The Press: The Pinch Hitter

“Tell them I’m finger painting,” said veteran Newspaper Cartoonist Edmund Duffy when someone recently tried to invade his comfortable retirement at the end of a long and lustrous career. In 1948, after 24 award-studded years (three Pulitzer Prizes) with the Baltimore Sun, Duffy left to try a hand at magazine cartooning for the Saturday Evening Post, drifted briefly back to newspapers—New York City’s transitory Star and the Long

Island Newsday—before vanishing from public view into an apartment on Manhattan’s upper East Side. This week, having dangled an irresistible bait, the Washington Post and Times Herald announced that it had lured Cartoonist Duffy, 60, out of hiding.

For at least the next two months, hard-punching Duffy, who once drew Franklin D. Roosevelt’s arm brandishing a blackjack over the U.S. Supreme Court, will fill in for the Post’s liberal (and two-time Pulitzer Prizewinner) Cartoonist Herbert Lawrence (“Herblock”) Block, 50, decommissioned last September by a heart attack. For a while the Post got along by running the work of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Bill Mauldin and others, but Post Publisher Philip Graham decided that Herblock needed a fulltime pinch hitter. Herblock agreed. “He went madly for the idea,” said Graham. “I had Duffy down last week and he agreed to come to work for us. As for policy, I don’t know what the hell it is myself. Duffy can draw as he likes.” Until Herblock returns, Duffy will do just that.