Category Archives: Obituaries

The prolific illustrator and comic book artist Joe Messerli passed away last Wednesday at the age of 79. Complications relating to cancer are given as the cause.

Joe Messerli was successful in several artistic careers. Born in Kingston, Texas, he started out as an assistant to the local cartoonist Charlie Plumb on the syndicated Ella Cinders newspaper strip. Later, Joe was one of many who ghosted the Napoleon & Uncle Elby and still later, he inked and lettered the Flintstones and Yogi Bear strips. (Most of the online obits for Joe today feature a sample from a Sunday Flintstones strip…but I'm pretty sure that's not his work. That one was lettered and inked by Lee Hooper.)

Joe worked extensively for Western Publishing on their comic books and activity books in the sixties and seventies on most of their licensed titles but especially on Daffy Duck, Pink Panther and Woody Woodpecker. I wrote a lot of those so I got to know him a little. He struck me as a hard worker, very devoted to his drawing and deeply respectful of his fellow artists. At the time, a number of veteran "funny animal" artists were dying off and Joe was uncomfortable that he was inheriting key assignments for that reason. He learned so much, he told me, from inking the pencil art of some of those guys so it was rough to take over their end of the job.

He also had a very successful career in graphic arts and TV illustration. He worked for years at NBC and did many pieces of advertising and on-screen graphics for their shows, including the "More to Come" art pieces that you saw on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, going in and out of commercials. His most famous creation though was not for NBC. It was the famous logo for the TV series, The Twilight Zone…

Messerli's career also included work as an inker on the Dennis the Menace comic books published by Fawcett and an artist on Marvel's kids' line of the eighties. In his last e-mail to me a few years ago, he said he'd been working on merchandise art for Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. I gather he was rarely, if ever, without work and he seems to have made those who employed him very happy.

Adrienne Colan, wife of comic book artist Gene Colan, was found dead this morning in the home she and Gene once shared. Time and cause of death have not been determined.

The Colans had been separated since early April when a physical altercation left the 84-year-old artist with a broken shoulder. Adrienne later pled guilty to having caused the assault, and Gene's affairs are now being handled by his children and an attorney. Gene has been hospitalized since the incident.

The Internet has been filled with rumors and speculation and amateur psychiatry from afar about this sad family matter…and even though I got dragged into some of it, I won't pretend I understand it all. But at the moment, Gene is healing and Adrienne is gone and most of it falls well into the category of "none of our business." That's all I have to say about it except that I'm glad Gene is getting the proper care and attention. He is a great and wonderful man and he did not deserve any of the unpleasantness he has experienced.

Well, sadly, it's true. Al Williamson was 79 years old and while we haven't heard a cause of death, we'd all heard how he'd been suffering from Alzheimer's for the last few years.

Al was a great talent and a great guy. I can't think of anyone who saw his comics and didn't love the way he drew and I'm darn sure I don't know of anyone who ever met the man and didn't enjoy his company. Al Williamson was born in New York on March 21, 1931 but spent much of his childhood in Bogota, Columbia. He fell in love with comics at an early age, especially Flash Gordon in both the Alex Raymond newspaper strip and the Buster Crabbe serials. Al used to joke that all the heroic males he drew either looked like him or like Mr. Crabbe.

He studied at Burne Hogarth's Cartoonists and Illustrators School and struck up friendships with many artists around his age, most notably Wally Wood, Angelo Torres, Frank Frazetta, Roy G. Krenkel and MAD editor-to-be Nick Meglin. Most of his friends wound up working for EC Comics and it was there that Al did the work that gave him his reputation. He was an amazing illustrator, especially in the line's science-fiction titles where his work had a pageantry and beauty.

Al was the perfect example of the Second Generation of comic book artists — the kids who got into the business because they grew up on comics drawn by the guys who started the business. He was an enormous fan of almost everyone. The first time I met him was in 1970 at a New York convention where he pumped me for information on Jack Kirby. The last time I saw him was (I think) at the '97 Comic-Con in San Diego. One of the other guests that year was George Tuska, and Williamson had as a child been inspired by Tuska's work. When I went off to do a panel interviewing George, Al asked if he could sit in on it, ask a few questions himself, and tell the audience how much he admired Mr. Tuska.

