No Kings, Just Jacks...

A keynote speech I gave to the California Writers Club

I was honored to be the keynote speaker at the California Writers Club 100th anniversary event, which was real honor for me, since I split my time between writing and drawing. A short portion of this speech you may have read a few weeks ago, but it’s mostly new material, so my apologies. Also, once you’re done reading this, I’ll have some news about my new collection of cartoons, finally!

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Thank you.

No Kings. Just Jacks.

I told a friend of mine I was going to have to write this speech on Friday, which meant I was unable to join him for golf.

He said, “Why can’t you just get AI to write it?”

Heh.

I have to introduce myself a little here. People wonder why I’m the way I am.

Well. I was born in the election year 1960.

My parents were named, I’m not kidding, John and Jackie.

They named me Jack.

And they voted for Nixon.

My life started with irony and cognitive dissonance.

I was really flattered to be asked to give this speech, as I have somehow shapeshifted myself into a columnist. Editorial cartooning is a form of writing, but everyone gets distracted by the drawing.

As an aside, to illustrate how weird my career started, my first job interview was with Clay Felker, who was then editor of the evening edition of the New York Daily News, and it did not go well.

When I left his office, I ran into Jimmy Breslin, the great columnist. I was introduced to him as a bright, young cartoonist. I was 19.

He said, well, he looks young, anyway.

At 19, I was the youngest syndicated editorial cartoonist ever in the United States. Now I am an elderly cartoonist, but I am still the youngest ever-syndicated cartoonist in the United States.

I spoke to a retirement center in San Francisco the other day, and I realized it was the first time they were my peers. I did a lot of Medicare jokes. My Social Security payment delays material killed. And of course we discussed our medications.

A friend of mine once said that editorial cartooning was like doing a column in haiku form.

Interestingly, as a former deputy opinion editor for a regional newspaper, I had very consciously moved into writing as a way to save myself.

Heh, again.

As I do both cartoons and columns for the San Francisco Chronicle, I will try to lightly navigate both subjects today.

I can tell you writing is doing better than editorial cartooning.

There are probably only fifteen fulltime editorial cartoonists on newspaper staffs now, down from about 200 or so when I started doing this in 1978. I’ve had a 47 year career, and I know my boyish good looks are indeed deceptive, but it’s true.

When I parted ways with my last newspaper, I faced an entirely new media landscape. I didn’t expect to be thrown under the bus at 62 after winning a Pulitzer Prize for same said news organization, but here I was.

The first call I got was from the Chronicle. My editor who hired me there is about 20 years younger than I am, like everyone I seem to encounter now, and it was a relief to go to a major, respected, name-brand media outlet.

The first thing I told him was that I once had dinner with Herb Caen when I was in my early thirties, a moment that seems surreal to me now. I am not in any manner drawing a parallel between me and Herb Caen, other than we lived in Sacamenna. We both speak English, another parallel. But knowing that I had touched the hem of his garment for a moment inspires me every time I sit down to write for the Chronicle.

I’ll bet Ginger (Rutland, a former dear colleague, columnist, playwright, and a former KRON-TV political reporter ) has a lot of Herb Caen stories.

(She called out from the rear, “Yes”.)

It’s those literary touchstones, however tenuous or fleeting, that keep us all, as writers, going back to the keyboard. I am not going to say typewriter anymore. However, I do own two Selectrics, because I am an antiquarian.

One of those Selectrics belonged to the writer Peg Bracken. How many of you know who Peg Bracken is? She wrote a best selling book called the “I Hate To Cook Book”, which sold a million copies in 1960.

Turns out she’s my stepmother.

Peg was fascinating. It was like having Dorothy Parker as your mom, complete with all the Dorothy Parker accoutrements.

My dad was her fourth and final husband. He was a plant pathologist who went on to be in charge of all the scientific research in the U.S. Forest Service and won the Bronze Star in Korea. My mother was a Madmen Era homemaker. I suppose it adds up, somehow, that I would become an editorial cartoonist and writer. Throw out the high and the low, right?

Many of my editorial cartooning colleagues also had super high-powered fathers, which caused us to retreat into our heads and bedrooms and become angry cartoonists.

My favorite story about this phenomenon was at my first editorial cartoonist convention in in Washington, DC in 1987.

I met Tom Meyer, who was the editorial cartoonist at the San Francisco Chronicle. He was hired by the executive editor Bill German in 1980. Intriguingly, I live in Bill German’s late brother’s house in Land Park. More Chronicle destiny.

I asked Tom if he wanted to hang out, and he said he had to go visit his parents in Northern Virginia. I said, oh, my parents also live in Northern Virginia. Tom asked me what my dad did for a living.

I said, “Oh, he has a high government job. He’s in charge of all the research in the U.S. Forest Service.”

I asked Tom what his father did.

“Oh, he has a high government job. He’s Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff”

I’ve had some terribly embarrassing moments as an editorial cartoonist.

I was giving a speech up in Coeur d’Alene Idaho thirty years ago (at least), and an audience member asked me how I got interested in editorial cartooning.

I said, “Well, Watergate. I loved Watergate. I was obsessed with Watergate. Watergate was my boyhood hobby”.

After the speech, a very nice lady about 60 years old came up to me and said, “Mr. Ohman, I really enjoyed your speech”.

“Thank you”.

“ I was particularly interested in your remarks about Watergate”.

“I loved Watergate. Watergate was fantastic! I loved every minute of Watergate!”

