The following autobiography was published in “Something about the Author Autobiography Series, Volume 17,” by Gale Research Corporation, 1994.
“How I Became An Instant Celebrity”
One of my earliest childhood memories was Papa taking me to the Brooklyn Museum. He led me up close to an Impressionist painting, pointing out that it consisted of blobs of color. Then we stepped back and he told me to look again. Magic! The blobs had turned into a recognizable image.
My mother couldn't read or speak English when she emigrated to the United States, so she enrolled in the free night school for adults at the local public school. When we were little, my two older sisters and I sat in Mama’s bed as she haltingly read to us from her English primer. Our favorite story reflected the experience of our parents and their peers—how a family from eastern Europe traveled in a crowded train to Antwerp on the Belgian coast. From there they sailed in steerage across the Atlantic. After a long, rough voyage they at last saw the Statue of Liberty and landed at Ellis Island. Little did I know then that in twenty years I'd be on a similar voyage in reverse aboard a troopship.
Hot summer nights, after chores were done, the tenement dwellers of my Brooklyn neighborhood left their stifling flats and sat outside in the cool night air. Their children played nearby.
When the hour grew late I rested my head on my mother’s lap and fell asleep listening to the stories she and her neighbors told each other.
Early on in public school the pictures I drew attracted attention. The principal and teachers from other classes came into my classroom to see my art. In grades one and two we had but one teacher for all subjects. Art was one period a week. Teacher gave each child a stiff board on which was printed skilled, professional drawing of simple objects—a house, an apple, a tree, and so on—which we children tried to copy. Such “art” classes were not my favorite subject.
In 1925 when I was in first grade, World War I was still a strong presence and Armistice Day was widely celebrated. Teacher told us for art we would draw a military parade. We were puzzled. How could we accomplish so complex and difficult a subject? Teacher smiled and instructed us to follow step-by-step on our drawing paper what she drew step-by-step on the blackboard.
First she drew a zigzag line. We all drew our zigzag line from left to right across our paper.
Next Teacher drew straight lines from the zigzag’s valleys down to the bottom of the blackboard. We copied her lines.
On the zigzag line she drew two circles like an eight. Then two upside-down letter V’s. A large letter C was added to the bottom of the eight. A cat. Sitting on the fence.
Then came the soldiers. Their bayoneted rifles seen above the fence.
That was the parade!
Frustrated, I removed the fence and drew a real parade. Teacher gave me a failing mark of D because I did not follow instructions. It was my first encounter with an inadequate art teacher.
In third grade we had a real art teacher in a special art room. A kind and gentle soul, she encouraged us to draw and paint what we wished. Once each year she selected the best student work to submit to a New York City-wide school art competition. Weeks later at a school assembly the principal called me to the stage and announced that I had won two bronze medals. I became an instant celebrity.
Even without encouragement I would have been dedicated to art. I was already smitten by its magic. “The child is father to the man.” My lifelong identity was in place.
Outside school I pressed on, covering the pavement and walls of my tenement house with chalk drawings. Bad weather did not stop me. I chalked up the lobby and halls of my tenement. The enraged janitor pleaded with my parents to stop me. The book The Pirates of Bedford Street is based on this childhood experience. Its author/illustrator is my niece Rachel Isadora, who heard about my derring-do with chalk from her mother, my older sister Rita.
Sometimes I preferred not to play with my peers, wandering off instead to explore the teeming life in the city streets. Perhaps the 1920s were safer and more civil. A small child alone could wander far. In the city’s poor immigrant neighborhoods, no matter how much parents feared for them, children of necessity had to fend for themselves. Parents were too occupied, fathers with sixty-hour-a-week jobs, mothers toiling in crowded cold-water flats without refrigerators, washing machines, electric irons, and so on. This necessitated daily food shopping, washing clothes by hand, and heating the iron on the stove. Years later my childhood fascination with streets and store window displays showed up in my easel paintings and the children's books I worked on, such as The Do-Something Day, What Do I Do?, What Do I Say?
Elephants were the reason for my longest journey away from my street. It was a day that could have been scripted by Dr. Seuss. Our block bordered the New Lots railroad freight yard. One summer morning when I was five, from my bedroom window I saw a strange freight train in the yard. I was too young to read the words on the cars, but soon recognized it as a circus train.
Handlers were unloading wheeled animal cages. A crowd gathered for the free show. The lions, tigers, and other animals thrilled me. But when elephants marched down the ramps of several freight cars, I was captivated and followed alongside as they were led into the street.
Never before or since have I seen a procession of elephants through the streets. I could not tear myself away. Each block we came to renewed my excitement as I observed the delight and surprise of the new spectators. A mass of children followed the elephants. Knowing that I was being led far from home, through strange streets, I made mental notes of street features along the way.
Eventually we arrived at a vast, empty field. They existed then in Brooklyn. Now I surmise it was in the Flatbush section, miles from my Brownsville home. The big tents were going up, but hunger and fatigue compelled me homeward. Guided by my earlier visual markings, I arrived in time for supper. My mother didn’t fuss; she was familiar with my absences, knowing that I could become so absorbed in drawing or wandering that I would disappear for most of the day.
Then as today, poor immigrant parents struggled so that their children might have a better life. Education was the popular path to the good life. So was show business and the arts. Thus it was that at age eight, my mother enrolled me in a class with older students at the art school of the Educational Alliance in New York’s Lower East Side. I hated the long subway ride between Brownsville, in Brooklyn, and Manhattan.
