This marks my 30th year at the Arizona Daily Star, where, in the course of three decades, I have drawn approximately 8,640 cartoons, give or take a doodle. I have used so much paper Greenpeace holds me personally responsible for the disappearing Brazilian rainforest.
When I began my career there were over 200 political cartoonists in America. Today there are about 40 ink slingers left and, once the taxidermy is complete, three of them will be placed on display at Ohio State’s Cartoon Museum next to the Dodo exhibit. When I go, I will be displayed at the International Wildlife Mausoleum next to my beloved cat “Sketches.”
My first cartoons were about the Gadsden Purchase, Apache thievery and lynchings. Geronimo once delivered a letter to the editor complaining about my “one-sided pro-cavalry cartoons” by affixing his angry screed to a flaming arrow that arrived in my rump.
Dear Geronimo:
Thanks for writing. Your letter will be published as soon as the surgeon at Fort Lowell removes it from my inbox.
Fitz
After I drew a cartoon expressing alarm over the O.K. Corral shootings a disagreeable Doc Holliday threw a whiskey bottle and one of the Clantons through my office window. Later that week a mob with torches arrived with a noose. I was a success! I still have the rope burns to prove it.
Over the centuries I’ve received awards, thousands of pieces of hate mail, a handful of death threats, hundreds of terrible suggestions for cartoon ideas, and random instructions from unhappy readers encouraging me to insert my head into a segment of my anatomy in such a fashion as to cause lasting harm. And a restraining order in a Pear Tree. And that’s the fun part of the job.
I’ve made presentations about cartooning at every school, clubhouse, academy, Rotary, VFW Post, conference center, petting zoo, prison and carnival dunk tank west of the San Pedro. I am most proud of the fact I opened for Lindbergh when he spoke at Davis-Monthan Landing Field in 1927.
I drew Coolidge and told knee-slappers about Harding.
In the course of these presentations I would draw caricatures of many of the folks in my audience. And we’d all have a big laugh at their expense. Thousands of these beloved drawings have ended up prominently displayed on eBay the next day and many have been featured in failed libel suit exhibits.
Over the centuries I’ve seen amazing changes in the newspaper business. When I started in the industry we were hand carving petroglyphs onto boulders. This made home delivery impossible until a genius “thought small” and suggested we go with rocks the size of dinosaur eggs. He went on to invent the Volkswagen.
Home delivery revolutionized the business. And it was highly entertaining depending on the aim of the delivery boy. The invention of the catapult by the ancient Greeks was not the advance in home delivery we had hoped it would be.
When the Chinese invented paper and ink, meeting a huge demand from Chinese restaurateurs for menus, journalism leapt into the 1st century B.C. (Before Charlie Rose). Paper and ink were a huge improvement over chisels and rocks. It wasn’t until the greatest mind of the ages, Albert Einstein, invented the rubber band that the modern newspaper was born.
When Al Gore and a plucky Italian plumber named Mario invented the Internet I was propelled into the modern age, shifting from paper to pixels. Now I spend my days deleting emails, offloading, uploading, freeloading and downloading.
As I look over the past 30 years three things haven’t changed.
First, I still draw with the same cheap felt tip pens that I used to doodle caricatures of my teachers in the margins of my notebooks back when I was in a one-room prairie schoolhouse, sitting next to Laura Ingalls Wilder. She let me draw the R. Crumb “Truckin’” character on her arm.
Second, I’ve never changed the filter in my air conditioner. I’m sure that’s a mistake.
And third: I still love my job. I should. I started begging the then-editorial page editor of the Arizona Daily Star, Steve Auslander, to hire me when I was still eating Elmer’s glue and crayons. (I was 20. It’s a common disorder.) When Steve hired me, after a decade of pestering him, I was just about the last cartoonist hired in America by a daily newspaper.
Today I’m syndicated in hundreds of papers and on news sites worldwide. And the best part about this incredible gig? When I get mail from a reader in Kalamazoo telling me, “If brains were oil you’d be a quart low,” I know at that moment I am the luckiest man with the coolest gig in the world.