Williamson was passionate about his work. Even back when he knew the art would not get decent reproduction and the originals would not be returned to him, he'd spend hours on a panel, adding detail that would never survive the printing process. It mattered to Al that the work be as good as possible when it left him. After that, he had no control over it.

He worked for most publishers in the fifties and sixties, including Atlas (Marvel), ACG, Charlton and Harvey. No matter what they paid, he gave them the best work possible within the deadline…and was known to miss deadlines in order to get the work the way he wanted it. In the sixties, he especially distinguished himself with his work for Warren on Creepy and Eerie, and with a short run on a new comic book version of Flash Gordon in which he astounded readers with his ability to capture that world as drawn by Alex Raymond. That work brought him an offer, which he grabbed, to carry on another Raymond character. He and writer Archie Goodwin produced the newspaper strip for Secret Agent X-9 (now retitled Secret Agent Corrigan) from 1967 until 1980. He and Archie later handled the Star Wars newspaper strip for a time, following Al's acclaimed work on the graphic novel adaptation of The Empire Strikes Back. In the late eighties and through the nineties, his comic art jobs were mostly as an inker for DC and Marvel.

Al won the National Cartoonist Society award for Best Comic Book Artist in 1966 and later won two Will Eisner Awards (and four other nominations), plus he was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2000. He also won seven Harvey Awards and numerous other accolades. He was also, as I mentioned, a really, really great guy to be around. As much as we'll all miss his art, I think we'll miss the guy who did it even more.

I guess it's a good thing that Jimmy Dean decided to get into the meat-packing business in the late sixties. He apparently decided his career as a TV host and country-western singer wouldn't sustain and he wanted something else to fall back on. Still, it's sad in a way that so many people probably know him only as a name on packages of pure pork sausage. He was a fine entertainer — warm, funny and either a genuinely nice guy or a damn good actor to make everyone think so. I used to tune in his 1963-1966 TV series mainly to see Rowlf the Muppet (that's him in the photo above with Jimmy) but I also enjoyed the host's easy-going smile and manner.

There was a brief period around '67 or '68 when he was "next in line" to take over The Tonight Show if Johnny Carson quit…and actually, Carson did quit during this period over a contract dispute. But before it was resolved, we had a couple of weeks of Jimmy Dean guest-hosting and I recall him doing a decent job in a tough situation. Sorry to hear he's not around anymore but boy, he had a great career.

Veteran comic book and strip artist Tony DiPreta died Wednesday at the age of 88. This obit in a Connecticut newspaper notes that he grew up in Stamford, Connecticut and got into comic art while still in junior high school, which would have been around 1939…about when the comic book industry had its first boom. His first job was working in color separation and engraving for one of the many companies then that prepped comic book art for publication, and he also picked up lettering work on Lyman Young's newspaper strip, Tim Tyler's Luck.

The engraving work was mainly on material for Quality Comics and this led to a string of jobs for that company — lettering at first, then inking, then drawing. His first published solo work was probably a one page gag in National Comics #8, published in 1941.

The obit says, "Eventually, DiPreta made his way to New York City, where he met legendary comic book writer and editor Stan Lee, who gave him Porky Pig to ink." Actually, it was Ziggy Pig and from there, DiPreta segued to Hillman Publications, where beginning around 1942, he was one of their most valuable artists, working on all their comics but most notably, Airboy. He also worked extensively for Lev Gleason on that publisher's character called Daredevil and on the firm's popular crime comics. Around 1950, he returned to Timely Comics and Stan Lee where he was put to work on mystery comics and westerns.

All this time, he had also assisted Lank Leonard on the Mickey Finn newspaper strip, at times drawing more of it than Leonard. In 1959, he got the job of producing Joe Palooka and he handled that strip for 25 years until it ended in 1984. DiPreta promptly took over drawing Rex Morgan, M.D., which he worked on until 2000. Though continuously involved in newspaper strips for more than forty years, he also found time to assist his neighbor Mort Walker with some Beetle Bailey projects and to draw occasional comics for Charlton Press, mainly on their early 70's Hanna-Barbera comics. The comic art community mourns the passing of such a fine, prolific talent.

