connecticut – DarylCagle.com

Man’s Achievements in an Ever Expanding Universe

I was the Green Canary

Tags cartoonist, connecticut, Merrimac Street School, New Bedford High School, Parker Street School, Randy Enos, Red Cross, school

Blog Newsletter Syndicate

Englehart Decade!

Post author By Daryl Cagle
Post date December 16, 2019

Here are Bob Englehart’s favorite cartoons of the past decade! For decades, Bob was the staff cartoonist for The Hartford Courant newspaper in Connecticut.

See Bob’s favorite cartoons on USA Todayhttps://www.usatoday.com/picture-gallery/opinion/cartoons/2019/12/14/decade-cartoons-best-bob-englehart/4393124002/ where you can click on each cartoon and see it blown up to fill the screen with a pretty, high-resolution image. See the complete archive of Bob’s syndicated cartoons here.

Look at our other, great collections of Cartoons Favorites of the Decade, selected by the artists.
Pat Bagley Decade!
Nate Beeler Decade!
Daryl Cagle Decade!
Patrick Chappatte Decade!
John Cole Decade!
John Darkow Decade!
Bill Day Decade!
Sean Delonas Decade!
Bob Englehart Decade!
Randall Enos Decade!
Dave Granlund Decade!
Taylor Jones Decade!
Mike Keefe Decade!
Peter Kuper Decade!
Jeff Koterba Decade!
RJ Matson Decade!
Gary McCoy Decade!
Rick McKee Decade!
Milt Priggee Decade!
Bruce Plante Decade!
Steve Sack Decade!

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

Blog Newsletter Syndicate

Happy Times in the Morgue

Post author By Daryl Cagle
Post date October 20, 2019

My cartoonist buddy, Randy Enos, writes today about his trips to the library for photo scrap (this is something I also did frequently as a young illustrator in Manhattan, before the internet, running up to the big public library’s big photo-scrap morgue on 42nd Street (the library with the big lion statues in front); my second home in those days.)

Email Randy Enos
Visit Randy’s archive –Daryl

In my early days as an illustrator, like all the other illustrators, I kept a picture file of various things I might have to draw on an assignment. I’d have pictures of: trucks, cars, tractors, motorcycles, barns, rockets, famous people, etc.. I’d regularly clip up magazines for this purpose. Because I didn’t draw in a realistic manner, I didn’t have to keep the extensive kinds of files that my realist friends did. I could just invent and cartoon most of my material. I could sometimes draw a motorcycle, for instance, in a very fanciful way with strange gears and funny faucets sticking out all over, but, occasionally more realism was required.

I needed pictures of famous people of the day more than anything else because I was doing a lot of caricaturing for N.B.C., The National Lampoon, The Nation, The New York Times, etc.

These files, that all the illustrators kept, were called “morgues”. Some illustrators required so much attention to this collection of source material that they would hire somebody to clip pictures and organize their morgues for them. It could be a full time job.

A typical extensive file was kept by Al Dorne, my boss at The Famous Artists Schools. When he retired from doing illustrations and eventually moved to Westport to work full time at the schools, he put his morgue in our library there at FAS for all the instructors to be able to use. It was a great resource for us along with the really fine art books that were there and the magazines like Graphis from Switzerland and Gebrauschsgraphik from Germany which turned out to be a giant influence on me and my own work.

At home, I had the World Book encyclopedia and I still use it in my studio along with a world atlas, copies of the old Sears Roebuck catalogs and some books on costume etc..

