Local History; James Thurber in Falls Church

I live in Arlington, Virginia, which is both a town and a county. About a mile west from my house is the county line beyond which is the city of Falls Church, Virignia. If you head in the other direction and go four miles east you'll cross the Potomac and then you're in Washington DC.

From 1901 to 1903 cartoonist and author James Thurber lived with his family in Washington. He wasn't yet a cartoonist or author, he was mostly a small boy, who'd been born in Columbus Ohio in 1894. His father, Charles Thurber, had moved the family to DC when he was hired as a stenographer to a Justice Department commission headed by an Ohio congressman, and the Thurbers rented a house on I street in Washington. The hot summers and thick humidity DC is known for prompted them to rent a second house out of town for the month of August in 1902. They picked one at 319 Maple Avenue in Falls Church, VA, away from the city heat.

The house had a large yard with apple trees and pear trees, and a hedge around it, a good yard to play in for James and his brothers William and Robert. One Sunday afternoon, William was fooling around with a toy bow and arrow set, and he told James to stand over by the fence and he'd shoot him in the back with one of the rubber arrows. William took his time lining up his shot and James got impatient and turned around just as William let fly. The arrow struck James square in the left eye. His mother took him to a GP who dressed the eye, which hurt some but wasn't bothering him too much. But several days later it seemed to worsen and she took him to an opthamologist who recommended the eye be removed immediately.

The accident eventually caused Thurber's blindness later in life and he blamed the lack of more immediate drastic care for the effect it had on his right eye. And the accident profoundly affected his work, as he drew larger and larger and used ever thicker lenses to make sense of the visual world.

If you leave my house, drive about a mile and a quarter down Lee Highway and turn right on West Columbia Street, then left on North Maple Avenue, you'll come to a dead end street called James Thurber Court.The name of the court is thanks to Mrs. Elizabeth Acosta, a Thurber fan from Falls Church who struck up a correspondence with him in the late fifties, during the course of which she discovered that she was living in the house next to where he lived as a boy in August of 1902. When 319 Maple Ave. was pulled down in the early 60s to make way for townhouses, Mrs. Acosta pushed for the newly created cul-de-sac to be called after its most famous previous resident.



I'm going to walk over there some day this spring and take a photo of the street sign, but I'll keep my head down. Sounds like a dangerous neighborhood.

My thanks to Bob Burnett for telling me about this.

That Woman Again

This was drawn last week for the New Yorker. Smack dab in the middle of doing sketches of Hillary falling off pedestals, falling off a donkey, falling off everything, she won some more state primaries and the whole story changed. I was also doing sketches for a similar story for the Atlantic. So everybody scrambled and this drawing was the result, at least of my scrambling. Whatever you may think of Hillary Clinton, we can all agree that she does have a pretty rubbery face, for which I'm grateful.



And I gotta say, every time I pick up a copy of the New Yorker I'm awed by the caricatures Tom Bachtell draws for them, sometimes five or six in each issue. Every face is spot on and he never repeats himself. Makes me cry.

Slowing Down

For some reason our internet connection has slowed down in the last few days. Images and stuff take forever to load; it's almost like back in the days of dial-up. At first I thought maybe it was me, maybe I'd suddenly developed super-powers and was moving real fast and everything just seemed slow to my super-reflexes because, you know, it's all about relativity, And that'd be a boon if I wanted to get ahead on my deadlines, which were especially brutal this week, and if I was the Flash I could draw enough strips to last through next Christmas. But it looks like it's just the internet being slow.

I don't think I'd pick super-speed as my super-power. I've always thought the ability to stay awake indefinitely would be the most useful power, or the ability to make someone's foot fall asleep by staring at it, which'd be a hoot at social gatherings. Whatever, the point I set out to make is that I'm not going to post anything real graphicky, with bells & whistles & funny drawings, until the connection gets a little more up to speed. So until then, please feel free to leave a message with a good joke.

Antsy Times

We all know these are antsy times in the world of newspapers, right? Here are some improvements oughta help a whole lot.

On the subject of Lynn Johnson's For Better or For Worse, I'm guessing eventually the Patterson family will come unstuck in time, like Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse 5, and start bouncing between now and then and next week on a daily basis. Or maybe, like the citizens of Grover's Corners in Our Town, they'll be simultaneously in the here and the hereafter. Or they'll just move to Santa Royale and get bossed around by Mary Worth.

Happy Birthday, Ronald Searle

Master penman Ronald Searle turns 88 today. Here's his illustration for the song "National Brotherhood Week" from the book Too Many Songs by Tom Lehrer With Not Enough Drawings by Ronald Searle. The original hangs in my dining room, just waiting to offend an unsuspecting diner. I think it's the only piece of art I've ever bought, and when I first unwrapped it I studied it for almost an hour, sometimes with my nose an inch from the paper. Look at those hands! just clumps of fingers sprouting out of sleeves, and look at the way he's laid out the page in bendy chains of rectangles, and jeez, all those gormless-looking faces...

I've heard that Searle plans his work pretty carefully and his unmistakably wiry, sprung lines are laid down with a lot more control than might be apparent. His work always makes me aware of how liquid ink is, how it skips and splotches and pools when it hits the paper. For a long time his style exerted a tidal pull on me, as it has at some point for a lot of cartoonists for over sixty years. Though he used to draw not with ink, but with a kind of stain meant for I think furniture. He liked it because it aged interestingly into a greyish purple, and because it handled differently than regular ink. They don't make that brand of stain anymore, and he's drawn with regular ink for years, and better than just about anyone else.

