illustration – DarylCagle.com

Bob Englehart is a freelance cartoonist and his cartoons are syndicated by Cagle Cartoons.

Randy Remembers the NCS

Tags Avant Garde, Business Week, Escapade, Famous Artists Schools, Fortune, illustration, Monocle, Mother Jones, new york, Randy Enos, Rolling Stone and the Lampoon, The Atlantic, The Nation, The New York Times, The Progressive, Time Magazine

Blog Newsletter Syndicate

Be True To Your (Art) School

Post author By Daryl Cagle
Post date August 26, 2019

Our CagleCartoonist, Bob Englehart writes more about his cool career. Support Bob on Patreon, See Bob’s Cartoon Archive, E-mail Bob

I visited my alma mater last week in Chicago, the American Academy of Art. Man, has it changed. When I went there from 1964 to 1966, it was a small commercial art school dedicated to the practical side of art (that is, how to make money). It offered a two or three year course and a frame-able certificate upon completion. It was on the corner of Wabash and Adams streets in the Loop. The first year was about teaching fundamentals and the second and third year was about specialties: illustration, oil painting, watercolor, layout, design and so on and was geared to industry demand for artists. It had no cartoon course, so in the middle of my second year when I decided I wanted to become a cartoonist, my fundamentals teacher, Mr. Staake, designed a course for me. He had me drawing greeting cards and anything he could think of that might sharpen my skills as a budding cartoonist. One of my assignments was to draw a political cartoon. I drew it in the style of Bill Mauldin who was my favorite political cartoonist at the time.

The greeting card assignment led to work as a freelance greeting card cartoonist that paid for my first house and my second one, too. The political cartoon became a sample I used to get a job in the art department of The Chicago Herald American. It also inspired me to draw my first political cartoon for the paper shortly after it changed its name to Chicago Today.

The story: a KKK cell was discovered in the Chicago Police Department. The art director of the paper had given me permission to publish an occasional political cartoon on Mondays when the regular political cartoonists, Vaughn Shoemaker and Wayne Stayskal were off. I was walking across the Michigan Avenue Bridge when a gust of wind blew a woman’s skirt and the idea popped in to my brain.

I’m happy to say the academy still delivers a practical education in art. I won’t tell you what the tuition was back in 1964 because it would break your heart. Today, the tuition is comparable to a four-year private college, which is what most art schools are. The academy is now on Michigan Ave. It has student housing and offers nine bachelors of fine arts degrees in traditional areas of art such as painting and drawing but also in 3-D modeling, digital illustration, art direction and more.

A number of famous and successful alumni are making a nice living in comic books, posters, painting, sculpture, design, advertising and graphic arts but the most famous is Kanye West. I talked to Kanye’s teacher and he said Kanye was a talented artist. The teacher told him he could have a fine career as an artist, but Kanye said he had this music thing he wanted to try.

Read Bob’s other posts:

My One-Day Career as a Courtroom Artist

Where Do You Get Your Ideas?

The Birth of a Political Cartoonist

Please support us to keep Cagle.com free and keep the endangered editorial cartoons coming! Visit Cagle.com/Heroes!

We need your support!

Tags American Academy of Art, Bob Englehart, Chicago Today, design, illustration, Kanye West, layout, Mauldin, oil painting, The Chicago Herald American, Wabash and Adams streets in the Loop, watercolor

Blog Newsletter Syndicate

World’s Fastest Illustrator

Post author By Daryl Cagle
Post date August 17, 2019

Here’s another piece from my cartoonist buddy, Randy Enos –the fastest illustrator in the world.

Email Randy Enos
Visit Randy’s archive –Daryl

For many, many years my working hours were from about 10:00 in the morning until 4:00 the next morning, with breaks for breakfast, lunch and dinner. This was in the late 50’s into the late 90’s … then things slowed down a bit.

In the early years, I would often travel to New York to deliver jobs and to pick up work. Sometimes the regular work I would pick up from The New York Times and N.B.C. in particular, were jobs that were “overnight jobs”. I would rush home, do the jobs until 4:00 in the morning, sleep and wake up about 10 or 11 then go on the train to deliver them. I loved working at night. I would play movies that I would rent, while I was working. Sometimes, I would be so intensely working on the job that I wouldn’t even look up to see a single scene, I would just listen to the sound. I rented so many movies (and got additional free ones from the library) that I became a favored customer at several video stores and would get invited to their private office parties. I was renting 2 or 3 movies, EVERY day. I preferred listening to movies rather than music.