We were fortunate in Westport to have a little downtown library that was geared up for illustrators. They had nice picture files and when I, or some other illustrator, would just walk in the front door of the library, the woman at the desk would shout over and say, “What do you need?” She’d make a call to the picture files and in 5 minutes, we’d have folders brought up to the desk full of just the pictures we needed. It was a very comfortable, friendly, warm library with great art books. You could settle down cross-legged on the floor in a small, narrow passageway in the stacks where the art books were or sit in a window seat looking out over the Saugatuck River and read books that other communities who were not blessed with a population of cartoonists and illustrators would not even have on their shelves. That part of the old library is now a Starbucks, because, over time, with the growth in population, the library felt they needed a new building and so it came to pass that on a nearby location, a big brand new library was constructed. This time they had a small room off the big entrance area that was designated for the picture morgue; the walls were lined with file drawers that contained hundreds and hundreds of clipped magazine pictures and glossy photos of famous people. Into this collection came the Al Dorne files from FAS along with other files donated by famous illustrators who had retired from the business. When you went into this room, you’d always find a fellow cartoonist or illustrator to gab with. It was a great meeting place for some of the most illustrious illustrators of the day. You could compare notes, talk about the business and give each other tips on whatever we happened to be looking up. One illustrator had a vast (and I mean vast) collection of costumes that he would rent out to other illustrators to use as reference. This guy had everything in his collection. He even had one of Hitler’s actual hats!

The only problem with some of the material in the Dorne file, for instance, was that it was outdated, so, the library employed people to just keep clipping and updating all the files.

But, alas, the days of the computer and its attendant internet came along and enabled us all to stay at home and access all the reference we needed instantly without the burden of having to socialize with other cartoonists and illustrators. Pardon me while I catch this tear rolling down my cheek.

The library shut down for a while and did a major reconstruction resulting in a bigger, very high-ceilinged main room which allowed for local artists to have a personal month-long exhibit of their work. In the middle of this area, a few tables contained the very latest art books. I devoured them regularly. They also put in a little coffee nook near the entrance.

The population of Westport was changing. The illustrators were moving out and going back home to Texas. They didn’t need to be near New York City anymore, nor did they need libraries with picture files. Rich folks in the financial businesses were moving in. Pretty soon there was nary an illustrator left. I, myself, moved to nearby Easton to my own little horse farm to escape the onslaught of the wealthy new residents who didn’t even know that Westport was once known as the illustrators’ town. Eventually Max’s art store had to shut down and the library decided to have an even bigger re-do.

I hadn’t been in to the library for quite a while until recently when I happened to be in the vicinity (at a Save the Planet rally) and had to go to the bathroom. My wife and I walked over to the library. It took us quite a while to locate the entrance. They had completely changed the building around. When inside, I couldn’t believe my eyes. there were some sort of baffles, looked like sails up at the top of the high ceiling. I searched for the bathrooms because where they used to be was now a utility closet. When I finally found them, I discovered that they were approximately where the old picture file room, the morgue used to be. The men’s room was sparse and all-over decorated with a pattern of elongated rectangles in two or three shades of gray that I had seen repeated in the library’s entrance way and pretty much over all the flooring. It was very cold and impersonal. when I went to the sink, it took me quite a while to figure out why there were no faucets or hand dryers but just a horizontal chrome bar where a faucet normally would be. This bar functioned as a dispenser of hot and cold water and a little almost imperceptible symbol on the right side of it told me that it might be a hand dryer if I passed my hand under it. My mind flashed back to the old library on the Post Road where I would usually find a homeless guy washing his delicates and himself in the men’s room. I was thinking that the poor man could never negotiate this ever so clever, robotic, state-of-the-art, chic apparatus. I wondered where the poor fellow hung out now. Certainly not in this rich man’s paradise.

I went back out into the library’s main room. I didn’t see anybody sitting reading books but I did see a woman looking at a lap top. I looked around for the checkout counter which used to be manned by several people while a line of people laden with books waited to check them out. There wasn’t any. I did see a very small desk with a sign that read “Patrons’ Desk”. I decided to inquire about where one would find the new latest art books. The woman there didn’t know so she asked another library woman standing nearby. She didn’t know but she asked a man stacking a small shelf from his cart. He said he didn’t know but he showed me a book on his shelf on ceramics. I looked fondly up to where a second floor full of art books used to exist. There was no second floor there anymore. We passed a small desk which was labeled “Podcast Station”. there were microphones and head-sets. Inexplicably, there was a very wide set of stairs leading up and then down into another section of the big main room. On the stairs were a few leather, bean-bag chairs which were unoccupied. It was all very upgrade and ultra-chic like a Sunday spread in The New York Times. The whole area that we were in at that point used to be lined with stacks and stacks of shelved books. I saw very few books anywhere but there were a lot of movie CD’s and big screens with projections of one thing or another. Gone were all the little computer stations that had replaced the old card catalogs. Oh, and the little coffee bar had been replaced by a full-blown cafe eatery. The eatery was full but the rest of the library had very few people in it.