I selected a photo of Gary Coleman when he was young and cute. That's a much nicer way to remember him…not as the former child star who'd outgrown that job description and never found another one that fit. I was saddened to read that he'd died. Then again, I was saddened by darn near every news item I read about him the last few decades.

Gary was on a show I wrote for Sid and Marty Krofft around 1979, around the time Diff'rent Strokes was riding high in the ratings and the kid was a superstar. We also had Ron Howard on that show and it was impossible not to make comparisons. Ron was a former child star who'd gone on to become a current adult star, and he was also starting to direct movies. Gary was a current child star who…well, no one imagined he'd fall so far but even then, there was a sense that it wasn't going to end well. I'm not sure I can explain it except that Gary was a star not because of what he did (i.e., act) but because of what he was. You just knew he wasn't going to grow into his stardom.

When I hear Gary Coleman's name, I think of how angry and frustrated Joe Barbera was one day. Joe was the undisputed master of the "pitch." One of the reasons Hanna-Barbera produced so many poor shows was that Joe could sell anything, which he often managed by modifying the product on the fly, quickly molding it into whatever he sensed the buyer would buy. He might well walk into your office with a good idea to sell but if you weren't receptive to that and had some notion of what you did want, Joe could instantly reshape his idea into that — whatever it was and however unworkable.

Usually, he pitched to network execs and sponsors. The day I'm recalling, he came back from having to pitch to a 14-year-old boy who looked like he was twelve. Gary Coleman had a commitment from NBC to star in a Saturday morning cartoon show. If Hanna-Barbera wanted the job of producing that show, J.B. had to come up with a proposal that Gary liked. So Barbera swallowed his pride, grabbed up a pile of show ideas (some of them, probably pretty good) and went over to Gary Coleman's home or office to "pitch."

Barbera got the deal. Barbera always got the deal. But first, he said, he had to listen to about an hour of little Gary Coleman telling him how they should rerun Space Ghost, how Gary didn't like the Godzilla cartoons, how Gary thought Scooby Doo was getting stale, etc. Then he had to sit there as Gary rejected pitch after pitch, lecturing J.B. on how to create a good cartoon show. Finally, Gary described his ideas for a show and Barbera spun and mixed-and-matched and formed Gary's ideas into something that might fly…but it was a painful process. Eight months later, The Gary Coleman Show debuted on NBC…produced by Hanna-Barbera. Joe hated the show and would sometimes cite it as the lowest moment in his studio's history. But I always thought what he really hated was the pitch meeting.

This one got past me and most (all?) of the comic book/strip sites. Comic creator Don Sherwood, who was probably best known for the short-lived Dan Flagg newspaper strip, died March 6 at a hospice in Huntersville, N.C. He was 79.

That Sherwood's passing went unnoticed in the comic community is not surprising. He was a man of mystery, telling different things to different interviewers. In one article, he claimed his first job in comics was assisting Milton Caniff on his strip, Terry and the Pirates in the early 1940s. I'm not sure that's true. In another, he said his stint on Terry was working with Caniff successor George Wunder in the early sixties. Again, I'm not sure. He did launch Dan Flagg in 1963. The strip, which was similar to Caniff's Steve Canyon but set in the Marines, only made it into a handful of newspapers and lasted but four years. Still, Sherwood told reporters it was a "…huge success, running in virtually every daily newspaper in the country in the 1960s."

(As a reality check: Back when most cities had more than one newspaper, the best a strip could manage would be to appear in one paper in each city. The most successful ones were probably in about 25% of all the papers then being published.)

But Dan Flagg attained a certain notoriety among those who study comic strips. Sherwood employed others to write it (primarily Archie Goodwin) and others to draw it (including Al Williamson, Angelo Torres, Al McWilliams, George Evans and Gray Morrow). For a time, each ghost thought he was the only assistant; that Sherwood was doing all the other work on the strip. Then one evening, Goodwin, Williamson and a few of the others got together for dinner, started talking about their current projects…and discovered that they, not Sherwood, were writing and drawing Dan Flagg. The incident so amused Goodwin that he wrote a story for the first issue of Creepy (drawn by Williamson) about a comic artist named Baldo Smudge who hires others to do his strip. In the story, the ghosts get together, demand credit and more money…and are murdered by Mr. Smudge.

