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Let me offer a piece of advice to anyone whose parents are still alive: don't wait. Think about the questions you want to ask them when it comes to themselves, their lives, their past, and then do it! Not tomorrow, not next week, but today.
I didn't and I suspect I was pretty typical in that. Honestly, what did I care then about my parents' lives or their past? All I wanted was out. As it happens, my mother died 45 years ago, my father 39, and so many decades later, I can't tell you how many questions I have for them. I don't even know how they met back in the 1930s, though I do remember my mother telling me that my dad wooed her on roller skates. I typically took that in, but never asked her to explain or elaborate. What did she mean?
If only I could somehow call them today to fulfill my aged curiosity my mother, in particular. She was known in the gossip columns of the 1930s and 1940s (I still have the clips) as "New York's girl caricaturist" because, I suppose, it was so out of the ordinary for a woman to do such a thing professionally. If you read this piece, you'll understand why. I was inspired to write it to, in fact, go through what records I had of her (stored and largely forgotten in the crevices of closets and the backs of drawers) thanks to an odd occurrence. As you'll read, someone contacted me about a sketch my mom had done of a coast guardsman at the Stage Door Canteen during World War II. It was part of her artistic Rosie the Riveter moment at a time when Americans were actually mobilizing for war, when our wars weren't fought by a so-called all-volunteer military that might as well be a foreign legion.
Anyway, if you're in the mood and didn't read it in 2015, check out my piece now while I take a spring weekend off from TomDispatch. Tom
Requiem for the Home Front
A Cheer for Irma the Caricaturist
Almost three quarters of a century ago, my mother placed a message in a bottle and tossed it out beyond the waves. It bobbed along through tides, storms, and squalls until just recently, almost four decades after her death, it washed ashore at my feet. I'm speaking metaphorically, of course. Still, what happened, even stripped of the metaphors, does astonish me. So here, on the day after my 71st birthday, is a little story about a bottle, a message, time, war (American-style), my mom, and me.
Recently, based on a Google search, a woman emailed me at the website I run, TomDispatch, about a 1942 sketch by Irma Selz that she had purchased at an estate sale in Seattle. Did it, she wanted to know, have any value?
Now, Irma Selz was my mother and I answered that, to the best of my knowledge, the drawing she had purchased didn't have much monetary value, but that in her moment in New York City we're talking the 1940s my mom was a figure. She was known in the gossip columns of the time as "New York's girl caricaturist." Professionally, she kept her maiden name, Selz, not the most common gesture in that long-gone era and a world of cartoonists and illustrators that was stunningly male.
From the 1930s through the 1940s, she drew theatrical caricatures for just about every paper in town: the Herald Tribune, the New York Times, the Journal-American,PM, the Daily News, the Brooklyn Eagle, not to speak of King Features Syndicate. She did regular "profile" illustrations for the New Yorker and her work appeared in magazines like Cue, Glamour, Town & Country, and the American Mercury. In the 1950s, she drew political caricatures for the New York Post when it was a liberal rag, not a Murdoch-owned right-wing one.
Faces were her thing; in truth, her obsession. By the time I made it to the breakfast table most mornings, she would have taken pencil or pen to the photos of newsmakers on the front page of the New York Times and retouched the faces. In restaurants, other diners would remind her of stock characters butlers, maids, vamps, detectives in the Broadway plays she had once drawn professionally. Extracting a pen from her purse, she would promptly begin sketching those faces on the tablecloth (and in those days, restaurants you took kids to didn't have paper tablecloths and plenty of crayons). I remember this, of course, not for the remarkable mini-caricatures that resulted, but for the embarrassment it caused the young Tom Engelhardt. Today, I would give my right arm to possess those sketches-on-cloth. In her old age, walking on the beach, my mother would pick up stones, see in their discolorations and indentations the same set of faces, and ink them in, leaving me all these years later with boxes of fading stone butlers.
She lived in a hard-drinking, hard-smoking world of cartoonists, publicists, journalists, and theatrical types (which is why when "Mad Men" first appeared on TV and no character ever seemed to lack a drink or cigarette, it felt so familiar to me). I can still remember the parties at our house, the liquor consumed, and at perhaps the age of seven or eight, having Irwin Hasen, the creator of Dondi, a now-largely-forgotten comic strip about a World War II-era Italian orphan, sit by my bedside just before lights-out. There, he drew his character for me on tracing paper, while a party revved up downstairs. This was just the way life was for me. It was, as far as I knew, how everyone grew up. And so my mother's occupation and her preoccupations weren't something I spent much time thinking about.
I would arrive home, schoolbag in hand, and find her at her easel where else did mothers stay? sketching under the skylight that was a unique attribute of the New York apartment we rented all those years. As a result, to my eternal regret I doubt that, even as an adult, I ever asked her anything about her world or how she got there, or why she left her birth city of Chicago and came to New York, or what drove her, or how she ever became who and what she was. As I'm afraid is often true with parents, it's only after their deaths, only after the answers are long gone, that the questions begin to pile up.
She was clearly driven to draw from her earliest years. I still have her childhood souvenir album, including what must be her first professionally published cartoon. She was 16 and it was part of an April 1924 strip called "Harold Teen" in the Chicago Daily Tribune, evidently about a young flapper and her boyfriend. Its central panel displayed possible hairdos ("bobs") for the flapper, including "the mop," "the pineapple bob," and the "Buster Brown bob." A little note under it says, "from sketches by Irma Madelon Selz." ("Madelon" was not the way her middle name was spelled, but it was the spelling she always loved.) She would later go on to do theatrical sketches and cartoons for the Tribune before heading for New York.
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