Max, as you will read, was a special influence on my life. I was reminded last night that I have not been fulfilling my responsibilities with this blog. This is my latest chance to start anew.
Max J. Gwin
(November 30, 1924 - December 30, 2014)
Eulogy
Nappanee United Methodist Church
Nappanee, Indiana
January 3, 2014
By Richard Pletcher
My name is Richard Pletcher. I taught senior high Sunday school for two weeks
and ran out of this church screaming. Max Gwin taught the same class here for
40 of his 90 years. Max’s patience made Job look neurotic. We are here to
celebrate St. Max. He was the ultimate observer of human beings around him and
found humor in their well meaning attempts to help each other navigate this
funny thing called life. This skill became his person and profession.
Max saw Jesus in
everyone and everything, and enjoyed him most in the faces of our children.
Frank Ramirez recently said, “There is nothing more quiet than a church without
the sound of children.”
With never a harsh word,
he somehow found inspiration and glee from the MYF antics of Phil and Rob
Lehman, Vance and Stan Lopp, Jan and Gary Culp, John and Ron Kendall, George
Freese, and, of course, yours truly who was banned from Cub Scout meetings in
my own basement by my Den mother who was also my real mother.
I felt most accepted,
cozy, and loved when in the presence of Max’s teaching and tutelage. To him I
am thankful to know that Moses went to the top of Mt. Cyanide to get the 10
commandments, Joshua led the Hebrews in the battle of Geritol, and David fought
the Finkelsteins.
Oscar Wilde said, “The
best way to make children good is to make them happy.” Each of us felt we were
the most important person in Max’s life, no one had more interest in our well
being than he. Out of my immediate circle of Max’s prodigies came graduates of
Drew Seminary, Princeton and two West Pointers, plus IU school of law, with a
masters degree in theology, and an Emmy winner.
As the understated James
Weygand said in his book “They Called it Nappanee: A History 1874 - 1974”,
“From Nappanee have come more top-notch cartoonists per capita than from any
other city in the world. That claim ought to stand up for quite some time.”
The six funny-paper men
are recognized on the Indiana State Historical Bureau bronze marker placed
in 2005 appropriately in front of the Nappanee Public Library.
It reads, “Merrill Blosser was first Nappanee
artist to gain national recognition as a professional cartoonist. Freckles and
His Friends, his most popular cartoon, ran from 1915 to 1973, syndicated by
Newspaper Enterprise Association. In 1965, National Cartoonists Society honored
Blosser on fiftieth year of Freckles and its "wholesome entertainment."
Five other Nappanee artists became nationally
recognized cartoonists. Henry Maust and Francis "Mike" Parks drew
newspaper editorial cartoons; Bill Holman's best was Smokey Stover (1935-1973);
Fred Neher's Life's Like That ran 1934-1977; Max Gwin drew Slim and Spud for
Prairie Farmer 1955-1991. Town, training, and careers connected these artists.”
An asterisk would add that Max’s cartoons were
published in nearly 300 additional publications including “The New
Yorker,” “The Saturday Evening Post,” “Cosmopolitan”, and “Collier's,” which,
he recalled with a chuckle, went out of business the following year. More importantly, it would mention that his attic
contains four nail kegs filled with nearly 10,000 rejection letters. Did I
mention perseverance?
It all started with a $2.00 cartooning course
while in grade school, followed by a gag-writing course in high school, and after his hitch in the
Navy during World War II, he attended Chicago’s Academy of Fine Arts and became
the only one of the six cartoonists to have studied at the Art Institute. He
and Betty, his wife of 68 years, lived in a 26’ trailer with no running water,
no bathroom, and no car for five years.
While working for the
“Prairie Farmer,” Betty finally convinced Max to look for an apartment with at
least a bathroom. He said he never understood why a bathroom was so important
to Betty, he guessed it was just the way women were. This started the sequence
of events that led them to move back home with Max setting up shop in the next
largest town south of Nappanee, Gwin’s corners. Max’s father, W.H. Gwin and his
brothers owned land on three of the four corners of SR 19 and CR 1350. The
intersection is still known to natives as a landmark. On the south west corner
was Willard’s filling station. The closed one room station became his studio.
Once again there was no outhouse.
Betty joined her two
sisters and sang with Vivian and Carol as the Postma Sisters trio for many
years; therefore, Kent and Dawn are blessed with the double vision of the artist
and the musician and the ability to express it beautifully through their music
and photographic creations.
In 1971 at the age of 16
Kent was the first lighting technician for Amish Acres theatre. He climbed a
rope ladder and balanced on a plank flicking switches through 8 weeks of dinner
theatre. Safety harnesses had not been invented. Twenty seven years later, he
returned to music direct “The Sound of Music” in The Round Barn Theatre. Of all
Amish Acres tour guides over the decades, Dawn’s infectious smile, a cross
between Max and Betty’s, was, perhaps, the most memorable.
The comic strip, “The
Adventures of Slim and Spud,” a pair of hired hands on the farm of Penny
Pincher, began in 1921 in the prestigious “Prairie Farmer” magazine. A series
of cartoonists and staff artists and even a Wisconsin farmer kept the strip
alive until Max took over drawing it in 1956 and continued it for 36 years.
