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.
Disney finally closed their huge deal to purchase Fox studios, which doesn’t include Fox News, but include the Simpsons, and movie franchises like missing chunks of Marvel including TheX-Men, The Fantastic Four and Deadpool. Mmm. Tasty.
I did another Disney Eats Fox cartoon back when the deal was first announced.
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”.
Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar has become a gift to Republicans and a favorite on Fox News. She seems to be unaware of anti-Semitic tropes and stumbles into repeated, ugly slurs against Jews. Many Democrats defend her and an awkward attempt to condemn her statements was so watered down in the House that it was laughable.
Editorial cartoonists have a special responsibility regarding anti-Semitic clichés given the history of Nazi cartoons leading up to the Holocaust. At Cagle.com we have received many ugly cartoon tropes from worldwide cartoonists over the years, particularly from Arabic language cartoonists and Latin American cartoonists. When I talk to the cartoonists about it, they tell me that they were unaware, that it wasn’t their intent; they are generally happy to take the cartoons down and they tell me they appreciate being told about why their cartoons were offensive to an American audience. The most common images depict a Star of David representing Judaism, rather than the Israeli Flag representing Israel, and use images that equate Jews with Nazis, that show Jews crucifying Palestinians as they “crucified Christ,” Jews as rats, as spiders, Jews killing babies, or like vampires drinking baby blood – the whole Nazi panoply of Der Stürmer clichés in cartoons gets repeated frequently around the world, and these cartoonists aren’t used to hearing any push-back from their local readers. Nancy Pelosi seems to see it in the same way with Omar, who Pelosi thinks simply wasn’t aware and hasn’t been educated about the bigotry.
Whatever the reasons are behind Omar’s ugly comments, she is a gift to Republicans, Trump and Fox News. My cartoon from last week shows Democrats wrapped up in Omar’s hijab, to the delight of Republicans.
Here are some more Omar favorites from last week. This one is from Steve Sack of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune …
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”.
My cartoon today is bound to anger many of my readers, who expect me to draw liberal cartoons consistently. I’ll explain it! (But my readers will still be angry. Sorry.)
First, notice how I made San Francisco Bay into the state’s mouth? (You have to consider his purple tongue as part of the land defining the shape of the bay.)
My blue, California Burger Policeman is yelling a list of War Against Burgers issues that I face when I go out to eat in Los Angeles. Here’s what the burger policeman is yelling about …
Only small cups for soda!
The California legislature is expected to pass a bill soon that will limit restaurant sales of sugary drinks, like Coca Cola, to small sized cups only. A punitive tax on sugary drinks is also expected to pass statewide, following a similar measure in the city of Berkeley that is seen as successful because it has succeeded in getting poor people to drink more water instead of more expensive soda.
Use this paper straw!
Plastic straws are being banned throughout California, replaced by paper straws that get soggy quickly.
Pay an extra waiter surcharge! The City of San Francisco has passed a law requiring restaurants to pay underpaid waiters much more. Most restaurants have passed the increased costs on to customers by raising food prices, but many San Francisco restaurants have added a separate surcharge to the bill to account for for the extra cost.
Did you request this straw first? NO? Then FIRE the waiter! Some jurisdictions in California, including Los Angeles, have new laws that impose severe penalties on restaurants that give straws to customers who didn’t ask for a straw first. There are inspectors who go to restaurants to check on compliance with the straw law, and if they find a customer didn’t ask for a straw before the waiter gave out a straw, they sock the restaurant with a big fine –this leaves restaurants in the position of mitigating the risk of big fines by clamping down on employees. I went out to dinner at the Olive Garden last week and the waitress told me that the staff was warned that if they ever handed out a straw, without the customer asking for it first, they would be fired on the spot. Of-course, the law doesn’t require that waiters be fired, but the penalties are so severe that restaurants threaten the waiters with similarly severe penalties to strike the fear of non-compliance in the waiters.
Free the chickens! California passed a law not long ago, that requires better living conditions for chickens, who can no longer be kept in small, efficient cages, thereby giving the chickens a better, and more costly, free-range lifestyle.
Cow Farts, Styrofoam and Banning Beef
These issues transcend California, so no explanation here.
I’m usually a liberal cartoonist, but I love my burgers and conservative complaints about the War on Burgers resonate with me, unlike the fictional War on Christmas.
My buddy Pat Bagley drew a similar cartoon from the opposite point of view, that is surely more acceptable to our liberal readers …
If I drew conservative cartoons all the time, I would have a much more successful career as an editorial cartoonist.
Here is my cartoon as it appeared today in the Los Angeles Daily News. It is rare for me to see my cartoon in the local newspapers in the vast editorial cartoon desert that is Los Angeles.
The SCNG group subscribes to our Cagle Cartoons package but only prints one traditional editorial cartoon per week, on Sundays; they dropped daily editorial cartoons to run the comic strip Mallard Filmore. The strip takes half the space of an editorial cartoon and is reliably conservative compared to liberal-leaning editorial cartoons, making Mallard a more attractive alternative from the newspapers’ point of view. SCNG also dropped their editorial pages entirely on Mondays and Saturdays; sadly, this is also common. (Fortunately, SCNG runs many more editorial cartoons on their Web sites.) Since only one cartoon per week can make it into print, it is rare for me to see my own cartoon in the local newspaper – of-course, one spot per week is much better than The Los Angeles Times with no spots per week and no editorial cartoons on their Web site.