I never missed a deadline but had some harrowing moments sometimes in the middle of the night thinking that I wasn’t going to make it. My solution for that was to create a little schedule for myself. I had picked a complicated medium to work in because I’m not the brightest bulb on the tree. I invented this linocut-collage thing which included printing a carved lino block on many different colored papers (Pantone papers) in many different colored inks (water soluble Speedball) and then cutting portions of each print and pasting it all together… a hard to describe complicated procedure which netted me a unique style of my own which was unlike anybody else’s (no other illustrator would be stupid enough to go through a process like this into the wee hours of the morning). SO, here’s the kind of schedule I would quickly write out to assuage my fears of not being able to finish before the morning’s train time.

Only with my more complex and “scary” jobs would I make out a schedule like this. The ones that I thought I’d never be able to do in one night.

9 pm to 10 pm… make a sketch for the illustration.

10 pm to 11 pm… transfer the sketch to my lino block.

11 pm to 2 am… cut the block (or blocks, because I would often have more than one illustration to work on at a time).

2 am to 2:30 am… rest break (watch some of the movie).

2:30 am to 3: 30 am… ink the block (or blocks) and print on colored papers.

3:30 am to 5:00 am… dry the prints (in my little studio microwave) and cut them out with X-acto knife and paste up the illustration.

5:00 am to 7:00 am… do any retouching that would be necessary etc.. Put a flap on it and stick it into an envelope.

DONE.

When I could see that there was ample time to go through all my processes, right in front of me, the panic would subside as long as I kept to the schedule.

As I said, a lot of the time I would have more than one illustration to work on at a time. Six seemed to be my magic number. I always seemed to have six jobs on the board to do. As soon as one would be checked off, another had replaced it. Also, when I looked at a magazine or newspaper stand, I could, almost always, count at least six publications that I was in at any given time. In my 63 years, I’ve worked for every American magazine except The New Yorker. I even did an illustration for People and they don’t even carry illustrations. Have you ever seen one in there?

I never did any advertising work (unless you count the very “editorial” nature of my NBC illustrations), but, rather, I was in the low paying but much freer and more interesting world of editorial illustration (books, magazines and newspapers). And the money was all over the place from doing a small spot illustration for the back pages of Time magazine for $1000 to elaborate double-page spreads for The National Lampoon or Progressive magazine for $150 – $200. I never thought about the money (my wife says that’s a major problem with me) and put just as much energy and time into the low paying jobs as I did for the higher paying ones –sometimes more. And, I never turned a job down because, unlike other illustrators, I didn’t care about playing tennis or golf or going on vacations. I only cared about making pictures. On beautiful hot and sunny days, I was only happy if I was in my basement studio with some juicy jobs to work on.

In those days, I used to bill myself as “The World’s Fastest Illustrator”!

Time magazine had the habit of giving out rush jobs and sending a driver out to Westport to pick it up. That could be harrowing. I once got one of those jobs. No time for a sketch to be approved or anything. I worked out what I was going to do with the art director over the phone. Then he would say, “Okay Randy, the driver is setting out now to pick it up!” Then I would quickly draw my illustration onto my block and start cutting away at it, all the time with the vision in my mind’s eye of the driver on the Merritt Parkway heading toward me. Fortunately, it would take him almost an hour.

Okay, here’s the fastest job I ever did. My next door neighbor was the editor of Fairfield County Magazine. She called me from work and said that she had a quick job for me. She had some photos of lawn furniture and wanted me to just draw on them with pen and ink and make the chairs and tables into cartoon characters. She said she’d drop off the photos on the way home that night. Later, she came to my door with an envelope with the photos. I took them and rushed over to my drawing board as she left and quickly drew arms and legs and heads on the photos and went out the door and gave them to her as she was putting her key into her front door. Time elapsed… under a minute!

Some of the fastest illustrations I had to do were for The Wall Street Journal, which I like to call The Wall Street Gerbil. Back in the black and white days before there were any color illustrations in the newspapers (I did the first color illustration for them later on) we used to FAX the originals, Believe it or not!

