I apologize I don't have a better photo of Don Jurwich — preferably one without me in it. That was taken at a Christmas Party thrown by the Animation Guild a few years ago, the last time I saw Don. He was semi-retired from animation and was very happy to be painting what he wanted to paint instead of writing, producing or directing cartoons that someone else wanted him to do. He did a lot of that because he was so good that everyone wanted to hire him.
Don, who died yesterday at the age of 87, had a tremendous career in cartoons. It included working for most of the studios in Los Angeles but long stints with Jay Ward (where he worked on George of the Jungle) and Hanna-Barbera (where he worked on dozens of shows including Super-Friends, Scooby Doo, The Smurfs and so many others).
He was one of those guys — I encountered many of these in animation — who'd gotten stuck in executive-type positions, dealing with the networks and overseas animation studios and budget problems when he would rather have been just writing and drawing. Another producer there once said to me, "Don has to spend ten hours fixing a storyboard by someone else when it would have taken him five hours to draw it himself right in the first place."
But he was a tremendous talent and a supporter of tremendous talent. At H-B, he gave an awful lot of young artists their first jobs
I can't do Don's story justice but maybe Don can. Some time back, he sat for a two-part interview on his career. The two parts total a little less than an hour and if you're interested in the reality of the cartoon business and how it worked in years past, you couldn't learn more than you'll learn listening to this fine man.