Best Magazine Reads: Beetle Bailey and Connecticut's "Cartoon County"

I've visited Fairfield, Connecticut before because some of my wife’s cousins live there. What I didn’t know about the outer New York City suburb is that it had been home to an inordinate number of famous daily-newspaper cartoonists.

Mort Walker (pictured to the right) is perhaps the most famous of the crew detailed in a fantastic article in the September issue of Vanity Fair. I rank his Beetle Bailey as one of my favorite dailies, up there with Archie, Garfield, Peanuts, and, actually, several other strips emanating from Cartoon County, including Hagar the Horrible, Blondie, Popeye, The Family Circus, and Hi and Lois. The place also has ties to Superman, Tarzan, Prince Valiant, and many others. It’s really pretty phenomenal.

The cartoonists lived different lives than the working men (and the cartoonists seem to have been all men) who headed into the city each day. They sat at home in their offices that smelled of sharpened pencils, tobacco, and whiskey, were pretty domesticated by their families, and only went into the city on Wednesdays to show off their latest works to various publishers and editors. Then sometimes they would go to gatherings with the other cartoonists to drink lots of Manhattans. And they played quite a bit of golf and took lots of naps. Pretty nice work if you can get it. Maybe that’s why “cartoonist” was always on my short list of potential professions!

The author, son of the Prince Valiant cartoon, notes that Cartoon County was a quirk in time. Cartoonists were rock stars, creating the most-read portions of the newspapers, up until the early 60s, when Hearst killed what the group considered its Mount Olympus, the New York Journal-American. Then later Wall Street further killed Fairfield County as an affordable place where cartoonists could live comfortably.

Even I remember a time when the newspaper would clunk down near the front door. I would run out to get it and grab the funny pages, and maybe sometimes the sports section, and throw the rest of it down wherever. At that point, I was a remnant of an earlier age, when just about every kid (and adult) couldn’t miss the cartoons each and every day, with the special, fuller, mostly-color Sunday editions being the highlight of each week.

Revisiting D.C.'s Newseum After Several Years Away

Being a passionate journalist and communications professional, it's flat-out crazy that I don't visit the Newseum in Washington DC, where I live, as frequently as at least once a year.

It has probably been five years since I set foot in there, when I helped run a press conference for the World Resources Institute. Even though it's one of the only museums in D.C. that you have to pay for, and it's a fairly steep $25 entrance fee, it's well worth it.

Unless you read all the front-page spreads of many of the newspapers from around the world, it's actually a relatively quick museum to make your way through. There are so many interesting and diverse things to see, always told with an element of how journalism or journalists fit into the larger story.

The first thing on display right now when walking in is a piece of the Berlin Wall, and also a tower from near one of the Checkpoint Charlie sites.

Next up our displays of the funny pages, the counterculture of the 1960s, and Vietnam coverage from that same era. Those each could actually be much larger exhibits, or exhibits of their own filling the entire museum.

Also of note is a display from the civil rights era featuring a jail cell door that held Martin Luther King Jr. and a lunch counter from Nashville, Tennessee where protesters sat before fights and riots broke out. There's a long theater-seating area that displaying many screens of live TV news. When I walked through, Hillary Clinton was stumping in Iowa.

There is amazing display of the RCA tower that fell from one of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. Accompanying that is a spellbinding video of the one and only working journalist (amazingly) who died in the catastrophe, as he rushed towards the towers to take photos.

Joined by my dad and brother Tim, we didn't expect to sit in a room for nearly an hour watching a documentary, but that's exactly what we did, as the movie on the history of sports journalism was two fascinating to stop watching.

Finally, We stopped in to view the Washington Nationals baseball exhibit, which was quite a bit more interesting than actually watching the team on the field these days.

Final verdict: don't miss the Newseum when you visit Washington DC. It's a little bit of an under-looked gem.