On the other hand, I had a client who never had a deadline. Let me repeat that… NO DEADLINE… ever. It was the Boy Scout magazine, Boy’s Life.

The art director, Joe Connolly would call me up and ask me if I could do the job and that he would be sending me the text. It would always be one major full-page illustration and three smaller ones for each story. At the end of our conversations, he would say, “And, as always, Randy, there’s no deadline!” Boy’s Life was one of my highest paying clients but the stories had practically no content with which to work. They were void of any substance. I defy any average illustrator to get even one idea for an illustration never mind three! It’s a good thing I wasn’t an average illustrator because I did them for many years. Joe would just hand out and stockpile up the illustrated stories until he needed them for an issue. And he used top illustrators so I was in good company.

On one occasion, I slipped his manuscript under a pile of other stuff because I knew there was no immediate rush and went on to other projects. It stayed there for a WHOLE YEAR!!! Joe called me up and I suddenly remembered the long lost manuscript that I had forgotten about. I stammered, “Oh jeez, Joe, I forgot about the story … I’ll get to it right away!” He said, “No no no, there’s no deadline, I’m just calling you with another job!” You don’t find clients like that very often.

I used to do a lot of work for McGraw-Hill magazines. Some of it was tedious, mundane sort of things. One massive job I had, involved me putting down lots of Prestype lettering. God, what a nightmare! The lettering would crack or pull off or go down crooked and I struggled for hours and hours doing that tedious rush job. I stayed up without sleep for TWO nights and was going on to my third night (the job was due the next morning) when I just pooped out. I couldn’t go on any longer… I needed to sleep. I just gave up at one point and said, “I can’t do it, I’ve got to sleep” and promptly passed out. I awoke in the morning and went into panic mode. It was minutes before train time. I rushed into my studio to find the job sitting there… completely finished!! My wife had been watching what I had been doing and while I slept, she finished the job beautifully.

I knew there was a reason I married her beside the fact that she was a cutie-pie!

Read many more of Randy’s cartooning memories:

The Fastest Illustrator in the World!

Me and the GhostBusters

The Bohemian Bohemian

Take it Off … Take it ALL Off!

I Eat Standing Up

The Funniest Cartoon I’ve Ever Seen

The Beatles had a Few Good Tunes

Andy Warhol Meets King Kong

Jacques and the Cowboy

The Gray Lady (The New York Times)

The BIG Eye

Historic Max’s

The Real Moby Dick

The Norman Conquests

Man’s Achievements in an Ever Expanding Universe

How to Murder Your Wife

I Yam What I Yam

The Smallest Cartoon Characters in the World

Chicken Gutz

Brought to You in Living Black and White

The Hooker and the Rabbit

Art School Days in the Whorehouse

The Card Trick that Caused a Divorce

The Mysterious Mr. Quist

Monty Python Comes to Town

Riding the Rails

Andy Warhol Meets King Kong

Randy Remembers the NCS

Tags Boy's Life, Fairfield County Magazine, illustration, Joe Connelly, McGraw-Hill magazines, Randall Enos, The New York Times, the wall street journal

Blog Newsletter Syndicate

The Beatles Had A Few Good Tunes

Post author By Daryl Cagle
Post date July 10, 2019

This column is by my brilliant buddy, Randy Enos about his years teaching illustration.

Email Randy Enos Visit Randy’s archive –Daryl

Over the years, I have taught at many art schools including Parsons, Syracuse, Hartford, School of Visual Arts, Fashion Institute in New York, Rhode Island School of Design, Philadelphia School of the Arts and others. My longest sustained teaching was at Parsons in New York for 8 years.

The one common thread I noticed among students was that they didn’t know much of anything about our profession which they were supposedly interested in pursuing. They hadn’t looked at much illustration or cartooning and they didn’t know the names of the star practitioners of those fields. I always have found that to be peculiar. I’m sure that students of say, ballet, know the superstars of ballet; or students of music probably know the major musicians in the part of the field they are studying. I’m sure that students of painting or sculpture have their favorite painters or sculptors. But, not students of illustration. Once you get past Norman Rockwell, they don’t know any of the stars unless they have just had a visiting lecture from one of them. When you teach illustration or cartooning, you start at ground zero; there are no reference points, just a blank slate. I once opened a class at Syracuse with, “Good morning, I’m Milton Glaser.” I didn’t raise an eyebrow.

