page with “How to Make 10 Tantalizing Butter Waffles With That Tender Melt-Away Texture.”

Readers of the June 1953 issue, which featured “A Glass of Summer Daisies,” by Jessamyn West, could, a page later, contemplate the question, “Did you wake up today with ‘morning mouth’?”

Oh well, headlines and ad copy are a kind of poetry. Galway Kinnell has something of a tender melt-away texture, when you think about it.

The magazine had a history of such juxtapositions. Under Edward Bok, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer who edited Ladies’ Home Journal from 1889 to 1919, it published fiction by Sarah Orne Jewett, Bret Harte and Rudyard Kipling alongside articles on childrearing, Jennifer Scanlon, the author of “Inarticulate Longings: The Ladies’ Home Journal, Gender, and the Promises of Consumer Culture” (Routledge, 1995), said in a telephone interview yesterday.

There’s lots not to be nostalgic about when it comes to the fifties, a statement so obvious I shouldn’t have to say it. But we’re still left with women’s mags that have little to offer the mind (besides de-stressing and work-promotion advice, which are good but not what I mean). So don’t read them, you say. Well, exactly.

Elizabeth Hoffman, 82, Editor for Ladies’ Home Journal, Dies [NYT]

A sad story about the violent death of Ismael Kurkculer, a former Algonquin Hotel waiter who was killed in Jersey City on Thursday by someone the police suspect he may have known.

For more than five years Kurkculer, a Turkish national, worked as a waiter at Manhattan’s famed upscale, 174-room Algonquin Hotel, on 44th Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues. A hotel manager at the Algonquin notified staff of Kurkculer’s death on Thursday night.

“Everybody is shocked,” said one of Kurkculer’s fellow waiters who declined to provide his name.

“He was one of the nicest guys there are,” the employee said, standing outside of the century-old hotel yesterday.

The waiter said Kurkculer was “one of the best” waiters at the Algonquin and was known for his politeness toward guests.

“He was so quiet, so professional, always talking nice. For that kind of person to have an enemy, I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head as his voice trailed off.

DeFazio said a manager at the hotel got a shock when he called Kurkculer’s apartment on Thursday to see check on his employee, only to have a county homicide investigator answer the phone.

“The Algonquin manager called (Kurkculer’s) apartment Thursday afternoon out of concern because he received a call from a Jersey Journal reporter about the victim,” DeFazio said.

Yesterday a hotel representative declined comment, citing company policy.

Broken beer bottle was weapon in Jersey City bedroom stabbing [Jersey Journal]

From today’s Washington Post:

Faith McNulty, 86, author of the 1980 bestseller The Burning Bed, which focused national attention on domestic violence, died April 10 at her farm in South Kingstown, R.I. No cause of death was reported.

Ms. McNulty also wrote for the “Talk of the Town” section in the New Yorker magazine for four decades and wrote wildlife and children’s books, including How to Dig a Hole to the Other Side of the World.

The Burning Bed told the story of Francine Hughes, an abused woman who killed her husband by setting him afire as he slept and who was acquitted on self-defense. The book became a TV movie in 1984 and starred Farrah Fawcett.

Ms. McNulty, a native of New York, began her news career as a copy girl at the New York Daily News. She also was a reporter and researcher for Life magazine and wrote for Audubon magazine.

And from the Providence Journal, McNulty’s local paper:

She and her second husband, John McNulty—whom she met at the Daily News and who later wrote for The New Yorker—kept company with such literary luminaries as Joseph Mitchell, James Thurber, E.B. White, John Cheever, A.J. Leibling and S.J. Perelman.

Her heart’s work was writing wildlife articles and books, on such topics as whales, black-footed ferrets and whooping cranes. The book on black-footed ferrets, Must They Die?, was instrumental in getting a pesticide banned.
…
Mrs. McNulty was a slight woman, demure of speech, bright of gaze, and refreshingly innocent of fashion. She preferred old pants, long skirts, baggy sweaters (pilled), and Birkenstocks. Her cocktail garb was often a blue jean skirt, and a necklace—with Birkenstocks.

She was a first-rate raconteur who delivered stories with dry, sometimes biting wit. She often recounted her early life in New York City, or writing adventures such as her 2,000-mile Jeep ride through Madagascar, or her face-to-face meeting with Koko the gorilla. “We met and after an exchange of gifts, Koko the gorilla kissed me. She smelled sweet, like new-mown hay, and we looked into each other’s eyes with almost equal curiosity.”
…
Gerry Goldstein, former longtime chief of The Journal‘s South County bureau in Wakefield said, “To sum her up, she always amazed me. She led this really romantic and Runyonesque life in New York City, with her second husband, who was the best friend of James Thurber. She was probably as sophisticated a mind as you can ever run across.”

And yet, Goldstein said, “there was something very gentle and maternal about her, and that’s what produced all these dozens of children’s stories. She could write a story about a delicate little field mouse and always retain the hard edge of a journalist, and that’s maybe why she could produce something like The Burning Bed.”
…
Mrs. McNulty published her first fiction piece for The New Yorker in 1943, “a teeny tiny little story” that happened to be about South County.

In 1953, Mrs. McNulty signed on as a “Talk of the Town” reporter, writing regularly about South County. She turned to wildlife writing after her third husband, Richard Martin, found a mouse on the doorstep and she was inspired to write about the little creature.

Obituaries: Of Note [WaPo]
Burning Bed author McNulty loved her life in South County [Providence Journal, login]
Lasting Faith: Better times live on in Faith McNulty’s elegant prose [2001 interview, Providence Journal]
A Journalist Joins the War Effort From London: Faith McNulty Martin [Oral history, via WKCD: “In those days a city room was a very fast-moving place where pieces of paper had to go from one desk to another, and they used to use copy boys to carry the stuff. I was hired because the boys had gone to war. It was a very good break for me, and I was crazy about it…”]
Adopt a black-footed ferret [Smithsonian National Zoological Park; they’re in trouble, and wicked cute.]

Update: I did adopt one. (Virtually, I mean.) I’ll post the very fuzzy picture at some point and see if I can badger the zoo into giving me some news about the little nipper. I named it McNulty.

Categories: McNulty, Obits, Books

R.I.P., Miss Gould. Verlyn Klinkenborg:

To some people, I suspect, she came to embody the negative image of the copy editor: punctilious, schoolmarmish and blue-stockinged. But the grasp she had on the written word, on the inner springs and impulses of the language, made grammar and syntax and diction resemble the laws of physics. From one angle, those laws mark the limits of nature. From another angle, they define the very energies that shape the universe and make it intelligible.

In a review of 75th-anniversary New Yorker books I wrote five years ago for Newsday, I made an awful error that was compounded by the newspaper’s customary lack of a checking department: I referred to “the late Miss Gould.” Now that the fact is true, that intelligible universe is sadly less so.

Later: In the February 28 issue, Remnick writes his own tribute to the Grammarian. “She shaped the language of the magazine, always striving for a kind of Euclidean clarity—transparent, precise, muscular. It was an ideal that seemed to have not only syntactical but moral dimensions.”
Gould—like Orwell, Fowler, Bernstein, White, and the modest others now marking proofs in offices—knew well that clear language so often indicates a clear conscience, or will once the copy editor is done with it. “That type is all but extinct,” we say of such people, as of a Galapagos turtle. When the real death occurs it is immeasurably sadder.

The Point of Miss Gould’s Pencil [NY Times]
Miss Eleanor Gould ’38, Grammarian Extraordinaire, Holds The Line at The New Yorker [Oberlin alumni magazine]
An Ode to Miss Gould: The Fallibility Rag [Cynthia Ozick, via PBK]