Charles Saxon On A Motorcycle
I never really thought of Charles Saxon as a motorcycle guy. It just goes to show you: it’s never a good idea to judge a cartoonist by their cartoons. Mr. Saxon, who I met just once, seemed more of a sports car guy (an image I probably will cling to despite photographic evidence of Mr. Saxon on a “bike.” I like the idea of Saxon tooling around Connecticut in an MG.)
The evidence, in the photo above, shows Mr. Saxon on a small motorcycle. The photo caption quotes Mr. Saxon as saying: “Sometimes I think I’m getting too old for the in-thing.” [I’m only showing a fraction of a larger photo, taken by the great photographer, Phillip Harrington. I’m hoping that showing a snippet does not violate copyright usage]. Mr. Saxon was about 46 years old when the photo was taken.
The photo was one of many in a terrific spread on Saxon in the May 16, 1967 issue of Look Magazine. After seeing a Spill post last week about a trio of Charles Saxon original drawings in the Spill collection, the cartoonist, V. Cullum Rogers contacted me with exciting information: he knew where the Saxon drawings appeared.
I found a reasonably priced issue online (I think it cost about $4.00). You never know how these New Yorker profile pieces are going to be. Sometimes they’re gold, sometimes tin. This one in Look is gold (eight photos showing Saxon interacting with life-size cut-outs of his people; his wife appears in one of the photos). I wish I could show you the entire piece. Here again is a link to a number of outtakes from the photo shoot. Just one appears in the piece (Saxon at his drawing board) –it’s heavily cropped, eliminating the cut-out woman).
I’ll leave you with yet another snippet, another Saxon quote:
“Everybody in my cartoons is serious . It’s only the readers who see the humor. At least I hope they do.”
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Here’s Charles Saxon’s entry on the Spill’s A-Z:
Charles Saxon (self portrait from Best Cartoons of the Year 1947) Born in Brooklyn, Nov 13, 1920, died in Stamford, Conn., Dec 6, 1988. New Yorker work: 1943 – 1991 (2 drawings published posthumously). Key collection: One Man’s Fancy ( Dodd, Mead, 1977). One of the giants of the New Yorker’s stable of artists. He could do it all: covers, spreads, single panels.