The Philadelphia Inquirer editorial cartoonist Tony Auth said good bye to his readers yesterday after 40 years with the paper.
Creed Black, my editor, was a moderate Republican. He’d not be welcome in today’s Republican Party, but that was a long time ago, in what seems like a far away galaxy. Creed would never tell me what to draw, he said, but wanted a choice of drawings to pick from. That led to some game playing by the two of us.
If I had what I thought was a really good drawing, and he picked one of the other two sketches I submitted that day, I would show up the next day with the remaining two. If he picked the “wrong” one again, I would only submit the one he’d turned down twice on the third day, and we’d fight about it. I lost a fair number of those fights, but also won my share. We came to an understanding, and by the time I won the paper’s second Pulitzer in 1976, I was submitting one cartoon a day just like any regular contributor.