Here’s a yet another new story by the great Randy Enos.
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Everybody worked in a factory. In New Bedford, where I was born; we had shoe factories, woolen mills, a Revere Copper & Brass, the golf ball factory, tool and dye factories and many many others including where my mom met my pop, the Goodyear plant. When she first laid eyes on him, she didn’t like him. She thought he was a showoff because he would chin himself with one hand, up and down up and down on a bar that went across the doorway to the men’s room. This was all part of my poor father’s self-improvement regimen that he had adopted for himself along with scrubbing his teeth with some abrasive to keep them clean and white, sending away for Charles Atlas muscle-building equipment and reading all the non-fiction books he could get a hold of to make up for his lack of education.
My father had come from the old country when he was 10 yrs. old and he had only one year of schooling in a class for immigrant kids that couldn’t speak English. That was it. He started out as a newspaper boy selling papers on the street; then delivering coal; then in a bowling alley setting pins; then he went to work for “old man Weeden” who he liked very much. The Weeden Toy Factory made great little steam engines that are now represented in a special display of antique toys in the New Bedford Whaling Museum.
My father was always trying to make up for his lack of education by reading. He never read a book of fiction in his life. When I was a kid, I read the same books he read because they were there in our house. Some of them were the following: The Life of Madame Curie, The History of the World by H.G. Wells, Microbe Hunters by Paul DeKruif, How to Write a Business Letter, High School French Self Taught and a set of the World Book Encyclopedia (which my father read from A to Z).
As he got older he went to work in the mills but one day at his sister’s house he met her insurance man who encouraged him to seek a job at the insurance company. Eventually, many years later, my uneducated father became an insurance executive when he was finally forced to become the district manager in New Bedford of the Boston Mutual life Insurance Company when there was no one else to ascend to the position. Everyone he hired as agents had to have college degrees which he thought was ironic.
My mom worked in a number of factories, Goodyear, the Titleist golf ball factory and a venetian blind factory. My grandfather, her dad, worked in woolen mills and died of lung congestion. He married my grandmother when she was 13 yrs. old and she was illiterate her whole life working as a domestic and cook in the homes of wealthy people. She lived with us while I was growing up because my grandfather had died just before I was born in 1936. She died at the age of 86.
Okay … back to the Goodyear plant where my mom and pop worked. My mother, as I said, thought my dad was vain and a showoff until one day she saw him sitting alone at lunchtime with nothing to eat. She shared her lunch with him … and the rest is history.
On my studio wall I have a photograph of all the workers in one division of the Goodyear plant. My father is in the back row, my mother is sitting down in the first row right next to her sister, my aunt Laura. I don’t know whether or not my mom and pop knew each other at the time this shot was taken. I decided to make a picture of this group. I named it “Portrait of My Mother and Father.” It’s a linoleum cut. I drew it directly from the photograph so when I printed it of course it came out in reverse. I did it mainly with brown ink on brown wrapping paper to give it a bit of an aged, old fashioned look. The heads of my mother and father (which I had circled), I printed in bright colors on bright colored paper. It was a challenge to try to get a caricature of each individual. They stand and sit in such interesting attitudes. There are the tough guy workers, my father among them, with sleeves rolled up, a few guys in caps for some reason, some office workers and obvious minor bosses.
Later, when I was about 5 or 6, the second world war was waging and my mother was working on the large rubber rafts that were dropped down to the water for the use of the parachuting troops that would follow. The strong rafts would hold all the provisions the troops would require.
I don’t know what my father was working on but he was probably still chinning himself with one hand.
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Read many more of Randy’s cartooning memories:
Never Put Words in Your Pictures
Explosion In A Blue Jeans Factory
The Garden of Earthly Delights
When I was a Famous Chinese Watercolorist
A Duck Goes Into a Grocery Store
A Day With Jonathan Winters and Carol Burnett
The Fastest Illustrator in the World!
Take it Off … Take it ALL Off!
