Editorial cartooning Obituary

Tom Engelhardt – RIP

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D. D. Degg July 31, 2024 1 minute 0 comments

Long time St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial cartoonist Tom Engelhardt has passed away.

From the family obituary:

Tom was a lifelong learner and attended many schools along the way, including St. Louis University High School, University of Denver, Ruskin School of Art at Oxford University, and New York School of Visual Arts. He freelanced in New York City before landing a job in Cleveland, Ohio, as an editorial cartoonist and in 1962 joined the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, where he proudly worked as the editorial cartoonist until his retirement in 1997. His soft-spoken gentle manner, his deep faith, his joyful life, and his commitment to principles will be his legacy.

From Tom’s entry in the Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Journalists:

Engelhart was a freelance cartoonist and artist [in New York] from 1957 to 1960 and then worked briefly [1960-1962] Newspaper Enterprise Association in Cleveland. From there he returned to St. Louis, the city of his birth.

When Engelhardt joined the Post-Dispatch [in 1962], it was though he would “bring a greater local flavor to the newspaper’s editorial page cartoons after the international-minded Mauldin left to join the Chicago Sun-Times,” which he did.

“I would like to be able to hit forcefully what I consider to be wrongdoing, hypocrisy, and injustice,” he once said. “A cartoon should make an editorial point first and foremost. Then I would like to see this done with an imaginative viewpoint or analogy. Next it should be done with good design and good drawing, and if possible it should also be humorous.”

Tom followed fifty years of Pulitzer Prize-winning cartooning by Daniel Fitzpatrick (1913-1958) and Bill Mauldin (1950-1962) when he joined The St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1962. He retired from that paper in 1997 after 35 years.

Below: Tom’s first (October 2, 1962) and last (December 25, 1997) cartoons for The St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

From a 2010 St. Louis Beacon interview with Tom (via NPR):

Q. Were there cartoons that you regretted drawing or wish you had drawn differently?

A. (In November ’63) I drew a child’s playroom where there are figures up close, two windup dolls, cowboys, squared off shooting at each other. One is labeled “conservative Democrats” and the other one is labeled “liberal Democrats.” President Kennedy had gone to Dallas to try to unify those two wings. The figures have little cowboy hats, windup keys in their backs and they’re firing at each other over this jack-in-the-box. The lid is not open very much. You can see Kennedy’s head poking out, looking very cautiously toward the foreground. The caption is “Jack in the box.”

The first edition came out at 10:30 in the morning, and he was shot at 12:30. The publisher said “Get those papers off the street” and sent trucks out to get those papers. I got a call from a lady who said, “I don’t know how you know these things.” Later a secretary marked that one “Not to be given out under any circumstances.”

Below the original November 22, 1963 editorial cartoon.

Later editions replaced the above cartoon with a Bill Mauldin cartoon about Secretary of Defense McNamara.

Below the December 21, 1997 St. Louis Post-Dispatch article on Tom’s retirement.

The State Historical Society of Missouri has a few dozen Engelhardt cartoons in negative images.

Dan Martin at The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has written an obituary/appreciation of Tom (behind a paywall).

_{all the above cartoons originally appeared in and are copyright The St. Louis Post-Dispatch}