Tony Auth says good bye to his readers

The Philadelphia Inquirer editorial cartoonist Tony Auth said good bye to his readers yesterday after 40 years with the paper.

Creed Black, my editor, was a moderate Republican. He’d not be welcome in today’s Republican Party, but that was a long time ago, in what seems like a far away galaxy. Creed would never tell me what to draw, he said, but wanted a choice of drawings to pick from. That led to some game playing by the two of us.

If I had what I thought was a really good drawing, and he picked one of the other two sketches I submitted that day, I would show up the next day with the remaining two. If he picked the “wrong” one again, I would only submit the one he’d turned down twice on the third day, and we’d fight about it. I lost a fair number of those fights, but also won my share. We came to an understanding, and by the time I won the paper’s second Pulitzer in 1976, I was submitting one cartoon a day just like any regular contributor.

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