In those nearly four
decades, Max retired farmer Pincher, Slim took over the farm and married Annie,
who was the cook and housekeeper for Pincher, a widower. Spud stayed on as
Slim's hired man. Slim and Annie had two children. Their son, the older, was
named Pinch. The daughters name was Peach. They grew until the ages of 10 and 6
and remained at that age. They lived in Corn County in Illinois or Indiana. Max
said in a 1991 article in the Prairie Farmer’s Sesquicentennial Commemorative
edition, "Slim, Annie, and Spud have problems and victories like those of
other contemporary farmers.”
In 1957 he hired me as
his first intern. My job was to draw the squares and rectangles on art board so
Max could fill them with his cartoons and captions. I used an ancient ruling
pen that had a screw that adjusts the width of the line
by moving the two shaped metal tips closer or further apart. India ink was
dripped in between the two points, then flowed across the page at a defined
rate; or so the book says. With my meager junior high left handed drafting
skills gleaned from Dave McGrew, I was humbled every time the ink smeared under
the triangle and T-square, which was nearly a 50/50 proposition. Although I was
not relieved by Max, who just kept smiling and encouraging me, Max was relieved
when, giving up my drafting dreams, I took a job laying carpet for my father
using right handed tools where my rate of mis-cut wasted carpet equaled the
percent of unusable art board I left in my wake.
With his gap toothed
smile, Wrigley’s Spearmint chewing gum, (he could chew gum faster than a chain
smoker could light a Camel), signature laugh and nod of the head, Max was an
irresistible, endearing and lifelong influence on this Type A personality.
I never saw anyone
happier at his work than Max, smiling out over the corn field, breathing life
into those little inked squares.
After my return from
college in 1965, Max and I collaborated in an advertising campaign for Pletcher
Furniture where I confined myself to the written word and left the drawing to
Max. This series of ads was named one of the top 15 campaigns in the country by
the National Newspaper Advertising Association.
Max was inducted into
Amish Acres Arts & Crafts Festival’s Hall of Fame in 2013 for his humor,
common sense, influence and inspiration on young people.
This summer I acquired
Max’s drafting table and donated it to the Evelyn Lehman Culp Heritage
Collection in The Nappanee Center with the stipulation that a plaque read
“Donated by Richard Pletcher, Max Gwin’s first and worst intern.” Luckily for
Max I was followed by a prestigious cadre of apprentices including Fred
Hunsberger, Jerry Ganshorn and Jim Clouse.
In the 1970s, my
photograph was on the cover of “Prairie Farmer” for preserving the historic
Stahly-Nissley-Kuhns farm that has become Amish Acres. A farmer acquaintance of
mine said, “What the hell is he doing on there? He don't know nothing about
farming!” I have never heard Max laugh louder or longer, still music to my ears.
I returned to Max’s
“filling station” throughout his life, to rub shoulders with his serenity,
modesty, and humility.
Betty noted in her
recent Christmas card to us, that she and Max had been looking through some of
his early cartoons they found in the attic and Max said, “I was better than I
thought I was.” We knew that all along.
I struggle, as I expect
most of us do, with many of the attributes that made Max a servant of God in
this building and beyond; so I carry his belting leather briefcase with me, his
name embossed on the front, as a daily reminder of this gentle man. Amen.
Nappanee’s Cartoonists
From “They Called It
Nappanee: A History 1874 - 1974”
By James Weygand
First, in 1915 came
Merrill Blosser who created “Freckles and his Friends”. It became the only
comic strip in history to reach its Golden Anniversary under the personal
direction of its original writer-cartoonist. His great nephew, Brock Blosser,
was a fraternity brother of mine.
He lives on an island in
Canada without electricity carving Black Forest gnomes. The artistic gene runs
deep.
Henry Maust worked as a
cartoonist for the “Cleveland Plain Dealer” along with Merrill Blosser, but
switched to painting and commercial art where he made his mark. He created ads
for Libbys, Swift, General Mills and Kraft, receiving in 1923 the Gold Medal
for the best advertising painting of the year. His work was published in the
“Saturday Evening Post” and “Womens Home Campanion.”
Francis (Mike) Parkes,
studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Chicago, joined the “Cleveland Press,”
ending up at the “San Francisco Call-Bulletin.” Copies of his editorial
cartoons were requested by Winston Churchill, Harry Truman, J. Edgar Hoover and
Richard Nixon.
Fred Neher in the 1920’s
created “Us Moderns”, a humorous look at hospital babies for “American
Magazine” and “Life’s Like That” appeared in 265 newspapers.
Bill Holman was hired in
1935 by the Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate to distribute his “Smokey
Stover and the Smoke Eaters” strip. His Foo-car is the mascot of the Nappanee
Fire Department and a full-sized replica of the two wheeled chief’s car is in
the Evelyn Lehman Culp Heritage Collection in The Nappanee Center.
Max Gwin, the youngest
of Nappanee’s school of cartoonists. While he modestly protests he has never
hit the big league, as did the others, the facts appear to indicate otherwise.
His regular comic strip “Slim and Spud,” which he drew from 1956 through 1996,
appeared regularly in “Prairie Farmer,” the prestigious journal in its field.
In addition to still another regular comic strip, his cartoons have appeared in
two hundred ninety magazines, including many.
Andrew Sullivan, well known long term blogger, whose blog was once owned by TIME has quit posting out of sheer exhaustion. One wonders if this drudgery has become obsolete? Facebook posting is so easy, you don't even have to write sentences and no one cares. Express yourself on Twitter and you are cut off at 140 characters, saving your readers from boredom with your well thought out monologue.
