a
This is the nerve center of my home, the coffee station. It is where I spend my first conscious moments every day. Above the coffee pot is an original drawing by Jack Davis. Its subject, Alfred E. Newman, and his words are familiar, but this particular rendering has been seen by few. I will tell you its story.
The late Paul Burnett taught journalism at Auburn University. When it came to the basics, he was rock solid. If an aspiring reporter could have but one mentor, there was no one better than Paul Burnett. That was fortunate, because he represented exactly one half of the journalism faculty at Auburn in the early 70s. However, he was stupefyingly wrong about one thing: he liked to tell his students, “All you need to start a newspaper is a typewriter.” My young bride Rheta and I, students of his, bought this clap-trap and departed Auburn for St. Simons Island, Georgia, where we established a weekly newspaper. St. Simons was a young reporter’s dream, an interesting character and an interesting history around every corner. Nobody ever had more fun going broke than we.
One day, someone told us, “Jack Davis is vacationing on Sea Island.” Having derived a significant portion of my education from Mad Magazine, I knew exactly who Jack Davis was. It turned out Jack, a Georgia native, was an annual visitor to nearby Sea Island, the Palm Springs of the deep south. We reached him by telephone, which you could do in those days, and he agreed to let us come out for an interview. We knew nothing about Jack, really, except his work, but we learned firsthand the grace and good nature for which he was famed among colleagues. He sat with us pups on a screened porch, spending over an hour of his vacation entertaining our naïve, earnest probing. After the last note and photograph were taken, and he was home free, he asked, “Would you like me to draw something for your article?” Would we. The next day, a friend of his dropped the above drawing at our office.
It might be my favorite possession. Jack Davis died yesterday at 91. It just now occurs to me, many of you may think you don’t know who Jack Davis is. Google him. You will be amazed.
a
95 responses to “Where My Day Begins”
Mark: didn’t see that you had already posted the McCoy link. The other Orlando base was actually an Army Air base as it was pre-Air Force. More of its history can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Training_Center_Orlando#Army_Air_Forces_School_of_Applied_Tactics
Jackie: It’s possible!
Yes, my dad flew first for Canada and England, then came back to be in Army Airforce, so probable. He was shipped out of Florida.
My mom always told stories about his best friend who was part of Heinz catsup family and whose wife traveled with a staff that included her physician. That is apparently who confirmed my existence. So typically unlikely. My dad was not rich, just charming and good looking, smart.
Waiting out a hail storm and flash flooding, read the link. Yes, that would be where my dad trained. He flew P-57 fighter plane repurposed with cameras for filming behind enemy lines. They trained secretly so I am sure that was where. He was sent from Mississippi to Florida to complete training.
I may be here awhile. Water is washing over hoods out on street.
Mark – I used to make a game of pulling ads from 1970s era magazines and matching them up with their 1990s counterpart. (Grandparents had STACKS of old National Geographics and Reader’s Digests) “Now WITH PABA!” “Uses CFCs!” “No cheap UNLEADED fuel here!” “No PABA!” “CFC Free!” “Runs on unleaded!” Makes you wonder how much testing really goes on
Had to have a filling replaced after work. I have a big voice, but a small mouth. Besides excess tissue, the dentist and hygienist were struggling for access to my back tooth. I now have a very sore jaw. And trying to eat food with half your tongue perceiving food at the opposite temperature is just pain weird. Warm/cold ice cream!
One of the “checkout” ladies is the sister to one of my employees, and the daughter of a fellow manager. My employee just became a first-time grandma this afternoon. Her sister just happened to be showing a coworker a picture of the baby, born only an hour earlier, as I rounded the corner. I stopped and got the scoop and my appointment delayed by a few minutes! 😀
Oh, and it was only THIS YEAR I realized dentist office woman was family to other manger/employee – I’ve actually “known” dentist one longer! TWO YEARS LONGER! Never made the connection in four years – even with Facebook pictures. {Facepalm}
Trying to clear my schedule for The Big Speech at CrapFest II tonight. Hearing someone who has been paid over $21 million for her speaking prowess should be a rare treat.
Ghost dear, why are you torturing yourself like this? I can think of many, many things that would be time spent more enjoyably.
While it isn’t my top choice, I intend to unload and load the dishwasher, clean the kitchen, do a couple loads of laundry and go to bed with Rick Braggs, figuratively speaking, and the Adventure Dog, all ten pounds of love.
What you are doing is like self flagelation of an open wound, the blood flows immediately.
Love you.
