Me To You Things

NYT obituary today: "George Woodbridge, a cartoonist and illustrator whose hapless, baggy suburbanites peopled Mad magazine for nearly 50 years, died in a hospital on Staten Island on Tuesday."

Perhaps Mr. Woodbridge's most fondly remembered piece for the magazine was the 1965 sports satire "43-Man Squamish," written by Tom Koch: it featured a nonsensical field game played with shepherds' crooks, diving flippers, polo helmets and impossibly complicated rules.

"The different equipment was hysterical," Mr. Meglin recalled. "George was able to make that real." College students from all over the country sent in photographs of themselves playing the game.

I assume in Heaven there are the necessary Quarter-Frummerts, Overblats, and Back-Up Finks. So flourish a Frullip for one of the Mad Magazine greats from the old era.

On a personal note: I discovered Mad on a drug store magazine rack in Delaware in the early sixties. It was the first magazine I ever subscribed to. Like many others, I was thrilled by the new vistas on the culture it opened up. I tried to tip off a friend about the fabulous magazine. She said, "You read Mad? That's for boys!" If only I had been capable of rejecting that statement, which she was so sure of, instead of feeling ashamed of my inferior perceptiveness!