My class drew from plaster casts of isolated body parts, never from a live model. Our first cast was a clenched fist, a fit symbol of that silent, joyless class. The teacher insisted that we draw the same cast over and over, striving for photo perfection. If you got it right after one month, you were allowed to proceed to the foot, and so on. By year’s end we would be allowed to draw a complete arm and leg. After the second year the entire nude figure, complete with fig leaf. Halfway through the foot I quit.
Something positive did come from that unpleasant experience. It demonstrated to me that I and my art were important. Why else would my hardworking, weary mother have devoted precious evenings and money to enroll me in art class and escort me to and from Manhattan twice a week?
The local public library was my real art school. There I discovered the world of illustration in books and magazines. I read, or rather attempted to read, books illustrated by Howard Pyle and N.C. Wyeth, whose work I’ve admired all my life. No matter that I could not understand the stories. The illustrations mattered more than the text. The librarians questioned me. Why would an eight-year-old check out fat books like Treasure Island and Kidnapped? To this day a publication’s quality of design and illustration can influence my like or dislike of its text.
Excellence in one field does not necessarily extend to other fields. The preeminent illustrator Howard Pyle wrote shallow, simplistic stories about King Arthur and His Knights. Not that I thought them shallow as a child. My book A Tournament of Knights attempts to debunk the myth of the selfless knight-errant.
Before I had learned to read, I “read” the Sunday comics by scanning the pictures from left to right, trying to understand their content. Later, the library books I did read with understanding and enjoyment were the classic fairy tales in the color series: The Brown Fairy Tale Book, The Green Fairy Tale Book, and so on. I know I read all the books in the series because there were no more colors left. That’s also how I learned the colors of the spectrum.
The joys of “trash” were next—pop literature, unacceptable to librarians and teachers. This came in two categories: There were the pulp magazines with lurid covers purchased from newsstands—The Shadow, Doc Savage, Weird Tales, Flying Aces, and so on. The other category was hardcover books borrowed for five cents a day from circulating libraries—walls of books in candy stores and drugstores (as pharmacies were known then). My favorite series were The Boy Allies, Tarzan, and Bomba the Jungle Boy. Because of the five-cents-a-day fee I read these 200- to 300-page books in one or two days to save money. After a year of such intense reading I had to be fitted for glasses. “I told you not to read so much!” my mother yelled at me.
Before the 1950s, children had a great advantage: there was no television. We read more, played more, and spent more time in the public library. My local library was so crowded, patrons were required to keep voices low. It was not uncommon for librarians to come from behind their desks to shush the talkers. Children persisting in loud talk were punished by having their library cards taken from them for a week. They could not borrow books. I remember a girl whose card was taken from her. She became so fearful and hysterical that she fell on the floor screaming and kicking, disrupting the entire library. She got her card back fast.
Travail marred my parents’ marriage because they had not married for love. When my father decided to take a wife, he wrote to his parents in Romania. They contacted a matchmaker who sent photos of prospective brides to my father in New York. He selected the photo of my mother and sent her the money for her passage to America. Apparently she had no choice in the matter. That’s how it was then.
At age twenty she departed forever from her home, leaving her family for the first time. Alone, she traveled north across the central European countries to Hamburg, Germany. There she found a place in steerage aboard a transatlantic ship. Papa met her at Ellis Island. They were married in December 1911. So much for the good old days and family values. My book Merry Ever After describes medieval arranged marriages. Romance is a relatively modern invention.
A failure in almost all his endeavors, Papa did have a small measure of success as a cantor. During the high holy days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, he occasionally sang in synagogue choirs.
He was a skillful tailor but was incapable of holding a job. Just as carpenters today bring their tools to a job, so too did tailors once bring their tools to their work. Being “a cutter and presser by ladies’ and men’s garments,” Papa needed heavy tools to cut out and then press multilayered patterns of thick cloth. I waited for him to come home at night, his heavy tool sack slung across his shoulders. I transformed his tools: the immense gas-heated steam iron, which I could barely lift, became a steam ship; the bulky fifteen-inch scissors became a whale.
When the Great Depression descended, jobless Papa became a peddler. Apparently he earned very little. One day when he was away, several burly men burst into our apartment. Their leader shoved an eviction notice for nonpayment of rent at my frightened mother. She pleaded for a delay, but the man was adamant—and apologetic. He explained that he too had a wife and children and this was his work; this was how he kept from being evicted from his home. In no time all our possessions were dumped on the street and our former apartment padlocked. Frantically, Mama told us to watch our belongings while she rushed away to find another dwelling.
In the 1920s and 1930s there was a surfeit of unrented apartments. Every street had For Rent signs in the windows of vacant apartments. To find a rental, you walked along any desired street, inquired, and then compared the offerings. So eager were landlords to rent, they offered their apartments rent-free for the first one to three months. With a few dollars down my mother moved us into a small, three-room cold-water flat nearby. My oldest sister waited outside our former house for my father and brought him to our new place. My class consciousness, like my art, took early root.