And there was one other uncredited assistant: Ben Oda lettered the Dan Flagg strip and Ben Oda lettered the story in Creepy.

Dan Flagg ended in 1967 and Sherwood began working for Charlton Comics where his most notable assignment was a comic that adapted the TV series, The Partridge Family. Thereafter, it gets harder to track his career, which included a series of newspaper strips, some of which actually appeared in newspapers. He did The Flintstones for a time, primarily for the foreign market. He did a panel in conjunction with Dick Clark called Dick Clark's Rock and Roll, which I think (but am not certain) saw print. There were others that were announced and promoted, like a revival of Sgt. Preston of the Yukon, but I'm not sure if they were actually syndicated.

And I'm afraid that's about all I know about Don Sherwood. Never met the man…but I thought his passing ought to be noted someplace where folks in and around comics might learn about it. Perhaps someone else will be moved to do a little digging and find out more about him.

Longtime TV host Art Linkletter has died at the age of 97 and I'm getting e-mails from people who are waiting for me to post some great anecdote or personal encounter with the man. I'm afraid I'm going to disappoint these folks but I do have a few thoughts to offer.

Art Linkletter was darn near the last of a breed — those guys who came out of radio, got into television and functioned as hosts. They weren't comedians. They weren't musical performers. They weren't actors. They were just hosts, often of game shows, and there were a lot of them around in the early days of TV. What did Art Linkletter do? He was a host.

I'm afraid he was never a favorite in our household. Much of America saw him as warm and genial and beloved, I suppose…but everyone I knew saw him as unctuous and enormously condescending to the people who got plucked from his audiences to appear on his shows, House Party or People Are Funny. He just had this way of acting like they were all colossal boobs and that it was his job to make sure they came across that way. There also seemed to be no product he wouldn't sincerely endorse if they were paying him enough.

Some of the obits are recalling the event that turned him into a staunch anti-drug crusader. In 1969, his daughter Diane jumped to her death from an apartment window. Dad blamed it on LSD and the drug culture and permissiveness…this, despite the fact that the coroner determined she'd had no drugs whatsoever in her system at the time. Some campaigns to curtail drug use are admirable but Linkletter's just struck me as self-serving. Half of it seemed like a desperate attempt to convince everyone, himself included, that his daughter's death was not a suicide and he had therefore not been a bad father; that she was murdered by drug-pushers. The other half of the message seemed to be that to fight the plague of drugs, we had to all vote Republican.

At the time, I was rabidly anti-drug and reasonably Conservative and even I found Mr. Linkletter's little speeches offensive and counter-productive. To his credit, he eventually backed way off them. I seem to recall a brief news cycle years later wherein he recanted his position on marijuana, decided it really didn't lead inevitably to "the hard stuff" and even endorsed its legalization. But by that point, he was just a guy who sold cheap life insurance to seniors in commercials and no one particularly cared what he said.

He obviously had a long and prosperous life. When Disneyland opened, Linkletter did some hosting duties for Walt…and since Walt couldn't afford to pay the going rate for Art's services, they worked a barter. Linkletter's company got the concession to sell Kodak film in the park for some lucrative number of years. I don't have the stats handy but Scrooge McDuck would have envied the kind of money Linkletter wound up making off that arrangement. His other investments also did nicely for him so he probably lived quite well when his TV career went away.

I used to see him around town all the time but I never said hello to him. Usually when I meet a celebrity of any tenure, I can think of something the person did that I liked…so I can say, "I really enjoyed your work in that." I couldn't think of anything in that vein regarding Art Linkletter so he remained unapproached by me. Oddly enough, the one time I liked him was the last time I saw him anywhere. When Steve Allen passed, there was a tribute evening out at the Alex Theater in Glendale…performers who'd worked with Steverino telling tales, doing their acts, etc. Linkletter was the Master of Ceremonies and though he was around 87, he was sharp, funny and darn good at what he did. I found myself actually wondering why he had so totally disappeared from TV apart from the occasional commercial.

Anyway, as you can tell by now, I don't have a great story to tell you about Art Linkletter. But you know who does? Laraine Newman does. Here's a link to the tale of her TV debut…as one of the kids who was brought on to say clumsy, adorable things on Mr. Linkletter's House Party show.