In my 8 years at Parsons, I generally taught two classes a week. It took Murray Tinkelman, the head of illustration at that time, five years to talk me into teaching. I kept saying,” I’ve only been in the business 10 years, how can I know enough to be able to be a teacher?” But, he wore me down and he had created a special course at that time called “Sequential Illustration” which I was to teach along with a “Conceptual Illustration” course. The conceptual course dealt with the “concepts” or ideas part of the process rather than drawing or perspective or design. At that point in time, illustration was a conceptual business rather than in previous times when it was a narrative, story telling process. We were in the era of illustrating abstract ideas for the business magazines like Business Week, Time, Fortune etc., rather than illustrating Indians attacking a wagon train for The Saturday Evening Post. We were illustrating articles on the falling stock market or the rise in childhood diseases or the latest fad in cooking.

The “Sequential Illustration” course was to be taught by three teachers, each teaching for a third of the semester. The course focused on illustration that was realized in multiple images such as in children’s books, animation, comic strips etc. I dealt with book illustration and multiple- picture magazine or newspaper illustrations in my third of the semester. Dick Giordano (Batman etc.) handled the comics part of the program and noted animator, Howard Beckerman handled the animation part. A little later on they created a third course that I was a part of which was just an animation course wherein Howard and I split the year in half. I did the first part dealing with designing and storyboarding and Howard did the last part and took the students through actually animating and filming animation sequences.

Clip from Randy’s illustration for Emergency Medicine magazine.

Sometimes I would bring into my classes, actual assignments that I had worked on myself so that students had the real thing to deal with concept-wise. One time, I received an assignment from Emergency Medicine magazine just before going to class so I gave them the same assignment with the same time frame I had to do it in. I told them that I would bring in my finished illustration a week later and they were to bring in theirs. One student said, “What if our illustration is better than yours will you take ours to the client instead of yours?” I, of course replied, “Your illustration isn’t going to be better than mine!” So… even though this particular illustration wasn’t paying very much, I spent all week doing an elaborate, detailed picture just to show the students what they should aim for. Another thing that I did was to bring in some of my art directors from time to time. I tried to give the students a real taste of the business.

Randy’s illustration for Emergency Medicine magazine.

This sounds like an exaggeration, but it actually happened. I told the students one day that most of the realist illustrators traced photographs. I made the mistake of mentioning Norman Rockwell in that group. One of my students was so horrified that his idol traced photographs that he went over to the window, climbed out on the ledge and threatened to jump. I calmed him down by explaining that Rockwell was a splendid draftsman who had worked from live models for years before resorting to working from photographs due to the pressures of deadlines. I told him that those pictures could never come out as well if he didn’t know how to draw like a master.

Many of my students went on to stellar careers in illustration such as Victor Juhasz (caricaturist, war correspondent, Rolling Stone illustrator etc.) and Peter de Seve (New Yorker covers, children’s books, character designer for Bug’s Life, Robots, 4 Ice Age films and many others).

I remember one assignment I gave my animation class and that was to design and storyboard an opening for a TV special. I wanted to pick a subject that would be fairly easy for them to research. I picked the Beatles. I figured they’d have no problem finding info, photos and ideas for a project like this. One boy in class said, “You know we don’t know very much about the Beatles, it’s kind of before our time!” Another kid said, “Oh, I know the Beatles, I heard of them; they had a few good tunes!” at which point, I screamed “A FEW GOOD TUNES? A FEW GOOD TUNES?”

A few weeks ago, my son told me that his friend, a guitar teacher, had a student who was shocked to find out that Paul McCartney was in a band BEFORE Wings.

When I would finish my class at Parsons, I often would go across the street and have dinner with a fellow teacher, Burne Hogarth of Tarzan fame. One time, I reminded him of an incident told to me by a friend who had been one of his students way back at the School of Visual Arts before it was called the School of Visual Arts and was called “The Cartoonists and Illustrators School”. One of his students asked him one day why Tarzan was always pointing his finger. Hogarth had this characteristic pose that he would often use of Tarzan with his right arm extended out and his finger pointing. Hogarth answered, “He’s pointing at my critics and saying, can you draw as well?”