The woman then said, “I had a personal experience with Watergate”.

“What was that?”

“I was Mrs. John Erlichmann”.

Oh.

My career kind of bumbled along for years, and I lived in Portland for 28 years. Then as most of you know, my dear friend Rex Babin, the Bee cartoonist, died at age 49. A great artist, writer, and athlete. I miss him each day. I sit in his chair.

I was asked to come down and take over for him. Our fantastic publisher Cheryl Dell asked me at lunch if I thought I could win the Pulitzer. I said, “Oh, sure. I can win the Pulitzer. Why not? How hard can it be?”

This had been something of a monkey on my back for decades. My dad would ask me every year why I hadn’t won a Pulitzer. Every year, and only a few dozen times during any given calendar year. No pressure.

Finally, in 2016, I did win.

I can only describe it as perhaps the most surreal experience I’ve ever had.

I would say it’s comparable to getting a phone call in the middle of the night, and the caller says you’re the starting pitcher for Game 7 for the New York Yankees tonight, and don’t worry. It’ll be fine.

Once I recovered my composure about it, I went out to golf. A very nice man comes up to me on the 4^th hole at Land Park Golf Course, which is not as fancy as this one.

He says, “Mr. Ohman! Congratulations on the Nobel Prize!”

I thanked him.

(What I didn’t say: “Yeah! I got it for chemistry! Who knew?”)

I noted previously that we have an editorial cartoonists convention, which seems faintly oxymoronic. I just got back from ours in Bethesda, Maryland, a few weeks ago. This was the first time I have been to DC and had no interest in going into DC. I saw it at one AM driving in the Uber, and just didn’t have the heart to watch National Guardsmen performatively patrol.

This year’s meeting at the AAEC featured fear, but it also featured courage. We are fearful about government crackdowns on speech. We are fearful about being labeled as domestic terrorists. We are fearful about physical violence. We are fearful about the future of American journalism, and you should be too.

We have the courage to continue to do this work with your help, and we do need your help. An informed and vocal citizenry is our hope and our salvation, and that’s you.

We are not court jesters now--we are truth tellers in an increasingly intellectually dishonest and lie-filled political environment.

I do have a renewed sense of mission in this era. I am not too old for the revolution, if being a revolutionary is caring about the U.S. Constitution and ethics in government.

I come from a cornball patriotic family, where my dad won the Bronze Star in Korea, three of my uncles were in World War II. One won the Distinguished Flying Cross, one was at D-Day (he built the floating dock that went up in 24 hours), and one was in the Aleutians. They would all be appalled by what has happened in the United States in the past decade. (I was also a Naval Reserve officer candidate, which will be a funny forthcoming column).

And they were Republicans.

One thing they would never ask is what’s in it for them, never, and that’s the determinate ethos of our current power structure.

Editorial cartoonists are not the canary in the coal mine now—they’re the coal dust. But from coal comes diamonds, and we are hopeful, still, anyway.

We are close to extinct, and that’s not any accident. When hedge funds eat up local dailies, chew them up, and spit them back in their readers faces and charge astronomical amounts of money, that’s not an accident. It’s an American tragedy.

I am old enough in this business to have known Herblock, Feiffer, and Conrad personally. One thing they didn’t do is quit. Herblock endured the McCarthy Era, which we are now currently experiencing again. The new McCarthyism Witch Hunter in Chief, Laura Loomer, tried to follow me on Substack. I blocked her, but I need you to know something: that wasn’t an accident on her part. They are making a list and checking it twice, friends, I can assure you of that.

The ones who have survived like me have found new outlets and new venues, but I told Fast Company magazine a few months ago that I found it surprising to be busking on a street corner with a Pulitzer Prize.

It happens. I had to learn how to sing. I did.

We all did.

I am very proud of my profession, and now it takes great stamina to remain in this business. There are a lot of supporters of what we do, and I know take strength from knowing that you are out there, showing up, sharing our work, and promoting what we do.

As several of my peers noted last week, editorial cartoons are still popular and powerful. People share them online, and refer to them constantly on social media. It’s many of the media outlets that seem to be afraid of them.

I am currently on Substack, which has been my emotional and economic salvation. It’s a wonderful thing to be able to take some control in this crazy media environment. I hope you will consider joining my 9,000 subscribers, and if you become a paid subscriber, I will come over and do two hours of yardwork for you. I got a new hedge trimmer.

We are small, and shrinking, but people still want what we bring.

The question is, do the people who write the checks want what we bring?

The people want what we offer.

Why?

It’s the truth.

There’s a war on the truth, and we will be the victims. We need to fight for the First Amendment, which the Trump Administration champions unless it’s contrary opinion.

We have all been drafted in this war, and we have to fight like hell if we’re going to prevail. It will take years, because this administration and its effects will not go away when Trump is gone.

But the truth, and writers—and maybe even cartoonists—will survive.

Thank you so much.

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Hey, YBs! : There were also some interjections and light riffing in the above, but this is as written.

Anyway.

I am pleased to note that my new Amazon/Kindle book, “WEIRD”, will be available in a few weeks. I’ll get the prototype this week, and I suspect it will look fine. I think we’ve scheduled a November 1 pub date. When I have the link, I’ll post it here and on social. It’ll be priced at $19.95, if I recall correctly. This will be my first book in 13 years, and my first collection in about 30 years.

I know. Sloth is terrible.

Looking ahead to the week, the Week in Review, Annotated, will post later today or tomorrow.

Have a great day! —J.