By carefully reading all the signs, and a few wrong turns, we were thankfully able to find our way out of the building but it wasn’t easy, believe me.

They had surgically removed all the heart, goodness, calm, love, spirit, kindness, quiet, charm, warmth, tranquility, peacefulness, generosity, reverence, simplicity, intelligence and meaning of the old library and replaced it all with overly designed superficial techno glitz.

If I wanted to take a longer trip away from my house, I could find myself at the Pequot Library. It’s in a very old charming brown castle-like building. It’s small, the floors creak. There are old card catalogs where you look up the desired book. There is a good-sized room with a big fireplace which is furnished with large logs in the winter so visitors can sit in big comfortable easy chairs and read in front of the fire. it’s a real trip to wander through the old book stacks. I haven’t been there in a long while but, at least I know somewhere where the spirit of the reverence of books is still alive … or, is it?

Read many more of Randy’s cartooning memories:

Born in a Volcano

When I was a Famous Chinese Watercolorist

My Most Unusual Art Job

A Duck Goes Into a Grocery Store

A Day With Jonathan Winters and Carol Burnett

Illustrating the Sea

Why I Started Drawing

The Fastest Illustrator in the World!

Man’s Achievements in an Ever Expanding Universe

Why I Started Drawing

Tags connecticut, Randall Enos, Westport Public Library

Blog Newsletter Syndicate

Illustrating the Sea

Post author By Daryl Cagle
Post date August 27, 2019

By my seafaring, whale-loving, cartoonist buddy Randy Enos!

Email Randy Enos
Visit Randy’s archive –Daryl

At the opening, Jack Davis’ pirate (which he had done for me, just for the show) sold for $5,000 right away. I cinched the sale by telling the buyer what an icon Davis was and his historic association with Mad Magazine and how he had influenced a whole generation of artists stylistically.

My relationship with Mystic Seaport in Connecticut goes back quite a few years. I started visiting there because in 1941, the last wooden whaleship in the United States went to live there because the millionaire, Colonel Green, who had it in his possession didn’t leave enough money when he died to take care of it. A group of artists got together to save the ship and eventually convinced Mystic to take it just before war broke out with Japan when they bombed Pearl Harbor. It is named the Charles W. Morgan and it was born a hundred years before me in my hometown. My interest in studying whaling history took me to Mystic very frequently to walk the decks of the Morgan. In its 80 years on the sea, there are three men named Enos on the crew lists.

On the Mystic Seaport wharf there is a blacksmith’s shop. That shop was brought there from New Bedford, my home town and was the shop of John D. Driggs. I own two harpoons that he made and I have taken them to Mystic to show the blacksmiths that work there at the shop because they have never seen actual Driggs harpoons. In the whaling days, the blacksmiths signed the harpoon heads along with markings which show the boat the harpoon was assigned to and the ship it was on.

As time went on I ended up doing some posters for events there at the seaport and they also carried giclées of a few of my whaling pictures. Six necktie designs were made from the elements of a border on one of my pictures and they continue to be sold at their shop. One day while I was there they had a new exhibit opening in their nice little art gallery. It was all the same old stuff, sailboats in watercolor, sailboats in oil, sailboats, sailboats and sailboats. I said to the director of the seaport, who I had gotten to know pretty well, “Y’know, I know a bunch of famous illustrators and cartoonists that I bet could make pictures of the sea that would be much more interesting than this stuff!” Then he asked me if I would curate a show of these illustrators and cartoonists for the gallery. I had never done anything like that before. I started to regret I had said anything but he persisted so I said that I’d try to see what kind of response I’d get from my artist friends. So, I started e-mailing everybody I could think of, concentrating on the most famous guys in the business. It pays to have been in the work as long as I had because I knew all the famous guys and they liked me. I got a very enthusiastic response. I asked if they would put as many pictures as they’d like in my show. The only requirement would be that the pictures would be about the sea in some form or other. Mystic paid for shipping and framing. Everything would be for sale and Mystic would take a modest percentage from the sales.

