From: I'm not a real doofus, but I play one at a national laboratory (baisley@fnal.gov)
Date: Mon Jun 26 2000 - 10:01:09 PDT
I, too, really miss Jeff. Check out this Sunday's Trib's
MacNelly Gallery:
http://chicagotribune.com/news/metro/ss/macnelly/front.html
Here's the Dave Barry obit from the Gallery:
If you ask any cartoonist to name the best in the
business, the odds are the answer would be Jeff
MacNelly.
Jeff did me the honor of illustrating my
syndicated Sunday column for 13 years. He was
the best friend and co-conspirator a person could
have wanted.
Several times, when I was late with a column,
Jeff would call to find out what I was writing
about, so he could get his illustration done on
deadline. Our conversations would go like this:
Me: I think it's gonna be about my dog.
Jeff: OK, your dog.
Me: And it doesn't see the snake.
Jeff: The snake?
Me: Right, a snake. On my lawn. The dog
doesn't see it.
Jeff: Got it.
And with only that to go on, Jeff would produce,
in an hour, a brilliant, perfect illustration, usually
way funnier than the column.
Jeff could do that with anything -- any subject,
any politician, any ridiculous trend.
With his fame, his accomplishments, his awards
-- three Pulitzers, for heaven's sake -- Jeff
chose to live far from the corridors of anything,
next to a hog farm in the Blue Ridge mountains of
Virginia with his wife, Sue; a bunch of animals;
and his beloved 1959 DeSoto -- seen often in
Shoe.
Jeff was a big, strapping, vital, always-cheerful
guy, which made it that much harder to accept
the fact that he was sick.
Despite his declining health, Jeff kept producing
his cartoons, just as he had produced them in
1996, when his son, Jeffrey "Jake" Jr., died in a
rock-climbing accident. Jeff kept plugging until
the end, doing his job, making us laugh.
He would never let me say to his face that he
made the world better. But he did.
Cheers,
Wayne
http://www-oss.fnal.gov/~baisley
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