If any love could have possibly existed between my parents, surely it disappeared when my father was unable to support us. Driven by poverty we were forced onto relief, as welfare was known then. All of us, Mama, my two sisters, and I, had to find work. At age ten, I took on an after-school newspaper delivery route with the now defunct Brooklyn Eagle. After two weeks of work I had not received any pay. The branch manager laughed when I asked him what was my salary and when would I get it. He said there was no salary. That the difference between the discount price I paid for my papers each week and the retail price I collected from my customers was my pay. No one had explained this to me when I started working. I hadn’t been earning anything because there were always deadbeat customers who promised to pay “next week” but never did and eventually were dropped.
I quizzed other newsboys if and how they earned money. Like the manager, they laughed at my ignorance. An older boy took me aside and revealed the secret. He pointed out that I was obliged to pay for a minimum number of subscribers. Even if the route didn’t have the minimum, I would still have to pay for the minimum number of papers. The more subscribers in a route, the more the earnings. It was the newsboy’s responsibility to canvas for additional subscribers. Therein lay the secret.
If you didn’t reveal new subscribers to management, you kept all their payments for yourself. The papers you supplied to new subscribers came from the extra papers made available to compensate for damaged copies always present in bundled newspapers. The other way you earned your “salary” was to tell management you had to drop a customer for payment delinquency. But actually you kept delivering to the customer and pocketed the money. I descended further down this path to worldly wisdom when in time I learned that the secret was not a secret. The manager also profited by juggling his numbers. And so it went up the management ladder.
If my father endowed me with a wonderment of art, my mother gave me a social conscience. Papa took me to museums and concerts. Mama took me to political demonstrations. I was too young to comprehend either. Yet I remember those passionate orators, Socialist leaders Norman Thomas and Morris Hillquit, crying out for the freedom of Sacco and Vanzetti. Papa complained endlessly about the oppressive sweatshops he worked in yet had no interest in politics or unions.
Mama took me to the “soup kitchen.” She was a volunteer, cooking and cleaning in the Socialist Party’s shelter. At rows of long plain wooden tables and benches a simple, basic meal was served free once a day to anyone who came. They came. Long lines of shabbily dressed men. Several times during the meal I was sent outside the shelter to report back on the length of the line waiting to be served. Sometimes it extended for half a city block. The length of the line determined how much more food had to be prepared.
Writing this it occurs to me that I never saw women on line. Where were the hungry women? This was during “prosperity,” the Roaring Twenties, before the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression. Today, some sixty-five years later, I see lines of shabby men and women outside the shelter of my hometown of Norwalk, Connecticut. The 1920s and 1930s art of Kathe Kollwitz and Reginald Marsh depicting such soup kitchen lines is still timely.
In elementary school, art made me a celebrity. So too in high school, where I drew a popular cartoon strip for the school newspaper. But there was little stimulus or challenge for an aspiring painter. This void was lavishly filled by New York City’s museums and private art galleries, all free and waiting. One of the private galleries I admired and frequented was the Kraushaar Gallery. Years later in 1949, Antoinette Kraushaar took me on as a regular. The gallery still exhibits my paintings and illustrations.
Meanwhile I was comparing New York City art schools. The Cooper Union impressed me the most. It had the added advantage of being tuition-free. Founded and endowed by the estimable inventor and philanthropist Peter Cooper in 1859 “to provide education for working classes,” it offered four-year courses in art, architecture, science, and engineering.
In 1935, at age sixteen, while still in high school, I applied for admission into the Cooper Union night art school. Applicants had to be high school graduates and eighteen or older. The admission authorities didn’t ask for documentation, so I took and passed the annual entrance exams.
High school by day, art school by night, and on weekends and holidays I helped my mother in her stifling hatcheck concession in a Romanian cellar cabaret on the Lower East Side. This was how my mother supported us. My father, barely able to support himself, lived alone.
Cooper Union was an abrupt and welcome change, a ritual of passage into adulthood. My fellow students were adults; some of them worked at commercial art by day. I did not reveal my age. If asked what I did by day, I replied evasively that I did not have a steady job. I wasn’t lying.
Some of my peers at Cooper Union dazzled me with their ability. For the first time I was up against superior talents. In retrospect, interaction with my fellow students is what benefited me the most. The teachers taught us to paint in the styles of the 1930s: native regionalism or imported cubism. Both styles would soon be passé.
Technically there isn't much to painting. The basic training—mixing paints, stretching a canvas, mastering the tools and materials—can be taught in a month. The rest is all in the doing, and in the mind and heart. Would I have been better off with four years in a fine liberal arts college rather than four years of art school?
Those were the Roosevelt New Deal years. All over the country the Public Works Administration (PWA) was constructing new buildings for the federal government. One percent of the cost of construction was set aside for artistic decoration. National competitions, announced yearly and open to all, were held for these decorations. Still in high school and Cooper Union, I entered competitions for mural paintings. An entry consisted of scaled-down renderings and a full-size three-by-three-feet detail.
I never won a first prize. Just as well. I probably couldn’t have handled the technical complexity of thousands of square feet of painted surface. But I did win honorable mention in two competitions for which I was awarded contracts to paint smaller murals for two U.S. post offices, in Calumet, Michigan, and Millbury, Massachusetts. They are still in place.
I had arrived! I was a real artist—or so I thought. No longer would I be evasive with my fellow students. The murals paid $700 and $800. After mural expenses, I had enough to support me for a year.