(And I can't resist pointing something out. I have this ongoing fascination with the way in which everyone I know eventually intersects with everyone else I know. I've been working with Laraine a lot lately…and by the way, as a comic actress, she more than lives up to her reputation, which is that she's one of the best. From this article, I learned that her writing teacher is Claudette Sutherland. You may recall that recently, I did a couple of lectures up at UCLA about the show, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying and for one, I interviewed an actress who was in the original Broadway cast. That actress was Claudette Sutherland. My life is kinda like Facebook but without all the annoying invasions of privacy.)

Howard "Howie" Post, a mainstay of animation, comic books and strips since the mid-forties, passed away some time in the last week, reportedly due to Alzheimer's. Howie was born November 2, 1926 and while no one has ever pinned down exactly when he got into comics, his work was turning up in books from most of the major New York publishers by 1945. He mostly did funny animal comics, such as for DC's More Fun Comics, where he sometimes wrote for other artists but often drew his own wacky, energetic tales. He also worked in animation, at first as an in-betweener and animator for Famous Studios…later as a storyman and, still later, as the creative head of Paramount's cartoon studio in the early sixties.

His best known comic book work? Hard to say. He was a prolific writer (and sometimes writer-artist) for Harvey Comics, where he is often credited with creating Spooky, Little Hot Stuff and many other recurring characters. He wrote and sometimes drew hundreds of stories for Richie Rich, Casper the Friendly Ghost and other Harvey superstars.

Over at DC, he handled Doodles Duck, J. Rufus Lion, Bob Hope, Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis, Jerry Lewis without Dean Martin and many others, including occasional forays into romance and adventure titles. His most famous DC endeavor was probably Anthro, a short-lived light adventure comic that he wrote and drew in the late sixties.

He worked for Marvel in two bursts, the first being a gaggle of (mostly) funny animal comics like The Monkey and the Bear from around 1953 to 1955, along with occasional contributions to their horror comics. In the eighties, he drew Strawberry Shortcake, Madballs, Wally the Wizard, Heathcliff and other features for their kids' line.

He worked for at least a dozen other publishers and also dabbled in syndication. His newspaper strip, The Dropouts, appeared in many newspapers from 1968 until 1982.

And this is really only the briefest summary of this prolific and wickedly-funny man. I had the pleasure of working with him briefly on the Richie Rich cartoon show for Hanna-Barbera and interviewing him on a couple of panels at comic conventions. He was very nice and very creative, and his work sure made a lot of folks happy.

Okay, I think we have sufficient confirmation. Sadly…

Famed fantasy artist Frank Frazetta has passed away at the age of 82. Born in Brooklyn in 1928, Frazetta was one of those child prodigies, drawing at a very early age. Though he at one point dabbled in baseball and was scouted for major league teams, there was never any doubt that he'd have a long, fabulous career as an artist, commencing with his first sale to comic books at the age of 16. For years, he worked in comics — funny animal comics for Standard Publishing, adventure art for EC and others, plus a long stint assisting Al Capp on the Li'l Abner newspaper strip — before he segued to painting paperback covers. Before long, he had carved out a reputation as perhaps the foremost artist in that field, certainly in his genre. Offers for movie posters soon followed.

It would be difficult to overstate Frazetta's impact and influence. Artists were inspired by his depictions of the human form. Writers were inspired by the evocative moods and imagery. Rarely has an illustrator so "connected" with his audience. That astronomical prices paid for Frazetta originals — one painting recently going for a cool million dollars — testify to his enduring popularity. And despite severe health problems, including a stroke that affected his right hand and forced him to begin working with his left, he continued to produce fine, important work.

Others will write volumes about Frank Frazetta so I don't have to. I only met him briefly a few times and have no particular insights to offer in that area, other than that he seemed — in those brief encounters, at least — to have a genuine delight in the popularity of his work. If anyone ever decides to do a movie of his life, the theme might be, "Poor Kid from Brooklyn Becomes Rich and Famous Doing Something He Loves." And that, of course, was possible just because he did it so well.