And so, “Illustrating The Sea” was born. Mystic lined up some TV and radio interviews with me to promote the show and they also featured some pictures from the exhibit at their annual booth at the Javit’s Center where I was there to answer questions and plug the event.

The hump I had to get over was that almost all of these artists would be unknown to the average person and the prices on the art would be a little more than they were used to. I had to inform the potential buyers of the reputations and the place each of the artists held as actual historic entities in the world of American illustration and cartooning.

Click on the image to read more about Randy and his whaling art.

Peter deSeve, a renowned New Yorker artist and children’s book illustrator and character designer for numerous famous animated films and a former student of mine (he must have been impressed by me in art school because he went out and married a woman named Randall!), went on NBC’s Today Show with me to plug the exhibit.

I had work from 42 artists in the show. Here are just a few of the names you might know… Bernie Fuchs, Gary Baseman, R. O. Blechman, Lou Brooks, Seymour Chwast, Guy Billout, Jack Davis, Brad Holland, Gary Kelley, Jack Unruh, and Bonnie Timmons. An unlikely group to be illustrating the sea, eh? Well, they did it. Many of them gave me 2, 3 or 4 pictures or more. It was the most unusual show that the Mystic Seaport gallery EVER had!

At the opening, Jack Davis’ pirate (which he had done for me just for the show) sold for $5,000 right away. I cinched the sale by telling the buyer what an icon Davis was and his historic association with Mad Magazine and how he had influenced a whole generation of artists stylistically. A little later the same buyer bought Wendell Minor’s book cover “Revenge of the Whale” for another $5,000. Another $5,000 went for my friend Gene Hoffman’s sculpture “Killer Whale”. I was afraid the high prices that some of the artists put on their work would scare off buyers but then Kinuko Craft’s book jacket painting of “Jane and the Prisoner of Woolhouse” sold for $20,000. I sold two or three pictures and so did many of the other artists so it was a pretty successful show.

The artists that lived in the region came and many stayed over in Mystic courtesy of the Seaport. The next morning, I took everybody on a tour of the Morgan and explained how all the equipment on board functioned and I told of how the whale was processed on the ship in order to extract the valuable whale oil. I was told later by the head of the Seaport that one of their regular ship guides had been standing off to the side listening to me and said, “Who is this guy and how does he know so much about whaling?”

We had a lovely little catalog printed for the show and here is the last paragraph of my introduction on the first page:

“The men and women represented here do more than just replicate the obvious surface vision of the sea, they plumb its depths to reveal the energy and expression, meaning and story that only an illustrator can.”

Read many more of Randy’s cartooning memories:

The Fastest Illustrator in the World!

Man’s Achievements in an Ever Expanding Universe

Tags and Bonnie Timmons, Bernie Fuchs, Brad Holland, Charles W. Morgan, Colonel Green, connecticut, Gary Baseman, Gary Kelley, Gene Hoffman's, Guy Billout, Jack Davis, Jack Unruh, John D. Driggs, Lou Brooks, Mystic Seaport, Peter deSeve, R. O. Blechman, Seymour Chwast

Blog Newsletter Syndicate

How to Get Out of a Parking Ticket

Post author By Daryl Cagle
Post date August 7, 2019

My cartoonist buddy, Randy Enos explains how a cartoonist gets out of a parking ticket.

… a confused cop who is scratching his head and looking up and down and sideways trying to see any evidence of signage.

Email Randy Enos
Visit Randy’s archive –Daryl

Cartoonists possess a secret weapon whether they know it or not which will be shown in this little short story.

My wife and I and another couple went out to dinner one night. I was driving. We went to a city next door to us called Norwalk Ct.. There’s a nice little district there which has artists’ studios and interesting restaurants. I parked very close to the seafood restaurant we had selected. I carefully looked around for any “no parking” signs and saw none. It looked like a safe place to park… no restrictions in evidence. No signs at all.