In June 1939, two years after graduating from high school, I graduated from Cooper Union. What now? No longer was I a student inside a protective cocoon. No longer was there a father-figure teacher at my elbow providing boundaries and direction. The PWA along with the rest of Roosevelt’s New Deal was at an end. No more mural competitions, no more art projects.
I hadn’t yet learned how to adapt my talent to commercial illustration, so I took whatever employment was available. Summers I worked as an arts and crafts counselor in a children’s camp, then as a stage manager in Catskill Mountain “borscht belt” resorts, painting scenery and working lights and curtains. One holiday season I worked in a department store doing Christmas displays and then as a sales clerk. Eventually I found what was to be steady employment, ironically, in a small paint factory as a laborer. Naively, I mentioned to a fellow employee that I had graduated from art school. News that an “educated” outsider was in their midst spread among the workers. When the boss heard, he fired me, fearing I would be receptive to union organization. Of course he was right.
Worse worries than employment began to trouble me. My sisters had married and moved out of our apartment. I lived with and took care of my mother, who was very ill. Hitler, Mussolini, and Japan would obviously soon be our enemies in World War II. Most of my friends were in the armed services, and I knew I would be drafted sooner or later.
Nothing, not even a nation, was permanent. The Axis powers were winning military victories everywhere. France fell to Hitler. Everybody walked about in shock. One day I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I guess I was reaching for something permanent, the old masters. The museum was almost empty. In one of the galleries an older woman spoke to me. “How can you possibly be looking at paintings in these times?” Implying I was young, healthy cannon fodder.
Shortly before I was drafted my sister Lee, whose husband was in the air force, came back to live with us and take care of my mother.
Momentous events, unlike in the movies, are frequently dull affairs. The day I entered the army I did not march away with bands playing and beautiful women cheering. At a designated time my fellow draftees and I simply reported to a clerk at the local draft board situated in a barren store in Brooklyn. After a head count we boarded a bus and were delivered to Fort Dix in New Jersey.
When the army takes away your civilian clothing and cuts your hair short, that's a metaphor. A few weeks into basic training I realized I was nothing but a rifle with legs. I had two big worries: If I were killed, I would never have the chance to prove I really was an artist; and what would my death do to my mother and father?
Release from the second worry came before a year had gone by. Both my parents died from multiple illnesses within a few months of each other.
As for proving I was an artist, this rifle with legs had little chance. Maybe it was different in other outfits—in headquarter units or on the officer level. But the line outfits I was in, first in the infantry and then less so in the engineers, there was a climate of disapproval of anything intellectual. The same insensitivity on my part that got me fired from the paint factory also worked against me in the army. Months passed before it dawned on me that I’d be wise not to openly read anything above the level of a tabloid newspaper or a comic book. I further realized that as a soldier I had no complaint if I was dry, fed, warm, and not being shot at.
In the field, soldiers in training are allowed a ten-minute break every hour. They can lie down in the shade, smoke, urinate—whatever. The Arizona Desert Training Center where we were stationed had a dramatic beauty I sought to capture.
Instead of “getting off my feet” for the ten-minute break, I started to sketch in a small pad. Seeing this, my sergeant drawled, “Private Lasker, I need a volunteer to dig us a latrine ditch. You have the energy to make them pictures. You have the energy to dig us a ditch.”
That experience “wised me up.” I confined my sketching and reading to Sundays and evenings when I was off duty and could go off by myself. When soldiers were the subject I was more judicious in choosing when and where to sketch. Such a judicious time came on the troopship taking us to England. For seventeen stormy days in February 1945, everyone was left to his own devices. We were too seasick, too tightly packed together. Though terribly seasick, I made several ambitious, complex drawings of existence on a troopship.
Yank was a bright, lively magazine published by and for the army. Occasionally it featured art submitted by GIs. After my battalion had set up camp in England, I wrote a brief essay to accompany the troopship drawings and mailed the package to Yank. For security all outgoing mail was read and, if necessary, censored by an officer. His duty was to be objective and impersonal. But a few times he had addressed me with quotations from personal things I had written in my letters.
Weeks passed without a response from I. I wrote to the magazine describing my drawings and asked if they had been received. Days later Yank responded. My drawings had never arrived. I reported this to the mail officer and asked that a tracer be put on my package. There was no mistaking his intent when he replied, “I don’t recall sending out the package you describe. You would not be wise to insist on a tracer.” Obviously he or other officers had filched my sketches. Given the dictatorial power of an officer over an enlisted man, I saluted and did an about-face. Those drawings have become my “Lost Chord,” some of my best work.
Despite its stifling regimen I did not resent being in the army. It was my war. I was an obedient soldier. Put another way, during the Vietnam War several young men told me I was lucky to have been a soldier in World War II because “it was the last good war.” Friendship with a few soldiers enriched army life and made it bearable. My bonding with “Pat” O’Malley of Michigan has lasted to this day, even though we live eight hundred miles apart.
On the continent, my outfit, the 1147th Engineer Combat Group, maintained roads and bridges in Germany over which supplies moved to the front. Mornings, we watched as Hitler’s lumbering “V” bomb rockets chugged overhead on their way to London and Antwerp. Nights, we watched the massive Allied air raids on the industrial Ruhr. When bombers were hit by anti-aircraft fire, flames and detonated bombs lit up the night. Then they fluttered earthward in eerie slow motion. Nobody spoke. We were remote witnesses to horrible deaths.