Nobody better…

Sad to hear that the lovely Dorothy Provine has left us at the age of 75. Ms. Provine was a great and lovely comic actress, as she proved on TV shows like The Roaring Twenties and movies like Good Neighbor Sam and Who's Minding the Mint? But she will especially be remembered for her role as Milton Berle's spouse in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. She played the only major character in the film who didn't get injured, dumped in a trash can or covered with paint…and the only one who seemed to have a greedless heart. She got out of acting around 1969 and it was a shame because she was quite good in everything she did.

For those of you scoring at home, here's what I believe is the full list of surviving members of the Mad World cast: Sid Caesar, Mickey Rooney, Jonathan Winters, Peter Falk, Stan Freberg, Carl Reiner, Jerry Lewis, Marvin Kaplan, Nicholas Georgiade and Barrie Chase. Also, several of the stunt people are still with us and I probably should research which ones, since they were as much as the "stars" of that movie as most of the featured actors.

Word has reached us that the legendary voice actor and kids' show host Allen Swift has died at the age of 86. A whole generation of children who grew up in New York knew him as Captain Allen Swift, host of the Popeye cartoons (and others) on WPIX in late fifties, and for years, he was probably the most prolific mimic and performer of funny voices in that part of the country. His cartoon credits included Underdog (he was the villainous Simon Bar-Sinister), King Leonardo (he was Odie Cologne, Itchy Brother and Tooter Turtle) and the movie, Mad Monster Party. He did hundreds of commercials, cartoons, on-camera appearances and even a few jobs on Broadway…but some will always hail him as the man who saved Howdy Doody.

He did that twice. In 1952, the host "Buffalo" Bob Smith fired several of the performers in a salary dispute, thereby rendering many of the show's recurring characters speechless since the actors who played them were gone. Allen Swift came to the rescue, assuming those roles and he was soon dubbing most of the key players of Doodyville…all except for Howdy. Bob Smith himself would pre-record the voice of Howdy. Smith had done it himself in the show's earliest days when the budget wouldn't allow for another actor. He kept doing it after that because the voice was established and they were convinced no one could replicate it.

Then in 1954, Smith had a heart attack and was off the show for many months. Again, it was Swift to the rescue. Allen took records home over a weekend, learned to do the voice and thereafter supplied it so Howdy could continue to appear on Howdy Doody. In fact, Swift did it so well that when Buffalo Bob returned to the program, Swift continued to speak for the star of the show.

These are just a few of the staggering number of credits in the career of Allen Swift. He leaves behind an amazing legacy of work…and a lineage that is carried on by his gifted son, Broadway star Lewis J. Stadlen. Talent sure ran in that family.

Meinhardt Raabe, the oldest surviving Munchkin in The Wizard of Oz, has died at the age of 94. Mr. Raabe played the Coroner who pronounced the Wicked Witch of the East deceased — I believe the official Cause of Death was that a house fell on her — and he "sang" the four lines that began, "As coroner, I must aver…" In truth, the voice you heard in the film was the sped sound of a vocalist named Rad Robinson, a member of the Ken Darby Singers, a singing group that was heard all throughout the film. Mr. Darby was the movie's Vocal Arranger.

Perhaps you didn't know that Mr. Raabe was dubbed. For much of his life, Mr. Raabe apparently didn't, either. He long assumed that it was his voice — electronically altered but his — heard on the soundtrack. It was only in later years that he was informed otherwise.

That's one of the things I find interesting about Meinhardt Raabe. Another is that in his senior decades, he found an amazing stardom and even made some serious dollars making personal appearances and doing autograph shows. I know some find that circuit depressing…and it is sad in a way to see someone who was briefly on a hit TV show of the sixties or in some long-ago movie now sitting behind a table somewhere, hoping someone will lay down $20 for their signature. But for some, it's a chance to be a bit of a star again and to make a bit of the money they're not making as their work is rerun and reissued and remonetized without residuals being paid. I'd think it was more depressing if they didn't have that opportunity.

Mr. Raabe turned his 13 seconds of screen time (plus a few crowd shots) into lasting fame and a bit of an income…and good for him. I saw him a couple times at comic and film conventions, striding about in a replica of his high-collared Coroner suit, thrilled that people cared who he was. He certainly didn't seem to mind answering the same questions over and over and over and over and over and over.