After we finished eating and came back out to the car, there was a big, expensive parking ticket affixed to my windshield. I couldn’t believe it. We all looked around again and saw no signs at all in the vicinity of my car. Just then, a policeman walked past. I rushed over to him and asked about the ticket. He seemed puzzled too. He looked around and confessed that he couldn’t figure out why I would get a ticket there. He advised me to go over to the police station which was close by and pick up a form which I could fill out contesting the ticket.

So, off we went to the police dept. where I picked up said form and then we all went home.

I meticulously filled out the form showing where I was parked, how long I was parked there and the absence of any signs. I turned the form over to see if there was anything I needed to fill out on the other side and… there, I discovered an 81/2″ x 11″” blank expanse of white paper. BLANK WHITE PAPER!! I’ve never been able to resist a nice big, blank piece of paper since I was a little kid. My fingers itched. It was awful hard to resist that beautiful, plain white space. I succumbed!

… I drew myself leaping backward aghast and in utter horror at it …

I decided to illustrate my plight. I drew an elaborate cartoon of my car at the curb with a big parking ticket stuck on the windshield. I drew myself leaping backward aghast and in utter horror at it, slapping my hand to my head, sweat drops popping forth. Our male fellow diner is in the background gesticulating wildly at a confused cop who is scratching his head and looking up and down and sideways trying to see any evidence of signage. Meanwhile, our female fellow diner is trying to revive my wife who has fainted in the middle of the street. I put appropriate arrows and labels where needed and turned the sheet back over to put “OVER” down in the lower right corner so they would know to turn it over. I mailed it to the police dept. in the envelope supplied to me and awaited the answer.

… our female fellow diner is trying to revive my wife who has fainted in the middle of the street.

In a few days, I got a letter from the police stating that they were dismissing my ticket. No explanation as to why.

They also said, “Everybody in the station enjoyed your cartoon very much and we have it hanging up on our wall “.

See? … secret weapon.

Read many more of Randy’s cartooning memories:

Man’s Achievements in an Ever Expanding Universe

Tags cartoon, connecticut, Norwalk, parking ticket, police, Randall Enos, windshield

Blog Newsletter Syndicate

Riding the Rails

Post author By Daryl Cagle
Post date April 10, 2019

Here’s another flashback from my cartoonist buddy, Randy Enos. Like Randy, I also lived in Connecticut’s and took the train into Manhattan to visit art directors and deliver my art –back in the 1980’s (for me), and earlier, that was the thing cartoonists did. After Federal Express and fax machines came into being, illustrators and cartoonists moved away and the Manhattan cartooning and illustration culture was lost. I miss it. –Daryl

The name of our train station in Westport is “Westport Saugatuck” or, as one wag of a conductor once announced … “WESTTUCK and SAUGAPORT”.

What’s in the bag?

I loved riding the old trains before they started looking like subway cars with the sliding doors. We used to have to climb the steps up into the train and when I would hop on about noontime, I was able to go into the dining car and eat a hearty hot lunch (or dinner as we called it when I was very young). My favorite thing was to relax in the dining car watching the landscape whirring by while a waiter would bring me my meatloaf and mashed potatoes and gravy and apple pie for dessert. For years, I was a night worker going to bed at 4 in the morning and waking up about 10 or 11 and hopping on that train to deliver work and pick up more in New York City. At the New York Times, for instance, the art directors didn’t even get in to work until noon.

It was either you got on the train to deliver a job or you could give a train conductor five bucks to deliver it for you in the city on his break as soon as he got to Grand Central. It wasn’t unusual to see, on the platform, a stubble-faced sleepy-looking illustrator wearing a bathrobe and clutching an envelope with his art in it looking for a willing conductor. The other thing we would do was to use the services of Ryder’s Stagecoach to deliver our art. You could take your work to Ryder’s house at any time in the early morning, like 3 or 4 and you’d go to the back screen door and quietly stick it in there for him hopefully without waking the dog. That damn dog would often wake up and bark, though.

