Ever since I was a little kid in a highchair and randomly painted my face with creamed rutabaga, I wanted to be an artist. My teachers thought I had the talent for it and my parents thought I was wonderful at it (when a kid is in the single-digit age bracket, parents think their kids are wonderful at anything they do). My mother sent me to park district art programs and entered me in a suburban poster contest that I won, beating out teenagers, and got me in the newspaper.
In high school I drew teacher caricatures, road burning hot rods, monsters, painted names on students’ cars, and designed the cover of the first St. Joseph High School Yearbook. Eventually, I painted stock cars at the O’Hare Raceway, generally not while they were racing. The father of my senior year girlfriend owned a commercial art studio and I was assured a job after high school; that is, until I broke up with her.
After a year of screwing around and building TV sets on an assembly line for Motorola, I went back to school at the Art Institute. My dear Uncle Sam decided he needed more canon fodder in Vietnam, so he began drafting unmarried 19-year-olds. For some incomprehensible reason, art school wasn’t considered as a necessary to bolster the war effort. And, to my long time girlfriend’s chagrin, molten lead poured in my underwear was preferable to marriage (I gave her the it’s-not-you-it’s-me line; she didn’t buy it), I had to find another way to save my life. My father located an engineering school that would accept me. There was design and mechanical drawing involved, but it wasn’t like unfettered real art. But it meant a deferment so I enrolled to become an industrial tool engineer and learned what would happen if a weasel exploded in a depressurized airline cabin. Upon completion, I was immediately drafted. This put a bigger wedge between me and my carefree, swinging future life as a happy but probably broke alcoholic artist.
As an adopted child of Uncle Sam, the Army trained me to be a personnel management specialist and was sent to Fort Hood to handle special duty assignments. I was told nobody ever gets pulled out of this position, so it appeared I was destined to swelter the remainder of my military life away in the Texas desert heat. While operating with Army regulations all day, I discovered that the mean green machine was fairly open to changes in assignments to anyone who had the initiative to ask. So there, buried in the list of Military Occupational Skills (MOS) in two- or three-point type, was an MOS for a graphic artist. I applied for a change. Unfortunately, there was only one position for a graphic artist in the whole First Armored Division, and it was filled. I went to visit the filler in his nice little cubbyhole of an office with an air conditioner and a radio and nobody around to bother him. He kindly offered to recommend me for the position as soon as his 3-1/2 years there was up. Cruel fate, why doth thou treat me so?
Since I was assured I’d finish out my days at Fort Hood, I rented an apartment off post and brought my wife down to live with me. True to Army protocol, a few months I was reassigned to Seoul, Korea, and Eighth Army Headquarters where I worked at G-1 Officer Assignments. They didn’t have an open spot for me, so I just moved around from desk to desk whenever an empty one opened up. One day the major saw me drawing a caricature of him. He asked if that was supposed to be him and I said, no sir, it’s just a caricature of you (fortunately, the smart-alecky remark skidded right off the top of his bald head). He asked if I could do other drawing and I said yes, so he drafted me to begin making charts for his office. He supplied me with pens, inks, a T-Square and 30-inch x 40-inch poster boards. I filled his office walls with lists of the location of every officer in Korea in the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and above. Soon I began getting requests for posters from junior officers for their quarters, requests from our G-1 colonel for other charts and posters for the halls and front office. Whenever a birthday, going away, prom, circumcision or go-to-hell party came along, I would make the invitations and if needed, mimeograph multiple copies.
It finally struck me one day that I’d finally become an artist by accident; and in the Army no less, without even using creamed rutabaga. What goes around comes around, I guess.