The one time we spoke, I avoided those stories and asked him about his stint as the first Little Oscar, the mascot for the Oscar Mayer meat company. In that capacity, he drove around the country in the first Wienermobile — the 1936 model seen above — making personal appearances for that brand of hot dogs. So did a number of other "little people" over the years…and I never quite understood the premise. I mean, if you had a company that made frankfurters and you wanted to sell the idea to parents that their kids would grow up to be big and strong if they ate your product, wouldn't you want someone tall as your spokesperson?

I'm guessing that wienermobile was the key to it. Once they'd decided to have such a vehicle, they realized it wouldn't look very impressive if their mascot was taller than it was…so the choice was to build a huge, expensive wienermobile or to hire a shorter mascot. As a kid, I saw the current model wienermobile in photos and on TV and for lack of scale, I imagined something like a Rose Parade float, immense in size. The day it finally came to the Food Giant near me, I thought we'd gotten the Cocktail Frank version.

Here's a photo of four Little Oscars — left to right, George A. Molchan, Joe White, Meinhardt Raabe and Jerry Maren. I'm guessing the towering presence in the middle of the photo is Mr. Oscar F. Mayer, himself. Maren is the one I remember in Los Angeles in the fifties. He was always popping up at L.A. supermarkets and on our local kids' shows. He appeared about every other week on Channel 9 with Engineer Bill, who always seemed to have it in for poor Jerry. One of the things Engineer Bill sold for a time on his show was a product called Silly Soap, which was basically shaving cream in a colorful aerosol package for kids. The ads encouraged you to spray your friends with Silly Soap and then hop into the tub and wash with it. The filmed commercials suggested you could sculpt it into a lovely hair style or a funny beard but you couldn't. Just another of the many lies children are told.

Engineer Bill seemed to have crates of it on his set and he would occasionally spray an off-camera stagehand with the stuff. When Little Oscar came on the show, the Engineer had an opportunity — one he could not resist — to foam someone on-camera. Not only that but half a can of Silly Soap could easily cover Jerry Maren, head to toe…so when he came on, trying to deliver his pitch for Oscar Mayer All-Meat Franks (no filler), he'd have to dodge Engineer Friggin' Bill, who'd be chasing him around the cheesy set with two cans of Silly Soap, one in each hand, determined at all costs to suds the midget.

Maren was a pro…a guy who's still with us and who's had an amazing career. He'd worked with the Marx Brothers. He'd worked on the Superman TV show. He was in The Wizard of Oz, too. He knew that the bit had to have a payoff; that the audience would be disappointed if he didn't get Silly Soaped. So he'd just try to avoid the inevitable until he was done selling hot dogs and then he'd let Engineer Bill cover him with shaving cream. When I saw him recently, we talked about that, the most dangerous assignment of his many years in show business.

When I discussed playing Little Oscar with Meinhardt Raabe, he had no tales of crazed kid show hosts trying to slather him with soap, silly or otherwise. He complained about kids poking him and how poorly he was paid and driving around in the hot, not-air-conditioned wienermobile to Godforsaken locations where boorish children threw things at you. I have no doubt it was a rough way to make a buck, and I'm sure Jerry Maren had all the same problems. But to Jerry, who was and is a genuine actor/performer, it was all part of show business, which is why he's worked in it his entire life. Still, I'm glad Mr. Raabe had his little piece of it. He sure did more with 13 dubbed seconds than anyone else ever has.

The popular childrens' book author Betty Paraskevas has left us after a measly 81 years on this planet…not nearly long enough for the likes of her. I never had what I'm sure would have been the pleasure of meeting Betty in person but we had a long telephone acquaintance…and her son Michael (everyone calls him Mickey) is a good buddy. Together, Betty and Mickey created dozens of top-selling, treasured kids' books, many of which spawned sequels and several of which were later animated. The most popular series has probably been Maggie and the Ferocious Beast but I always told Betty that my favorite was Junior Kroll. She wrote 'em, Mickey illustrated them and the results were always magic.

Like I said, I never met Betty face-to-face. I'd speak to her every few months, mostly to answer questions about how the animation business operated or to just let her vent over the latest deal, the latest offer, the latest annoyance. She was feisty in a good way and creative in every way. Thanks, Mickey, for allowing me to get to know her, even that much. And keep those books in print so future generations can enjoy her wonderful stories.