Shortly after crossing into Germany, my captain asked if I spoke Yiddish. “Somewhat,” I answered. “Is Yiddish like German?” he continued. I said it must be because I was able to read some of the German signs and the many Achtung placards. He handed me a German-English dictionary and pronounced me the outfit’s interpreter.
Thus was I switched from manual labor to the “advance detail.” To my delight we reconnoitered over large areas of northeastern Germany in a Jeep and later in a commandeered locomotive. To further our mission, the maintenance of supply routes for the U.S. Ninth Army, we inspected the autobahn and rail lines. We searched bridges and dismantled explosives. When I questioned Germans it pleased me to know that they could tell I was a Jew from my Yiddish-accented German.
The roads were clogged with bewildered refugees: disheveled German soldiers who had stripped their uniforms of all insignia and brass buttons to hide their identity; German families pushing loaded carts and baby carriages, sometimes with babies and sometimes with old people; and emaciated “displaced persons”—liberated civilians from across Europe who had been slave laborers in German factories.
One day our detail reached the Elbe River, the line that, by Allied and Soviet agreement, was to be the point where their armies would meet. American GIs were already there, waiting for the Red Army. Partially submerged in the river was a wrecked bridge on which German soldiers were crawling, attempting to reach the Allied side. A GI explained that the Germans, terrified of the Red Army, were desperate to surrender to Americans. The GIs’ orders were not to let the Germans cross over. But some German officers did cross by bribing GIs with their Luger pistols. The high-tech Luger was the war souvenir most prized by GIs. After hostilities I was issued a European Campaign ribbon with two battle stars.
Like most GIs I had always looked forward to returning to civilian life. Back at Fort Dix, the night before my discharge, I became nauseous. At midnight I was forced to seek out the post medic. He tranquilized me with medicine and sympathy, explaining my illness was common among soldiers just before separation from service.
How right he was. I had been denying my fear of the unknown. Out there I had no home, no parents, no job waiting for me. After three years, four months, and six days, the army had become a snug cocoon.
My first week out of the army I stayed with my sister Rita while looking for my own place. Apartments were still cheap and plentiful. In East Harlem, in an empty, ancient six-story walk-up tenement, I rented a small, three-room apartment: hot water, no heat, toilets in the hall. The rent: fifteen dollars per month. Primitive, yes, but compared to army barracks it was home sweet home.
The apartment next door was rented by Steve Raffo, a fellow Cooper Union art school alumnus, also a vet without family. We chose the sixth floor because the light was best for painting. The landlord couldn’t understand why anyone would want to live in the building, let alone on the sixth floor when all the lower floors were available.
A year later one of the locals confided to Steve that we had been regarded with suspicion. Our life-style was so different in that Italian working-class neighborhood, it was believed we were police or FBI. That’s why we were high up on the sixth floor—the better to spy on the area.
I lived on eighty dollars a month on the GI Bill of Rights, otherwise known as the “52/20 club”: fifty-two weeks, twenty dollars a week. To get that money I had to enroll in a school approved under the GI Bill. School had as much appeal for me as enlisting in the army. No problem, thanks to the Hans Hofmann Art School. Hans Hofmann was the esteemed master and teacher of nonobjective painting, the father of the “New York School of Painting.” His school was known throughout the vet-artist community as the school where you could get your stipend without attending classes.
There was one hitch: enrolled students had to sign a register once a week. To comply, most of us paired off into groups of four. Each month one of the four took a turn attending the weekly register day. The attendee signed the four names in the register as it passed around the class.
The school puzzled me. Why didn’t the Veterans’ Administration question how Hofmann’s several hundred enrolled students could fit into his modest-sized classroom? He did have enough serious students to fill the classroom. All their paintings were nonobjective, so why was there always a nude model posing on the model stand?
On one of my register-signing days I sat in the class waiting for the register to reach me. I wasn’t drawing; I had no art supplies; I was just daydreaming. Meanwhile Hans Hofmann was going from student to student giving each a lengthy critique. Suddenly I realized he was with the student near me and I would be next. I grabbed a stick of charcoal and a large drawing pad a student had left on a nearby chair. Quickly I covered a page with scrawled lines and blobs. Just in time. Mr. Hofmann sat down next to me. He praised “the looseness, the push and pull tension” of my work of art. His critique lasted ten minutes.
Those three Spartan years on the sixth floor were my art crucible. I was “faced with insurmountable opportunity”—the blank canvas with no limitations. Freedom can be a terrible thing. How much easier it is to work under imposed limitations: that is, a designated subject, a wall mural, a portrait, an illustration.
I forced myself to paint, to stay at the easel. My first paintings were awful and I destroyed them. Gradually I found my subject, the streets outside, children in front of store windows, and building facades. Later I realized that this was a reaching back to my childhood. The theme served me well for ten years.
In a year’s time I had a few paintings that I was willing to show. Before 1960 there were more opportunities to break into the painting field. National competitions and art museum annuals invited submissions. I began to win prizes and favorable mention in the media. A few sales added further encouragement.
In 1947 I applied and was accepted for a summer at Yaddo, the sylvan retreat for artists, writers, and composers located in Saratoga Springs, New York. Compared to my stifling, tiny apartment, Yaddo was Elysium. A bedroom in the mansion and a studio in a large barn were assigned to me. Three generous meals a day were feasts compared to my poor efforts at cooking. This cornucopia was free—and a culture shock.
Kafka, T. S. Eliot, Sartre, Joyce, Proust was the language spoken at Yaddo by Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, Theodore Roethke, and other guests. I had little knowledge of the former or the latter. At night I eagerly read their works if only to comprehend dinner-table conversation.
After the space and luxury of Yaddo, it was daunting to return to the mean little sixth-floor apartment on 107th Street and First Avenue. I was lonely and restless, even though my painting was going well and getting recognition.
The New York Times and Life magazine ran stories about a “GI Paradise” in Mexico, the Escuela Universitaria de Bellas Artes in San Miguel de Allende, where the GI Bill and the mighty U.S. dollar enabled a vet to live in grand style.
Fifty dollars bought a round-trip bus ticket from New York to Mexico City. From the border town of Laredo to Mexico City my bus carried other vets bound for San Miguel. Most of them had one thing in common, eagerness to at last fulfill their dream of painting or writing without money worries.
The peasant culture, the beauty of the land, and the architecture of San Miguel in 1948 were enchanting. It took time to absorb and to paint it. A few of the GIs who had been on the bus with me from Laredo were unable to “face their insurmountable opportunity”'—the fearful blank canvas, the blank sheet of paper. They took to the bottle and the all-night cantinas.
After four months of painting and travel in Mexico I went back to New York for a return visit to Yaddo in July. One Saturday night, between Mexico and Yaddo, I went to a fund-raiser social for the Henry Wallace presidential campaign at a rented studio in Carnegie Hall. When I asked a young, pretty woman to dance, I didn’t know it was the best and luckiest thing I ever did. Six months later we were married, despite my hesitation and fear that I would be giving up my “freedom.”
My new wife, Millie, and I moved across the street into a larger apartment, and she continued in her office job. My earnings hovered between the GI Bill, free-lance illustration, prizes, and occasional sales of paintings. Art had not yet exploded. Critical acclaim did not yet translate into big bucks. My “fifteen minutes of fame” had come and gone before that time.
When Millie became pregnant with David, our first child, I reluctantly sought a regular job with steady income. My boyhood pal Bernie Sterler was a salesman for a small TV company. He secured a sales position for me. Nine-to-five respectability complete with time clock was mine.
The boss, knowing I was an artist, asked if I could handle advertising. I told him my experience with advertising was remote, limited to a few illustrations for magazines. Dissatisfied with a small advertising agency he had engaged, he took me off sales and put me in charge of advertising. No one was more surprised than I when my ads did better than the agency’s ads. The only explanation was that I was working from inside the company, whereas the agency had only a secondhand understanding of the company and its purpose. My pay was raised, I had a secretary, but the demanding nature of the job left little time for painting. Meanwhile I had submitted paintings to the Prix de Rome fellowship competition.
Oh happy day when I was notified that I had been awarded a Rome fellowship. It meant we would live in Rome for the next two years. The prize included round-trip fare to Rome, a bedroom and a studio in the academy, meals, and travel allowance. Children, however, could not reside in the academy, so we had to find an apartment. The academy has since provided apartments for families with children.
Months before we were to leave for Rome I resigned my advertising position. Good thing I did, because our baby, born in April 1950, was more than Millie could handle alone. David was super hyperactive and exhausted us both.
September 1950, on the SS Saturnia to Italy (air travel was still a rarity) we met our fellow fellows: painters, sculptors, classicists, composers. All of us young and eager, aware we had been gifted in more ways than one. Also aboard was a fresh shipment of Fulbright scholars, among them Jack Levine, whose paintings I’ve always admired, and Teresa Stich-Randall, the opera-diva-to-be.
In those halcyon years the strong dollar enabled us to rent a pleasant apartment near the academy and employ a full-time maid. In the evening Millie joined me at the academy for dinner and mingling with pleasant company. There were frequent cocktail parties, receptions, and concerts. Many luminaries passed through: Ingrid Bergman, Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Henry Moore, Louis Kahn, Eero Saarinen among them.
Everything about the American Academy in Rome is grand. It is a spacious Renaissance style palazzo surrounded by its own gardens and smaller villas, designed by Stanford White at the turn of the century. It stands astride the Janiculum, one of the seven hills of Rome, a short distance from the Vatican. My studio was immense, with a wall of windows two stories high that overlooked the city and the mountains beyond. Art and history are in the streets and piazzas. Ah, the streets. In those early 1950s the streets were viable, shared by pedestrians, bicycles, and a few cars and trucks. The magnificent piazzas were still open and visible, not yet transformed into mean parking lots. Victor Hugo wrote, “Every artist has two homes, his own and Rome.” We felt at home immediately in Rome, and in our travels in Italy. When we strolled in the streets with David and Laura, strangers came up to us to admire them, so unlike Parisians. Oddly, the best painting I did in Rome was of Naples. Naples is now in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
January 1952: Laura, our second child, was born in Rome. Unlike David she was an easy baby. Easy, like those two golden years which eventually came to an end. We departed with trepidation, again facing an uncertain future, only this time I had a family to support. Unlike most of the other fellows who were tenured professors on leave, I had no job waiting for me. Nor did we know where we would live. Apartment rentals had become difficult to find.
Not knowing when we would return to Europe, if ever, Millie and I foolishly decided to return to New York by way of France, Holland, and England. We left Rome in late September on a near disastrous sojourn. Traveling with two small children on a limited budget through strange countries was hard on all of us. But we couldn’t cut the trip short because our return passage was booked for late December of 1952.
We reached London in December just in time to be trapped in the worst smog in history. Day became night, breathing was difficult, vehicles drove a few miles per hour and then only if someone walked ahead holding a lantern to guide them. We walked through the streets by feeling our way along the buildings and counting the corners to tell how many blocks we had traversed. Thousands of people died of respiratory illnesses, as did most of the animals at an international exposition of prize livestock. The smog was caused by a combination of factors. Britain, not yet recovered from the war, used the cheapest coal, a brown powdery substance, to fuel the city’s million small stoves; central heating was rare. Add to this London’s famed pea-soup fog. The smog penetrated everywhere.
With time weighing heavy, we went to a movie but could barely see the screen. Sleep was difficult: you couldn’t breathe through your nose, and if you breathed through your mouth you tasted the acrid smoke. Laura, eleven months old, and David, two and a half years old, suffered deeply. Laura developed bad diarrhea and was admitted to a hospital. Her condition deteriorated rapidly. Millie had breast-fed her since birth; the two had never been separated. Limited visiting hours kept them apart most of the day. We could see Laura was dying—she had no color, her eyes were expressionless. Millie demanded that she room with Laura, or else we would remove Laura from the hospital. The doctor and nurse told us we were wrong to move her, but we insisted. Laura was transferred to a different hospital where she and Millie could have a room to themselves.
This second hospital wasn’t old; it was ancient. Its halls were open to the elements, and the rooms had no central heating, just a fireplace with a limited fuel supply. Laura developed bronchitis, yet we could see by her eyes and response to Millie that she could recover. Of our month in London, Laura spent three weeks in the hospital.
Another crisis hit us. One week before our ship was to sail, the doctor advised us not to remove Laura from the hospital if she had not yet recovered.
Fortunately, she improved rapidly and was discharged the day before we sailed. I inquired about the bill and was told there was none—Britain had socialized medicine. Fleeing London on the train to Southampton, we saw no smog beyond the city. From Windsor on the air was crystal clear. We arrived in New York on New Year’s Day with two healthy children.
Back in New York, compared to Rome, our living standard plummeted. We rented a kerosene-heated cold-water flat on the Lower East Side. Again, I hustled for free-lance illustration work, until the day my dealer, Antoinette Kraushaar, told me the University of Illinois, Urbana, had inquired if I would take a position as visiting associate professor of art for one year, teaching two days a week. I accepted immediately.
The university placed us in a small, cheerful house on the edge of Urbana near prairie farms. We were happy the children were in a bucolic setting. It was my first association with a university. If you have to have a regular job, a tenured professorship is ideal. Before my year was over I won a Guggenheim fellowship. I also sought another teaching position in or near New York City. The only position offered me was with the Famous Artists Schools in Westport, Connecticut. I balked at working for a correspondence school, but its location had advantages.
Before going to Rome we had bought a building lot on a small Long Island Sound peninsula in Norwalk, the town next to Westport. The lot was in a planned, nonprofit, interracial community called Village Creek. Eventually there would be sixty-seven homes plus a beach, harbor, playground, baseball field, and tennis courts. And it was one hour from Manhattan.
Village Creek was ideal for children. In its early years there were seventy children, and as many dogs and cats. For the first time we had stability, community, and our own home. The pay at Famous Artists was good, the work easy; I didn’t have to see students, leaving me with enough leftover energy to paint. The twelve-minute drive to work was pleasant, as was my private work space overlooking the Saugatuck River.
Millie hadn’t been to college. She had always wanted a degree and a profession. With three small children she felt vulnerable “in case anything happened” to me. When Evan, our third child, was six months old, Millie embarked on a grinding nine years of mostly evening college courses toward a bachelor’s degree and an M.A. in special education. The measure of her determination was in graduating with a B.S. magna cum laude. For her master’s degree she attended Columbia Teachers College on a scholarship. Three months after obtaining her master’s degree she started teaching children with learning disabilities in the Westport school system. Twenty-two years later she retired.
Evan set Millie on her special education career. As an infant he was “not like other children.” He is not retarded or dyslexic, or any other condition. For years we schlepped him to various psychologists, psychiatrists, neurologists and other specialists who gave us conflicting, unconvincing diagnoses. The last was that Evan has “a pervasive developmental disorder”! What is certain about Evan is that he is gentle, loving innocent. Read all about it in my book He’s My Brother. After three years at an excellent nursery school, Evan was enrolled in kindergarten. Before long the principal told us our son would not be allowed to continue in school because “he’s not like the other children, is too slow, and doesn’t understand things.” We could not force the school to educate Evan in a special class or even tutor him at home. State law did not mandate special education.
Through local newspapers we found other parents with a similar problem. In 1963 we joined together to force the schools to provide an appropriate education for our children. We also worked to change the state education laws and eventually had federal laws enacted that would mandate special education. It took years to achieve and we did it by cooperating statewide and nationwide with like-minded organizations for the handicapped. My seventeen years with the Connecticut Association for Children with Learning Disabilities as president and then as legislative director involved boring organization work for which I have no stomach, but it had to be done.