Randy’s wife, Leann, with Randy’s 6 foot Black Indigo.

When I worked at the Famous Artists School, we would get a 3 week vacation in the summer. In my 8 years working there, I never took a vacation. I would, instead, take my vacations one day a week and use that day to go to the city to see art directors and try to sell my work.

I had pet snakes, a 6 foot Black Indigo and a 5 foot Gopher Snake. I used to take them to New York with me sometimes because my art directors wanted to see them. We’d let them slither down the hallways past the shocked secretaries at NBC.

One day, I was sitting on the train with the white laundry bag containing my 6 foot snake resting quietly on my lap as the conductor approached punching tickets. He knew me very well and often would just make believe he was punching my ticket, thus giving me a free ride. That day, as he was reaching across me to punch the ticket of the lady to my right, the snake, “Satan,” rippled in the bag. The astonished trainman said, “Randy –I do not want to know what you have in that bag!”

One time, because the trainmen knew my wife and I so well (they would often sit and talk with us when they weren’t picking up tickets) that they let Leann drive the train home. My wife was an actress and she travelled the train a lot too.

On Thursdays, I would sit with all the New Yorker cartoonists going in to show their roughs. My neighbor, Don Reilly, was always there with his friend Dana Fradon and sitting across the aisle from us would be Whitney Darrow or Bob Weber (who never had his roughs done and would do them on the train). One time I watched Whitney off to the side on the train platform in Westport, drawing a guy waiting for the train. Later, that same day, I encountered him hiding in a doorway, way uptown in the city, surreptitiously drawing a lady waiting for a bus.

Along with the artists, the morning trains out of Westport carried most of the Madison Avenue advertising world. On the way home, we often had to ride in what we called “cattle cars” which had no windows and no seats. I used to see some of the richest tycoons of advertising, finance, etc. sitting on their briefcases, lurching around in the densely smoke-filled car while reading their evening paper.

One day, the regular train wasn’t working out of Westport and along comes this shiny new- looking train car. It was a private train that a lot of really rich guys owned and it had been enlisted by the New Haven Railroad to help out in the crisis. So, that day, I travelled in luxury with stewards that took your coat and hat and brushed them off. Very plush seats –the works!

One evening the train home broke down in the proverbial “middle of nowhere”. There was no train coming to save us so the whole train disgorged its riders and we all slumped along the tracks with our gear looking for some sign of humanity in the darkness. We finally came to a small house. We all camped out in the front yard while a few guys went to knock on the door to see if we could use the phone. A startled family, who were in the process of eating their supper, graciously allowed the long line of weary commuters to enter and use the wall phone. Some time later, the cars with the wives started arriving to pick us up off the front yard, one at a time.

But, I guess the oddest thing I saw on the train was one evening, very late, about 11 or so at night. I walked down the train at Grand Central to board and noticed that all the back cars were dark but I saw a little movement in them as I passed. There were people in there, in the dark! I got on in the first lighted car I found and I was only one of two people in the car. A little while into our trip, the other guy in my car asked the conductor if he was going to be opening the rear car. The conductor said he would open it in a while. Sure enough, in a while he came back and the passenger followed him to the back door where the conductor unlocked it, took something passed to him by the man and then locked it behind him.

You see, Westport is next to a city named Norwalk. A lot of girls from Norwalk would travel into New York every day to ply their “trade.” They would then ride the late train back. Sometimes they would be sitting opposite me on the train and ask to use my portfolio as a card table. I, also, had once seen a very famous game show host (I will refrain from naming him) being “entertained” by one of them in a back seat while I was in a front seat being the only other person in the car.

So… I realized what was going on the dark back cars. Some conductors evidently had a little business going. I was riding in a rolling brothel!

–Randy Enos

Email Randy

Read more more of Randy’s cartooning memories:

Randy Remembers the National Cartoonists Society

Tags commuter train, connecticut, Conrail, new york, New Yorker Cartoonists

Blog Newsletter Syndicate

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.

–Randy Enos

Email Randy

Read more more of Randy’s cartooning memories: