Logo Overlook™©®: Special exhibit

Where dung, dough and dreams collide.

By my wife's special request, the Logo Overlook©®™ has been cleared out to make room for these two pieces, representing the first of many times my wife and I wished to escape the rat race and take the road less traveled (and wring out whatever other overwrought metaphor is appropriate for the occasion).

This particular wish is the closest we came to embarking on a plan, and the only one that has come with its own logo.

Buffalo Bagels (funny, we hoped, with not too much barnyard scatology to render the business unappetizing and worthless) was our dream. We would take it anywhere people loved a good bagel and a memorable coffee, which we seemed to crave at the time.

We could open it in Hanford, where we lived and worked at the time, but not bloody likely; though we met many people who grew up there and wouldn't live anywhere else (touting the proximity of vacation destinations Sequoia National Park and Pismo Beach so often, I proposed as the city slogan whatever’s Latin for, “Two hours away from everywhere else you’d rather be”), we were strangers in a strange land. We would go back to our roots, to San Luis Obispo, where we went to college, or somewhere on the coast, somewhere enough regulars would support us in our dream.

 

We would make friends of these regulars, and become part of the weft and woof of their lives. I would use the little shop as a place to force myself to socialize with the people of Wherever We Lived (I'm an evergreen wallflower), but have a place to go in the back to cover myself in dough and coffee grounds and be by myself. Nancy would be the brains and soul of the operation, as she has proved on a daily, hourly, basis in our household for 26 years. She'd be the reason people came in, and the bagels and coffee would be something extra.

I was never crazy about how the descending letterforms
dripped into "Bagels," and time hasn't improved my view.

We dreamed of our bagel shop early into our early careers. Our jobs as newspaper reporters were not what we expected; I'm sure our disillusionments were not uncommon, though I don’t really know what we were expecting; I wanted to become a feature writer somehow, some way, and got distracted by new ideas of becoming an editorial cartoonist.

Plus, it was tough being husband and wife and co-workers. Most of us young reporters and editors at The Hanford Sentinel would get on each other's nerves on a regular basis, either for what we did or did not do for each other. Bosses would bug us for what we perceived them doing to us. It was difficult to have lunch and dinner and weekend conversations, because we lived each other’s lives in the office and had nothing new to tell, good or bad, because we already knew it.

Our vacations, always camping somewhere as far away from Hanford as we could afford, invariably fueled our dreams for doing Something Else, and Buffalo Bagels grew out of those vacations.

We were serious enough, at least, to design the signage. I talked the chief photographer into showing me the machinations of the image reproduction equipment, and wandered into the photo shop after hours.

This was all cut-and-paste. I copied the Frankfurter typeface out of a type book for its bagel-y chewiness, enlarged the letterforms, pasted them together and inked out the seams with a black marker. I drew “Buffalo,” “Ltd.” and “The Gathering Place” were drawn with a brush on woody paper towels, no doubt from the break room at The Sentinel, to let it bleed. I'm fairly sure I drew “Buffalo” in one shot, but the others might have been pasted and tweaked with a marker and a razor blade.

They were drawn to match the image, an homage to the animals rendered millennia ago in the caves at Lascaux, both to say “We ‘Buffalo Bagels’ as a joke,” and “We’ve got a few cultured brain cells floating around in our heads.”

We envisioned the little shop as a showcase of art and maybe a place for folk groups to play weekends.

That’s as far as we ever went with our pipe dream. It's possible that we looked into the reality of opening Buffalo Bagels, and blanched at the infusion of cash we would need, and the regulatory quagmire, and the taxes and licenses and skill in basic math we needed but lacked, and decided we would take the course that life seemed to be leading us instead, wherever that may still be.

But we dream our pipe dreams still, usually involving living somewhere else. Not long ago we found ourselves in Port Townsend, Wash., a town on the Olympic Peninsula, just off the Strait of Juan de Fuca, a town served by the Washington State Ferry system. We were waiting for one of the ferries, which I find endlessly fascinating. The odd town sat high on a bluff over a cove, and the calm cove looked like a great place for a daily swim.


“Why don't we live here?” I asked aloud. “Why don't we just move right here.”
 
“The woman at the ferry terminal says it rains a lot,” my wife answered.

Rain doesn't bother me, especially in a place that is built for rain. I wonder if the townsfolk desire bagels and good coffee in a friendly shop …

Editorial cartoons: My humble bumbling beginning

Headwaters: As far as forensic historians can tell, this is my first editorial cartoon.
A rather anemic start (Boo, drunk driving! is my bold message), especially since my mission was to
help raise the profession's standards. But I got better. Then worse again. Then insipid and derivative.
Then occasionally … OK. I'll show it all in good time, if you've the stomach for it.

One lonely Saturday in Hanford more than a quarter-century ago, I had my James Fenimore Cooper moment.

Cooper, you may remember from 10th grade literature class, was arguably America's first great novelist. "The Last of the Mohicans" and "The Leatherstocking Tales," resulted, so the story is told, from Cooper having read a bad novel and deciding he could do better.

I had a similar feeling that Saturday in Hanford, though writ small. It was my turn among reporters to work the Saturday shift at The Hanford Sentinel, and as with most Saturdays, Kings County residents were kind enough not to make news over the weekend. After visiting the jail to look over the police blotter, with sad families waiting around me in the lobby to visit their inmate relatives, and checking the hospitals for any updates, Saturday reporters had little to do but rewrite news releases and get ahead on assignments. Of course, I goofed off instead, mostly by reading all the newspapers The Sentinel subscribed to, particularly the comics and editorial cartoons.

I remember being fed up with one editorial cartoon in particular — one bad cartoon too many — in an out-of-town paper. I don't remember the content, but it was what I call a "knock-knock" editorial cartoon, that makes innocuous fun, nothing more, out of a current event, eliciting a giggle, if that. Its intent is to make readers smile without hurting their feelings, and most important to help the syndicate that sells the cartoon remain in the good graces of the newspaper that subscribes.

By their nature, syndicates water down the power of editorial cartoons, because they sell to as many news outlets as they can, liberal, conservative, libertarian, what have you. Some syndicates represent a stable of cartoonists from many points on the political spectrum, but the opinions of even those tend to carve a straight, safe line between all those political viewpoints, hence the "knock-knock" silly editorial cartoons, which you still see today in most newspapers.

Which is just plain wrong. Good editorial cartoons should kick ass and take names, with a punch that even the best editorial can't match for its instantaneous message.

Boss Tweed, the mastermind of New York's Tammany Hall political machine more than a century ago, fumed at cartoonist Thomas Nast's depictions of his shenanigans.

"I don't care a straw for your newspaper articles," he said. "My constituents don't know how to read, but they can't help seeing them damned pictures."

Good editorial cartoons should, as Finley Peter Dunne said, comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. They should spark change and change minds. Few do so today, and on that short list Pat Oliphant is the undisputed king. Ted Rall jabs mightily and means it. Tom Toles is consistently potent. Jeff Danziger does damage. After that, the cartoonist landscape is so-so. And cartoonists are becoming fewer, sadly.

I decided I could do better.

So for the next seven years or so, starting on that Saturday, I embarked on an odyssey of becoming an editorial cartoonist and knocking at least one other cartoonist down a peg. In the process I churned out more than my share of the kind of bad cartoons I hated so much, but gradually sharpened and poisoned my brush to the the point that every once in rare moment I came close to making an impact.

I did not achieve the bottom line, to become a staff  cartoonist somewhere, but I had a heady time trying. From time to time, I'll share my cartoons here, good and bad and botched, whether it be the anniversary of an event, the reminder of what I or the world was doing at a certain time, or just because I feel like it. Fair warning.

Challenger

(Today marks 30 years on, that the tragic explosion of the Challenger scratched its arcing demon horns into the Florida sky and our memories. I figure this is worth another mention:)

Twenty-five years ago today, the space shuttle Challenger blew up after liftoff, killing her crew, including the first teacher in space, Christa McAuliffe. This cartoon was my visceral response; a reporter for The Hanford Sentinel, I had talked my editors into letting me draw editorial cartoons too (more on that down the road). The disaster took place on a Tuesday, so I would still have had a full day of reporting duties, and was likely designing and editing the agriculture page as well. I must have drawn this after the workday was over, and the editors put it in the next day's paper. (I believe it won a California Newspaper Publishers Association award.)

Among the touchstones of my life is Apollo 11, the crew of which returned to earth on my seventh birthday; it still gives me chills to imagine humans having walked the moon. So I thought of Challenger as a child might, and responded as a child (me?) would. It was one of the worst experiences to have had to share with others by that point in my life; bitterly funny, since so many even more horrible events have taken place since.