The public schools did take Evan back and coped with him through high school. He was passed along from grade to grade, sometimes in special classes, until he was eighteen and “graduated.” The Connecticut Association for Children with Learning Disabilities still exists and is a force for special education.
Thus far I’ve said little about my career as author and illustrator of children’s books. I never aspired to be a writer, though as a child I wanted to be an illustrator of children’s books, like Pyle and Wyeth. It came about because, like Millie, I felt economically vulnerable. Lifetime experience taught me not to put all my eggs in one basket. Not that my position with Famous Artists wasn’t secure in the 1960s.
Accordingly I again turned to illustration, children’s book illustration, because of what I had seen in the many picture books I had read to my three children when they were small. The best of these illustrators were direct and honest, without the slickness or superficiality then current in illustrations directed at adults. I refer to the children’s book illustrators Maurice Sendak, Garth Williams, E. H. Shepard, Erik Blegvad, Randolph Caldecott, and many more. I worked up a new portfolio of samples and made the rounds of publishers in New York—without success.
Back to the drawing board I went to prepare new samples. But along came deus ex machina in the form of Miriam Schlein, a friend and author of many children’s books who asked me to illustrate a manuscript she had sold.
Before the late 1960s most color illustrations in picture books were color separated by hand. The artist drew a separate picture for each color, then prayed they would all register perfectly in the printing. It was far more work for the artist, but the publisher saved money on production costs. Some artists were perfectly attuned to separation. To me it was the devil’s invention. Fortunately Miriam’s husband at the time, Harvey Weiss, an experienced illustrator and author, showed me how to handle the mechanics of color separation. When the book was published it received favorable reviews. The rest is not history.
From then on I illustrated one or two books a year while juggling Famous Artists, painting, and serving on the board of the Connecticut Association for Children with Learning Disabilities. When Famous Artists collapsed unexpectedly, I had eggs in illustration baskets. To double my income from books, I turned to writing. The standard royalty is 5 percent to the author, 5 percent to the illustrator. After the first edition, total royalty is 12 1/2 percent. After writing several books I found that writing takes as much time and effort as illustrating. On the other hand, as an author I write about subjects that I like to illustrate. Merry Ever After, my most acclaimed book, was inspired in part by my love for medieval art, Pieter Breughel’s paintings, and so on. It was a vicarious thrill; I became a medieval illuminator.
But how do illustrators, like me, who never aspired to write, learn to write? When an illustrator gets a manuscript to illustrate, he reads and rereads it to extract ideas for illustrations, page layouts, and so on. He analyzes the words and their meanings. Without realizing it, he’s learning how it’s written. Like taking a clock or motor apart and then assembling it, he learns how it works. I write the way I illustrate and paint. Starting with a definite subject and outline, I put down whatever comes to mind without worrying about the opening sentence. After I have a mess of words and sentences, I pull it into some kind of rough order. After numerous rewrites the form emerges.
Ideas can come from anywhere. Writing this autobiography it occurred to me for the first time that my childhood experience with the circus elephants could be developed into a book. Earlier I showed where the ideas for Merry Ever After and He’s My Brother came from. Talk on the radio concerning women’s roles in picture books inspired Mothers Can Do Anything. In the late 1970s when women’s liberation burst forth, again and again talk-show guests complained that sexism begins early, in children’s books. Boys have all the fun and adventures. Boys slay dragons and rescue passive maidens. So I did a book showing that women can do anything, basing it on women’s activities from news stories.
I have never “retold” any classic “best loved” fairy tales, legends, and so on. If they have been classic and best loved for centuries, how can I improve on them? I fear that a retold version might lose the subconscious, mythic power of the original. Anyway, there is so much rich material in history and in the news of the day that I feel more secure in creating my own stories from those sources: The Great Alexander the Great, The Boy Who Loved Music, Nick Joins In.
Each book I have written has spawned ideas for more books. My “ideas” folder has grown exponentially. While doing research for Tales of a Seadog Family I came across a brief mention of a woman who had commanded a clipper ship. I never knew that women captained any ships, especially the legendary nineteenth-century clippers. There was a great idea for a book, another validation of the women’s movement. After lengthy research to find information about Mary Patten, the sea, and sailing ships, (I’m a landlubber), I wrote The Strange Voyage of Neptune’s Car, a true story about a pregnant nineteen-year-old woman who, during a perilous voyage around Cape Horn, took command of a clipper ship after her husband, the captain, became seriously ill.
Neptune’s Car received critical acclaim and has been anthologized in five elementary school readers. But it didn’t sell well. This may be because it has a sad ending. The story ends with the ship successfully completing its hazardous voyage. I realize I should not have added the epilogue about the heroine and hero later dying, both succumbing to the rigors of the voyage.
Now I believe that children’s books should have happy endings. Children are so vulnerable and so dependent. An unhappy ending affects them far more than it does an adult. Offhand, the only popular children’s classics I can think of that have unhappy endings are The Little Match Girl and The Snow Queen. But their sad endings are mitigated by a Hollywood-like epiphany.
Of the various art jobs I’ve worked at, none has been as rewarding, as satisfying, and as gentle as creating children’s books. This may be because the ultimate consumer of the product is a child, and most of the editors are women. No other commercial art form allows an illustrator so much independence—to design and control his product from cover to cover. My only regret is not having gotten into children’s books earlier.
Something, definitely not all, about the author.