Actually, Jackie, it’s either that or upgrade my mom’s desktop computer to Windows 10. Since the latter will only be available for about another 24 hours, and the former seems as hard to get rid of as Jason Voorhees in “Friday the Thirteenth”, I will probably go with the latter. 🙂
Love you back.
Debbe: Re your earlier post re walk in cooler. If JJ accepts this long 2001 column, it may clarify things. Peace,
Hot air.
Copyright © 2001, 2003, 2004, 2015 Evan B. Hazard.
Mammon College sits high above Influence River, just west of Enterprise City. Of Enterprise City’s 200,000 households, 15,000 (mostly east of the railroad tracks) have no air-conditioning (AC). AC costs money: the price of the unit itself plus the electricity to run it. How many households in Enterprise pay a price for AC? Easy question: 185,000, because the other 15,000 don’t have AC.
If that’s your answer, you likely never took a class from me or some of my colleagues. We usually pose such questions only when the answer is not the obvious one. All 200,000 households pay a price for AC. We’ll come back to them later.
Next question. What do the following have in common: computers, dachshunds, electric fans, fluorescent tubes, freezers, furnaces, granddaughter Anna (and the piano she was playing as I wrote this in 2001), refrigerators, shade trees, walleyes, and water heaters? (He’s tricky: they’re alphabetized, so the order won’t give us a clue.) We’ll also come back to them later, after two largely true stories.
One: Some biologists met in Cartel Auditorium at Mammon College. They were sweltering, because the building’s central AC was broken. As a professor approached the lectern to open the session, two workers carried in a window air conditioner, set it on a table on the stage, plugged it in, and turned it on. After they left, the prof turned off the machine, amid laughter and applause.
Two: I once attended a meeting at the Conrad Hilton Hotel in Chicago. Planning on a short nap after arriving on a hot August afternoon, I slept until after 9 pm. Since I had missed the meeting’s “mixer” and any chance for a restaurant supper, I went to the hotel coffee shop for a sandwich. One waitress was complaining to another about the heat: “It was so hot last night that I had to turn the AC to ‘high’ and open all the windows.” I thought, “Evan, don’t say anything; there’s no point in it.” I just stored it.
Back to the good people of Enterprise City. Their computers, dachshunds, electric fans, fluorescent tubes, freezers, furnaces, piano-playing granddaughters, refrigerators, shade trees, walleyes, and water heaters all use energy, and therefore all produce heat. We design furnaces and water heaters to produce heat, but the others can’t help it.
But wait: freezers and refrigerators don’t heat things, they cool them! That’s nice, but they do it by taking heat from inside the fridge and putting it outside. You can feel that heat from the fridge’s vent. Furthermore, the mechanism that removes the heat generates heat itself, so more heat comes out of a fridge’s vent than is removed from its cold box.
If you have AC, either central or room-by-room, your home is a refrigerator. The AC removes some heat from the air inside, adds the heat produced by the machine itself, and vents it outside. What difference does it make? The overall effect of the refrigerators and the households with AC in Enterprise City is to raise the town’s temperature. The prevailing westerlies typically move the heat they generate east toward the households that don’t have AC. I don’t say we shouldn’t air-condition. But we should understand all the costs, and who pays them.
There’s an upside to this. In winter, all of your indoor machinery, not just your furnace, heats the house. Many big box stores get most of their winter heat from their fluorescent lights. The chest freezer in our old basement did double duty nine months of the year, its waste heat rising to heat the house. A computer is, among other things, an expensive space-heater (or lap warmer). If you had to run the faucet a minute to get hot water into the upstairs bathroom, at least the water remaining in the hot water pipe heats the house. CD players, TV sets, and computers are not cost-efficient space heaters, but, at least for nine months or so in Bemidji, their waste heat is a gain. In the summer, it’s a loss, adding to your electric bill and to the heat that your AC donates to your neighbors.
The workers’ supervisor thought the biologists would benefit from the portable AC. But, since it was venting more hot air than cold air into the auditorium, it would have actually heated the place. The waitress had unwittingly made her apartment hotter, by diluting the cold air her AC had provided with hot air from outdoors. I thought it politic not to add to the hot air in the coffee shop.
p-hotair 757 8.0 publ 010612s, rev.
I saw the news about Jack Davis yesterday on Facebook and shared it. I knew the name rang a bell, but then it showed a caricature he had drawn, and I knew then who he was. Having read Mad Magazine since the days they were 25 cents, cheap I recognized the art work immediately. I shared the article, hope you saw it.
Yes, thank you Bill. Alfred E. Neumann, Charlie Brown and Playboy and New Yorker cartoons fueled my desire to be a cartoonist at an early age. I loved cartoons since I could see them,not even read. But they were who made me want to draw cartoons. And I did and got them in print, so there is that.