Happy Birthday to Mr. Searle, and I hope he's well and working in his converted windmill in the French countryside.

Important Touchy Subject Vaguely Alluded To

Here's an Almanac that bravely almost mentions an important issue but deftly avoids it for a cheap laugh, like usual.

My favorite is the Shaker. You so rarely come across a good Shaker joke these days, but you so rarely come across a Shaker either. I did see a Shaker once, she came to our school in 8th grade to present a program on her religion. I don't think she gained any converts, but it was interesting and, as we'd coincidentally been doing a week of drug-awareness programs, a little confusing in context. I went to a Quaker school up till 10th grade, and I can claim some pretty thick Quaker heritage, but there weren't many Quakers attending the school. Our third grade teacher, Mrs. Harker, was Quaker and sometimes used thee and thou and did it unaffectedly. She was cool and funny and told great stories (the best one was about how she somehow managed to get her car stuck up in a tree). Nowadays if someone asks my religious affiliation I usually say "lapsed Quaker", then I hope they ask how do you become a lapsed Quaker so I can tell them you sucker-punch a Buddhist. It's a lousy joke and no one's ever laughed at it, but someday they might.

More Oscars Updated with Old Material!

Here's this week's Almanack, too late to do you any good.


And here's an Oscars Preview from about 2003 with a few Teeny Tom Cruise jokes. And some other references that might be a little dated. But there is a flying-cummerbund joke, and of course those are always funny.

Girl Scout Cookies!

It's not too late to order cookies from my younger daughter, you know.

On The Bus

This was for the New Yorker last week. I kept redrawing it because of 11th hour panic, which is where the caricature suddenly ceases to look like its subject just as you're finishing it. I couldn't get his smile right. This is close enough.

Oscar (R) Fun!

This is an old Almanack. I've done an Oscar (R) cartoon maybe six times, and they've usually included Tiny Tom Cruise getting his arm stuck in his chair's cup-holder or falling between the seat cushions and nobody noticing. This was the first of them and probably my favorite, even though there are no actors caricatured.

We used to have an Oscar (R) party, with a pool for the winners and various props and novelty food items. The first year it was an Oscar (R) statue made of cream cheese. The most epic was a twenty minute version of Titanic that my wife made using toys from our daughters' toybox, and a mock-up of the ship that actually split in two and sank to slide-whistle accompaniment. She brought it all in under budget for about $62. Boy, she hated that movie when we saw it in the theater, and it really showed in the parody. Someday it'll make its way to Youtube, and she'll be voted an honorary Oscar (R) for services to mankind.

Electrical Contactors Run Amok

This is a cover I just finsihed for Electrical Contracor Magazine, art directed by the mighty Bono Mitchell. I think it's purty. I wish my house looked like this, maybe without the yellow dog. Or I wish I had a yellow dog like that, and forget the house full of gizmos.

Fumetti!!

Mille grazie di "Balloon- il blog delle comic strip"!

I think they were saying nice things . The Babelfish translation made it difficult to tell, though it was vastly entertaining in itself.

More President's Day Hi-Jinks

Here's Saturday's Almanack, drawn quickly when the lengthy, complicated cartoon I'd planned didn't work. My excuse is: when will I get another chance to draw Ron Paul?

President's Day Special Almanack

I think it's awfully nice that presidents get their own day. Do you think they get special deals at family-friendly restaurants on their very special day? In the Midwest there used to be a restaurant called Bob Knapp's that offered patrons a birthday deal where you'd get a percentage off based on your age; if you were ten you'd get ten percent off, if you were 100 you'd eat for free. Anything over 100 and I guess they'd owe you. It's no longer around, maybe because centenarians flocked to it. When my daughter turned four she got four percent off plus a slice of very tasty chocolate cake, and they probably sang Happy Birthday to her.

That was a digression. I did this back during the last Clinton administration, when a presidential stain was the stuff of comedy. Not like these days, when a presidential stain is more like Lady Macbeth's.

A History of Valentine's Day Cards

This is also from the Post mag, Valentine's Day '03. And every word of it is true. I was shocked to find out that my editor didn't know that diarist Samuel Pepys' name is pronounced "Peeps", especially as I'd only learned it the day before. I always thought it was Pep-eez, which is actually a stomach antacid.

Happy V Day!

This is Alice's first appearance in print, on the cover of the Valentine's Day issue of the Washington Post Magazine in '04. She's since gotten a haircut and a face-reshaping. But haven't we all?

Another Proto Cul de Sac Almanac of Yesteryear

Elephants for Monday Again!

So that big plan for posting an elephant every Monday kinda fell apart. But here's an Elephant for Monday just to catch up, plus a bonus donkey. It's a cover for Contingencies magazine from 1999, the theme being a play on Waiting for Godot. The final is fine, but I like the sketch a lot.

Comcs Improved, Maybe

This is for Mike & the guys. It's from a few years ago and started out as Roz Chast draws Blondie, then grew from there.

McCain With Penguins

Drawing John McCain is kinda hard; in other words, he doesn't simplify easiely. He's got a wide jaw, a small mouth, a blunt-yet-pointy nose, and twinkly, I-dare-you eyes. I've drawn him a dozen or so times, and this one's my favorite. It was for US News & World Report back when I did a weekly caricature for them, and it appeared soon after McCain lost the '04 nomination. To chill out (hah!) after the pressures of the campaign, McCain and his wife went to the Antarctic to look into the effects of global warming. Plus evidently McCain's a penguin fan, as who isn't? So my advice for drawing McCain is: if you get a chance, draw him with a mass of penguins. I don't know why, but it seems to work.