The Funniest Cartoon I’ve Ever Seen
The Beatles had a Few Good Tunes
The Gray Lady (The New York Times)
Man’s Achievements in an Ever Expanding Universe
The Smallest Cartoon Characters in the World
Brought to You in Living Black and White
Art School Days in the Whorehouse
The Card Trick that Caused a Divorce
8th Grade and Harold von Schmidt
The Funniest Man I’ve Ever Known
Read “I’m Your Bunny, Wanda –Part One”
Read “I’m Your Bunny, Wanda –Part Two”
Famous Artists Visit the Famous Artists School
It all started with the son of my father’s best friend, Jose. The kid’s name was Jerry and he was about my age. I must have been 8 or 9 when Jerry seriously stole my father’s affection by being very skilled at drawing. Jerry would go to the zoo, come back home and draw all the animals from memory. My father would rave about these drawings.
When you were born and raised in New Bedford, Massachusetts, as I was, you grow up in an atmosphere of whaling history. At one time back in the late 1840’s, New Bedford was the richest city in the world. That’s right –not the country but, the world! It all came from a Quaker business, the collection of whale oil. The oil generated by the New Bedford (and earlier the Nantucket) fleets of whaling ships supplied the street lights of the world, the lamps of Italy’s opera houses, buggy whips, canes, perfume enhancers, candles and hundreds and hundreds of other products. The oil from the Sperm whale is the finest machine oil that has ever appeared on this planet.
So, when you’re a kid in New Bedford and you go to the library or you accompany your parent to the bank or you go to a municipal building or go to school, you see all around you, paintings of the whale chase. Whales heeled over snapping whaleboats in their mighty jaws, hapless seamen falling through the air, mighty ships plowing through rampaging seas. Out in front of the New Bedford Public Library is the symbol of New Bedford, a sculpture of a strong whale man in the prow of a whaleboat, with his sharp harpoon in hand, ready to dart it. Now, on the other side of the library, stands a statue of a black harpoon maker named Lewis Temple. There are no existing pictures of Temple so the sculptor used a picture of his son as the model. This man invented a harpoon that revolutionized the whaling industry because it was designed in such a way that once thrust into a whale’s hide it stuck and didn’t pull out which was the problem with the harpoons that preceded it. It’s called the “Temple Toggle.” I own two 1800’s examples of this iron.
As the years went on, I started thinking about my childhood and heritage and I began reading some whaling books. It was startling to me because I found such a connection to it. I was reading books that constantly mentioned New Bedford and mentioned the whalecraft shops that I realized were right in the neighborhood that I had grown up in. In the later days of whaling, the American-Portuguese had, pretty much taken over the business. The captains had Portuguese names that I was familiar with. I started to discover a history that I really never knew existed wherein the whaling industry, playing a big part in the Revolutionary War (that tea-party adventure in Boston was on a whaleship), the Civil War, the Gold Rush and more. History teachers tell me that they too have been unaware of this rich history.
In my extensive readings on whaling lore, I discovered a whale named “Mocha Dick.” He was a white whale who rampaged through the Pacific in the 1800’s eating whaleboats and whale men seemingly seeking vengeance on the enemies of his brethren. He was based around Mocha Island off the southern coast of Chile. Mocha is pronounced with a “cha” sound rather than a “ka” sound because it’s Spanish (but try to tell that to the rest of the folks out there who study whaling lore). All the whale men of the era knew of Mocha, including Melville who later used a version of his name for his great Moby Dick.
An art director friend from The Wall Street Journal, Dan Smith asked if I’d like to do a book with him in his newly formed “Strike Three Press.” Dan loves books and he even likes to “make” books –I mean he binds them, hand stitches them etc. He asked me what I would like to do a book about and I quickly said “Mocha Dick”.
Later, around 2013, the award winning designer, Rita Marshall was at my house and saw a big picture of Mocha Dick that I had made. Months later she told me that she couldn’t get that picture out of her head and also said that they had a manuscript from a writer named Brian Heinz on Mocha Dick. And, so, another Mocha Dick book was crafted for her company Creative Editions. It’s a rather sophisticated children’s book. Thanks to some great starred revues from places like Kirkus and some mentions on important websites like Brainpickings.org and the Atlantic Magazine’s, we got so many advanced purchases on Amazon that we sold out the first edition two weeks before the book was even released. I was blessed to have a great writer on board that trip around.