I’ll end on this note … A FEW GOOD TUNES???

Email Randy Enos Visit Randy’s archive

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

Read many more of Randy’s cartooning memories:

Jacques and the Cowboy

The Gray Lady (The New York Times)

The BIG Eye

Historic Max’s

The Real Moby Dick

The Norman Conquests

Man’s Achievements in an Ever Expanding Universe

How to Murder Your Wife

I Yam What I Yam

The Smallest Cartoon Characters in the World

Chicken Gutz

Brought to You in Living Black and White

The Hooker and the Rabbit

Art School Days in the Whorehouse

The Card Trick that Caused a Divorce

The Mysterious Mr. Quist

Monty Python Comes to Town

Riding the Rails

Randy Remembers the NCS

Blog Newsletter Syndicate

The Pyramid of Success

Post author By Daryl Cagle
Post date April 6, 2019

My cartoonist buddy, Randy Enos, is a generation older than me and comes from the same New York City illustration background that I jumped into, fresh out of college in the 1970’s. I grew up following Randy’s work in the National Lampoon and all the top magazines as I was a budding illustrator. Randy knows all of the famous illustrators who were my heroes in the 1960’s and 1970’s. I’m delighted to syndicate Randy’s off-beat editorial cartoons and I’m enjoying the memories he’s writing for my blog –especially this one. –Daryl

Toward the end of November 1973, my buddy, Stan Mack, called me in to The New York Times to do a cover for the Sunday magazine section which he was art directing at the time. They were doing a story on John Wooden, the famous coach of the UCLA basketball team. Wooden was famous for giving his players a mimeographed sheet of platitudes which reflected his recipe for succeeding in sports and in life. He arranged these platitudes on the paper, in ruled boxes that stacked up to form a pyramid. He called it his “Pyramid of Success.” It was just a simple typed up sheet of words to live by. Each time a player was recruited, he would find this sheet of paper in his mailbox the next morning.

Stan had been at a loss as to how to feature Wooden on his cover. He wanted to avoid he obvious montage of, perhaps, a head shot with a basketball player in the background. Then he stumbled upon Wooden’s “Pyramid” in the text. Stan had seen a couple of jobs (one I remember was for Esquire) where I had done some wood-block or lino-block lettering and he thought that I could take this homely little typewritten page and do something nice and artistic and colorful for his cover. So, I tackled it in my normal lino-cut collage technique where I would print my lino block on different colored papers (in different colored inks) and then collage the whole thing together. The finished art appeared on the cover, Sunday, December 2nd, 1973.

The Randy Enos version of UCLA basketball coach, John Wooden’s “Pyramid of Success” that ran on the cover of The New York Times Magazine.

Bright and early Monday morning the telephones started ringing at The New York Times – and they continued ringing until finally the Times had to recruit outside help to man the phones. Then the mail started pouring in, sacks of it. Then the Times gave out my phone number and address to callers and my phone started ringing and my home mailbox started filling up. Each time, I would go to the Times to pick up or deliver a job, I would be presented with a sack full of mail addressed to me at the Times. They dealt with the ones addressed to them.

This deluge was caused by readers, who seized with the passion of Wooden’s words, were demanding copies, re-prints, ANYTHING we had to offer. We were getting correspondence and calls from, mayors’ offices, corporations, law enforcement bureaus, libraries, universities, along with just plain ol’ ordinary citizens – LOTS and LOTS of them. Some were upset because they had also written to Wooden and received only a dopey little mimeographed sheet in black and white. They wanted the one in color – the POSTER!

I had created a FRANKENSTEIN MONSTER!

It went on for months and months and finally years and years … and years. My son recalls visiting a friend in college and seeing it on many students’ walls. My wife was getting tired of the constant phone ringing and cursed the Times for giving out our number and address.

