When Bill Schorr felt that NASA was slow to integrate, he took out pen and paper and drew his vision of a belated first: a NASA official walking toward a gantry and congratulating a black man for being named as the first American to walk on the sun.
When Los Angeles police officers gunned down an elderly grandmother who had chased away gas company meter readers with a knife, but was not a threat to anyone, he drew a little girl asking an L.A. cop to get her kitty out of a tree, only to watch him shoot the cat out of the tree. That infuriated the police and inspired a scene in the low-brow smash film, “Police Academy.”
And when word got out about the notorious Tailhook convention in Las Vegas, he parodied a famous photo of marines raising the American flag on Iwo Jima with a cartoon showing soldiers raising the skirt of a female officer.
The Tailhook effort brought Schorr to Chicago last week, to accept an award for being a stellar member of a small cadre of Americans who get paid for rattling cages: editorial page cartoonists.
Schorr was the $3,000 first-place winner in the annual Fischetti Editorial Cartoon Competition, run by Columbia College Chicago and named for the late Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist John Fischetti of the Chicago Sun-Times. He beat out runner-up Jack Higgins of the Sun-Times, who pocketed $1,500 in a contest that elicited more than 150 entries.
Schorr, 45, born in New York City and raised in New Mexico, who has plied his trade at the now-defunct Los Angeles Herald Examiner and twice at the Kansas City Star, where he now works. He turns out a syndicated comic strip on the side, the Grizzwells.
Throughout his work, there is the passion and politics of a child of the 1960s. The humor can be pointed, even rough, and melds with superior craftsmanship.
“He’s one of the most intense, driven people I’ve met. He lives on that special planet (where only a few cartoonists are). I’ve never been there, but I do like watching,” says Tom Plate, editor of the editorial pages of the Los Angeles Times and a former Schorr colleague.
It’s thus no surprise to hear Schorr assert: “I get mad when I don’t do one as well as I’d like. Some days I’m just not happy with the work. And some days, people say, `Great cartoon!’ when you really didn’t know what the hell you were doing.”
His craft, he concedes, is an imitative one at times: “A lot of people work with the same metaphors.” Thus, the cartoonist sits down sometimes and just knows that if he doesn’t do something a certain way, somebody will.
It was that way when he knew somebody would twin the House debate over NAFTA with the surprise appearance at the recent heavyweight championship fight of a parachutist. Somebody would do Ross Perot parachuting into the House debate. Somebody did.
When it comes to readers, he notes that there’s no shortage of times when people totally misinterpret him. It happened earlier this year when six black Secret Service agents alleged that a Denny’s restaurant in Maryland refused to serve them.
Well, Schorr drew a cartoon with both a black couple sitting at a table at Denny’s and, nearby, some fellows attired in white sheets burning a cross. The black man tells the black woman that they should have requested the non-smoking section.
The point, to Schorr, was clear: He was mocking the chain and the Ku Klux Klan. It’s why he was taken aback when learning that the Klan had reprinted it in one of their publications. They liked it, not seeing it as he had.
Sometimes, his bosses have not seen things as Schorr has either. He and a previous publisher of the Star clashed. “He was more influenced by the bottom line,” says Schorr.
What he means is that cartoonists are hampered by the growth of newspaper chains. He’s convinced that faraway corporate ownership dampens a paper’s local thrust and commitment, and willingness to take tough stands. The Star is owned by New York-based Capital Cities/ABC.
When a publisher “must answer to New York,” says Schorr, he may not “put the paper on the line” when it comes to local issues as before under local ownership.
As for the years ahead, Schorr has no plans to leave a rather good gig. He and his wife, Arlene, are content in Kansas City, where they’ve raised two daughters. Since he works at home, his task is not exactly like toiling in a coal mine.
But as to what the years ahead will mean for cartooning, he’s unclear. How will cartooning be affected by the much-ballyhooed, if still somewhat amorphous, “information superhighway”-that mix of cable TV, telephones and computers that supposedly will change our lives by making some gizmo in the home the central instrument of our lives?
“You hope there’s a place for the editorial cartoon,” he says. “They have done a real service. But what our part will be-if we’ll do our stuff through computer animation-I have no idea.”
Harry fails to show
Since 1971, Playboy Enterprises has been a public company and held annual shareholder meetings. Since 1971, they’ve all included the presence of shareholder Harry Korba, a haberdasher from Yonkers, N.Y.
Or, to put it as he does, they’ve all included “Harry Kaw-bah of Yon-kus, New Yawk,” who addresses the boss as “Cheh-man Hef-nah.”
But when the company meeting was held last week at the Art Institute of Chicago, there was no Harry.
“I had a conflict,” he told me by phone Thursday. “A Yon-kus Chambuh of Comiss meeting.”
Korba was, as usual, unabashed in offering his assessment of Playboy: “It’s not movin’. It’s not movin’. The stock goes up and down, up and down, and they haven’t increased the dividend.”
But his absence meant that nobody asked “Cheh-man Hef-nah” about her company-paid travel and entertainment expenses during the previous year-which Korba does in a ritual anticipated by Christie Hefner.
A call to the company found a solicitous spokeswoman who passed along the answer to the question that was not asked this year: $39,000. The chairman also made sure to write a note to Harry expressing chagrin that he hadn’t shown.
But I did have a final, obvious question for Harry: How’s the haberdashery business?
“Ah, ya know, like everytin else, ups and downs,” he told me from Yon-kus.
Apple then and now
“Casey Stengel asked it about the 1962 New York Mets-`Can’t anybody here play this game?’-and politicians in the capital, including many Democrats, are starting to ask it about the Clinton administration in the wake of a second, painfully public, politically devastating failure to find an acceptable candidate for Attorney General”- Page 1, New York Times, Feb. 6, R.W. Apple Jr. opining after Judge Kimba Wood withdrew from contention.
“He won support, too, because his much-maligned staff turned in a sterling performance that won praise from a tough jury on Capitol Hill”-Page 1, New York Times, Thursday, Apple opining on NAFTA (“President Emerges a Tough Fighter”).
Rose takes offense
WLS-Ch. 7 fashion plate Jim Rose, celebrated leader of the Michael Jordan Fawn Club, was expressing on-air chagrin Thursday over the appearance of Dennis Rodman, a very talented, slightly wacko pro basketball star who now plays for San Antonio.
He noted that Rodman, who is black, is sporting a blondish hairdo that looks as if he “bathes in Clorox” and has “tattoos all over his body.”
If only Rodman had been watching “J.R.” during last season’s Bulls-Phoenix finale, taking viewers through his luxury hotel room in Phoenix and, in particular, a sink area that included his seemingly full line of Clinique skin-care products.
Rodman, the cretin, unlike Rose, appears to toil sans moisturizer.