And yes,I started reading New Yorker at about age eight or seven, second grade. I know I read Playboy since 50s, no one ever knew what I read. Benefit of having parents who didn’t read.
Interesting that Ruth Anne’s original post seemed too long, but JJ printed my whole column. Read it carefully, as there w/b a short quiz. My ID has gone public here by accident several x, so what the heck.
BTW, I hold the “Copyright ©” to all my columns. Please do not make cc. or forward. Thanks, emb.
Mark: . . .. “Mistress and Commander sounds like the captain’s into games ashore.” You’ve seen “The Captain’s Paradise”, starring Alec Guinness?
Also, “Would the Quiet Woman be a science fiction movie?” [+ JACKQULINE and Trucker]: Sociologists & psychologists have long known that, on average, men jabber and gossip more than women do.
After WWII, B52 [if I have the # right] was the designation for a 2-engine bomber AKA “flying coffin.” Apparently a rather unforgiving plane. My roommate in the BOQ, a capt. whose wife had just joined him from the States, bought the farm in one in a flight over occupied W. Germany. Sad.
While digging in my files, ran across this, an updated bunch of symbols that I have at the bottom of both running files and draft essays. At least one of the spaces in line 4 was occupied by a circle with a cross [just two lines, like +] in it, the astrological symbol for planet Earth. Originally transferred from ancient Word Perfect, apparently not compatible w/ this blog.
¶ ½ ¾ ¼ ? ? ? ? ? ? © @ ® ™ ? Å Æ å á å ? ? á à æ Ç ç É ? ? é ê è ? ? ë ? ? í ? ? ñ ? ? Œ œ ó ô ö ? ? Ø ø œ ? ? ß ? ? ú û ü ý ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ° — ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ÷ ‰ ? ? ? ? ± ? £ ¢ ??? °? WDTSAG entrée matinée fiancé fiancée Trouvé Année année mélange Søren Curaçao Fauré Velcro®™ chacun à son goût ??? ??? ???
Apparently many symbols did not come through, incl. most of the Greek alphabet, and a few combos that incl. pi. Sorry. Peace,
emb, probably a B-26. They had a “wing loading” problem (small wing area vs. the lift it had to provide) that made them subject to stall/spin accidents. Also known as the “Flying Prostitute” for having “no visible means of support”.
emb, no I haven’t seen that one. I need to look it up because I like those black and white British comedies. And Alec Guinness was excellent in them.
Ghost: Right, B-26. Thanks.
My exciting evening abbreviated to soaking in a tub full of lavender Epson salts and bath lavender bubbles. And I still hurt.
For got about the chickens on breezeway and lights came on when opened door, they started cooing or chirping and it was so sweet. Dickenson cannot figure out what they are. As Ghost would say, they have 80% of their feathers. About as big as a small football. No one had better eat them.
Just knocked my iced tea over, going to bed with Rick Bragg, Jerry Lee Lewis and the Adventure Dog. Good choice for entertaining men. It’s a book, I grew up 30 miles from the Ferriday trio. Jerry Lee’s mama’s house was always being run into by drunks until he moved her.
Takes an industrial strength drunk to hit a house.
Debbe 😉 Never too much of her, is there?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3v8t7u0GYo
Jackie
What does your large dog house eat besides chickens?
of feed and fancy water and food containers. They will get the expensive dog kennel to keep from being eaten by hawks and a large dog house for now.
We love you
Mindy
We ate all connected by 6 degrees of separation – most less.
Riding the train again from Dearborn Mi to Chicago. Had a ” hinky” type day. Nothing major went wrong but enough to make both my wife and I uneasy. Arrived at the station and realized in the last 3 yrs, they’ve built a new one. But was able to board on time.
Riding was pleasant. Was able to plug in my phone and had WiFi the whole way. Probably could get there quicker but it’s nice to let someone else do the driving.
So True Old Bear. I was stunned to find when I began doing genealogy that,I had dated relatives. We should all keep records like Mormons and we could avoid that.
Have not gotten past first chapter but we all know Jerry Lee married his 13 year old cousin. I thought she was 12.
That was still fairly common in Louisiana back then.
Ruth Anne I got same URL message.
.
Back in 60s a college mate had a Braille subscription to Playboy
(And yes there were no pictures)
Part 2
When I read MAD (25 cents cheap) in the 50s I could not understand
why my father enjoyed it. He was OLD – he was 42.
If I recall (without looking it up[big word that]) MAD originally was a comic –
and “comic decency police” did not approve (comics produced juvenile delinquents-
smoking,truancy, wearing blue jeans) so MAD became a magazine.