Years later, people would write or call and say that their copy of the Times cover was yellowing on their wall and did I know where they could get a better reproduction of it. My answer to all of them was that I couldn’t sell them or give them a copy or a poster of it because it wasn’t totally mine. It was Wooden’s thing. I merely had interpreted it in color. They would have to get his permission and then maybe something could be worked out. They never got back to me. Finally I contacted Wooden by letter and said that he was obviously getting the deluge that I was and so perhaps we should get together on this and make reproductions of it for sale or something. Leann was already imagining a life of exquisite bliss on a tropical island where we and our 5 horses would be sipping daiquiris and never having to work again. But Wooden never replied.

Years would go by and I would think that maybe it had finally gone away. And then, the phone would ring, or I’d get a letter with the familiar phrase, “Back in 1973 you did a cover for the …”

Okay. I lied. One entity got through to Wooden. It was McDonald’s. They sent me a letter from the coach that said that I could give them the art for a Christmas card for their employees. I had previously told them that if they got permission from Wooden that I would let them use my picture for free. Of course, I never thought they’d get it. So a big black limo pulled into my driveway and I handed over my original art. Later they returned with it and magnanimously provided me with a coupon entitling me to two free hamburgers and a coke. I never redeemed the coupon. And I never saw the Christmas cards.

The Times had given out repro rights to some people like IBM, who used it as the cover bearing the Times masthead.

Many decades have passed and I haven’t had any more letters and calls for a while. Of course, I haven’t checked the mail yet today. Out of the thousands and thousands of requests that the Times and I received, not one single one was complimentary about my art (I’m sure Wooden hated my grotesque version of his beloved, mimeographed Pyramid). It was only the sentiments expressed by Wooden that captured their imagination and desire to own a copy of it (suitable for framing).

Years and years after 1973, I was at the Times one day and one of my art directors said, “Randy, I want to show you something.” I followed him to a back room where there was a closet. He unlocked it with a key and there before my astonished eyes were shelves laden with copies of the Sunday, December 2nd, 1973 edition of The New York Times Sunday Magazine.

–Randy Enos

Email Randy

Read more more of Randy’s cartooning memories:

Randy Remembers the National Cartoonists Society

Tags basketball, illustration, John Wooden, lino cut, linoleum cut, Randall Enos, Stan Mack, The New York Times, UCLA

Blog Newsletter Syndicate

The Day I Chased the Bus

Post author By Daryl Cagle
Post date April 3, 2019

Here’s another story about being a freelance illustrator in New York in the 1970’s, from my brilliant cartoonist buddy, Randy Enos.
–Daryl

Some years ago I went into New York City with my young friend, an aspiring illustrator named Debbie; I was going to take her on my rounds with me and introduce her to art directors at NBC, New York Times, National Lampoon and more. I had been working on some big project and I was lugging my biggest black portfolio. I had to show some work to a client and then I was going to go home that evening and work some more on the project and return the next day.

This morning was going along nicely and before we were to have lunch, I thought we’d quickly go to a show of Jean-Michel Folon’s work at the LeFebre Gallery at 47 E. 77^thStreet. We hopped into a cab and arrived across the street from the gallery/townhouse. As I crossed the street with Debbie, I patted my pockets, as I was accustomed to do, to make sure I had everything … and … I discovered my wallet was missing! I realized it must have fallen out in the cab. I whirled around and the cab was gone! Panic!

We went in to see the show, anyway, which, ironically, consisted of collages in which there were actual coins. Each piece of art re-enforced my sense of present poverty.

Back out on the street, we assessed our financial situation. Between the two of us, we just had enough coins to get us back down near Grand Central Station by bus. So, we got on a 5^thAvenue bus and headed downtown. As we approached 52^ndStreet, Debbie said she wanted to visit her new acquaintance, the illustrator, Bob Blechman so I told her to get off there and I would continue down to one of the next stops, visit my art directors at NBC, and we would meet later on the train to go home.

At 49^thstreet, I hopped off and walked a few steps up the street before I realized that I wasn’t carrying my big portfolio with all the components of the job I was working on. I had shoved it into the space behind the driver’s seat while we had stood in the aisle of the bus. I looked south on 5^thAvenue to find my bus and instead I saw about three identical blue busses. Fortunately, I had looked at the driver when I was on the bus and he was a large black man. So, I ran quickly to overtake the nearest bus to me. As I caught up with it, at the next stop, I saw that it wasn’t my driver.