Newspapers are shutting down editorial page staffs faster than they are dropping editorial pages and this sometimes works to our advantage. When SCNG and BANG consolidated all of their newspapers’ editorial page staffs, we picked up newspapers in the groups that we hadn’t been able to sell to before, so that all the papers in the groups could run the same content. A similar thing happened recently with McClatchy in North Carolina and we picked up two new papers, The Richmond News-Leader and The Durham Herald-Sun so that they can run a common weekly round-up of cartoons, prepared centrally by our brilliant cartoonist Kevin Siers at McClatchy’s The Charlotte Observer.
I’m often asked what the trends are with editorial cartooning, and my rare cartoon in my local newspaper led to this long-winded answer. We will continue to see newspapers dropping their editorial pages, sometimes dropping only two pages per week, and sometimes dropping the editorial pages entirely. I’m told that editorial pages make readers angry, and papers don’t sell advertising on the editorial page, so editorial pages can be viewed as a costly hassle. Editorial cartoons will continue to lose their newspaper homes.
Newspapers will also continue to consolidate and we’ll see editorial page staffs continue to be cut, with regional groups consolidating their editorial staffs from multiple local papers into central locations; ironically, this is good for Cagle Cartoons as our content is so much better than competing syndicate packages that we continue to pick up more papers than we lose to the consolidation trend –which is a little silver lining on a big dark cloud.
Our cartoonist Randy Enos has had a long and interesting career. Here’s another one of his stories …
When I was working as a film designer with Pablo Ferro in the 1960s, every job was an adventure. Pablo was a very innovative guy and he never wanted to do anything like what other people would do. The story I’m about to relate happened when we got a commission to do an institutional film for the “Negro Marketing Institute of Harlem.” Pablo and I went up to Harlem to meet the client and take a tour of the neighborhoods to get the feel of the place, learn some of the slang (such as “kicks” for shoes) and eat some great home cooking at a little out-of-the-way kitchen.
Back home at our studio I started working on ideas for the film. I finally hit on the notion of just throwing a lot of fast images on the screen in various styles in Pablo’s usual quick-cut filming style. To hold the whole conglomeration together I thought we would have a very long parade of drum majors and majorettes and other band members which we would slowly pan while intercutting still pictures that we and others would create.
So, the long process began of drawing many many individual pictures of faces, shoes, store fronts, words and the like. Because we needed so very many images, we enlisted the aid of anyone who happened by our office on 45th Street. This included messenger boys, friends, workmen, our secretary, wives, husbands, and actors like Vaughn Meader and Reni Santoni who often dropped by. We’d hand out pencils, ball-point pens and magic markers to one and all and just beg a picture off of them which related in some far-flung way to our subject matter. One day a girl showed up looking for a job. She was a pretty good cartoonist so we put her to work on it. She had fun just drawing anything that came into her head. She said, “I love this animation business.” I told her that this wasn’t exactly what the animation business was all about.
Meanwhile, I was busy at work on a loooooooooong roll of white paper creating my parade of colorful characters. It stretched out across one or two office spaces.
When we had a real long parade that suited us and a huge pile of assorted, colorful drawings (some professional, some amateurish and primitive) we piled into a cab and rushed down to Francis Lee’s Oxberry animation stand. Francis had a dusty, dirty loft-type studio on the east side near the U.N. building. Dust and dirt aren’t an ideal environment for shooting with animation cels but shooting with Francis had its advantages. He was a visionary, an experimenter, an avant garde explorer of the wild side. He had relationships with the New York underground film makers. He was even a friend of Jonas Mekas the renowned critic who died not long ago. Francis also contributed the famous abstract psychedelic sequence in 2001: a space odyssey. We liked the fact that Francis would go along with any crazy notion that we had.
In later times, after I left Pablo, I would still go to Francis’ stand to shoot films on my own. He would let me unscrew the bolts on the Oxberry so we could spin the table while the big 35mm camera would come sliding down the rails to film a wild spinning zoom. But, I digress.
So, we placed our parade, the unifying element in this minor masterpiece, on the animation stand locked onto the Oxberry pegs, by peg strips we had affixed to it, and started cranking the long strip of paper, increment by increment as we banged off single frames of film. We stopped when we ran out of table length and had to re-position to crank it further. All the while this was occurring, we would interject one of our friends’ drawings every now and then. Pablo and I were working like modern jazz musicians improvising on the spot as the parade and its intercuts rolled on into the wee wee hours of the night and morning.
It finally came to a finish and we sank into chairs exhausted from bending over the table all night. Francis unloaded the film reel and came over to tell us… the bad news. He had forgotten to load COLOR film. You see, this was a time when there were still a lot of commercials and film that was shot in black and white.
Well… back to the drawing board (or, in this case, back to the Oxberry stand).
My new Trump emergency cartoon is inspired by the pushmi-pullyu character from Doctor Dolittle and is something of a cartoon trope. Cartoonists have all drawn this kind of thing before. Still, it is fun to have the Jack-ass be an ass.
Not much different from an old Nickelodeon show I liked, CatDog. I drew CatDog way back in 2002 when HP merged with Compaq.
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.
WHOOOOOSH… right over the kid’s head.
Back home at our studio I started working on ideas for the film. I finally hit on the notion of just throwing a lot of fast images on the screen in various styles in Pablo’s usual quick-cut filming style. To hold the whole conglomeration together I thought we would have a very long parade of drum majors and majorettes and other band members which we would slowly pan while intercutting still pictures that we and others would create.