I started running to catch up with the next bus in front of that one. Again, not my driver. It was hot and I was out of breath at this point and panic was setting in as I imagined my fate of losing my portfolio and its contents to the vast black hole of the New York Transit Authority. Who do I call? What do I do? I started running again. I could see that there were two or three busses approaching the library stop at 42^ndStreet. Big stop. I was sure to find my bus there. My hopes were up. I ran like I have never run and probably will never run again. I swear, as I crossed 41^stStreet, I think I was running over the hoods of cars. I felt this was my last chance. As I got there, a bus or two had pulled away but there were still one or two left. I checked them out……. not my driver! I looked down the avenue. I couldn’t run any more. My chest was heaving, I was sweating.

Just then, a police car came creeping up. AHA! I dragged myself over to the curb and flagged them down. The window went down. I … I … tried… to … tell … them my problem. I was incoherent. The two cops looked at me puzzled. I kept trying to get the words out but I couldn’t catch my breath. They gestured for me to get in the car. I collapsed into their back seat telling them, as best I could about the lost money, the portfolio and the big black bus driver. The cop next to the driver said, “What was the number of the bus?” The number of the bus? The number of the freaking bus? How the hell did I know what the number of the bus was! He then instructed the driver to overtake the bus we saw ahead of us and see if a “n****r “ was driving. We caught up with it and driving by the left side we could see that it wasn’t my driver. I pleaded with them to catch up with a few other busses we could see. They did… to no avail. Finally at 23^rdStreet, where 5^thAvenue forks, they tired of me and decided that I should consult the bus dispatcher we could see on the curb at our left. “He’ll help you out” they said. I went over to the man holding a clipboard and started telling him my tale of woe. As I was speaking, I looked across the fork in the avenue and saw a bus pulling away… WITH A BIG BLACK GUY DRIVING!!! The dispatcher blew a whistle and flagged him to stop. I ran across and the driver opened the door and there was my big black portfolio just where I had left it!

I slowly dragged myself along the street completely worn out with my precious portfolio in tow while a crazy bag lady screamed something at me. I paid no attention for I was now concerned with how I was going to explain why I didn’t have a ticket to the train conductor, because it was in my lost wallet where I always put them. BUT … maybe not. Sometimes I put them in my shirt pocket. I patted my pocket. My ticket was there. A little wave of joy … just a teensy one, wafted over me.

As I slunk into my train seat next to the ebullient Debbie, she was chortling about her visit with Blechman. She asked if I had a good time at NBC. I grumbled something incoherent and glared her into silence.

At home that night, I received a phone call from the man who had gotten into the cab right after me and found my wallet and my phone number therein. I told him that I was coming in the next day and he gave me his business address.

The next day, in a downpour, I trudged across the street from Grand Central to a small liquor store to buy my benefactor a nice bottle of wine. Then, with bottle in hand along with my portfolio and umbrella, I made my way up the street to the address he had given me. It was a labor union office. I climbed up a narrow stairway on which were seated a few of their members to a little office at the top with a little pay window. I asked for the man who had called me and I was directed down a hall to an office from which I could hear serious negotiations transpiring. I dragged my dripping self to the open door and was spotted by a robust fellow standing behind a desk in the midst of an argument.

He spotted me, “I know who you are” he smiled, “I saw your driver’s license picture in your wallet.”

He drew my wallet from his drawer and handed it to me. I, in turn, handed him a soggy bag which contained my gift of wine.

“No… NO” he said, “I can’t take that!”

“Please take this” I said

“No, I couldn’t take that!”

“Yes, you have to take it!”

“Oh no no no, I can’t accept that!”

Finally, I screamed, “LOOK… IT’S POURING OUTSIDE… I’M SOAKING WET AND I’M LUGGING THIS BIG HEAVY PORTFOLIO AND THIS DAMN UMBRELLA AND I’M NOT CARRYING THIS BOTTLE OF WINE ANOTHER STEP!”

“Oh… okay” he said, “Thanks!”

–Randy Enos

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Randy Remembers the National Cartoonists Society

Tags art, bus, cartooning, illustration, Jean-Michel Folon, LeFebre Gallery, new york, police, portfolio

Blog Newsletter Syndicate

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”.

–Randy Enos

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More about Gene Hoffman here.

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