Eulogy
The English word “eulogy” comes from a Greek word compounded of the prefix eu- meaning “good” and logos, meaning “word.” A eulogy is a good word regarding a human being. In current usage, eulogies are good words spoken regarding a person who’s recently died, but that’s a lousy time for such words. What’s the use if the person being eulogized never gets to hear how his life touched your own?
My father was in his early 90s when he came to visit my family in Ohio, and agreed to attend one of my anatomy lectures at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. A strong and virile man who had made his living as an artist, he was rounding third base, and was very tired. My class was on the third floor of the building. It wasn’t easy for him. And by this time Macular Degeneration had whittled his vision down to 20-400, meaning that what he could see twenty feet away was what normal people could see at 400 feet away. For all intents and purposes, he’d gone blind. But still he trudged those stairs.
We got to my classroom. I set up chairs and placed him at the back. He looked a lot like Toulouse Lautrec in his later years, gaunt and hunched over. The students filed in and eyed him with some curiosity as I prepared to do my lecture on the anatomy of the human foot.
I never made a lot of money teaching at the Academy; in large part it was just a tax write-off, and something that gave me immense pleasure. Not to mention the benefit to the students, who loved the teaching. But it never made a whole lot of sense to come in once a week. The administration, and particularly my department chair, never liked me, my class, my teaching, or the philosophy I espoused. No, none of it made a bit of sense. Not until I began my lecture and gestured at the stunted figure in the back of the class. At that moment, those years of teaching human anatomy for artists suddenly had a purpose. It was my chance to eulogize our visitor.
I guess you’re wondering about my Special Mystery Guest in the last row. He’s a very interesting guy, and I hope some of you will get to know him while he’s here. His parents came over from the Ukraine in steerage at the beginning of the twentieth century. They soon had eight children. Our guest was number seven. He was born in 1913 in Hamilton, Ontario. They later relocated to Flatbush, a funky section of Brooklyn. His father, a tailor in the old country, specialized in failed business ventures, but most of his kids took a different path. One was a labor arbitrator. Two were lawyers. Another was a stockbroker. Almost all of them grew to make money, a lot of it, including our guest, but that would come later.
In school it became apparent that he came from the womb wired to draw, and early on he was asked to make posters and dioramas at Easter and Christmas regarding Jesus Christ. He asked his parents, both Russian Jews, if they were okay with this. It was fine with them. Incidentally, he draws like an angel.
He attended Abraham Lincoln High School in Flatbush, which means nothing except that the head of the school’s art department happened to be a refugee from the maelstrom of 1920s Germany with world-class design skills. A huge percentage of the best illustrators, painters, designers and sculptors of the 20th century would come from his high school classes. In art as well as academics, a high school diploma from this school carried more weight than a Bachelor’s Degree at one of today’s colleges. In 1967, fifty of the most accomplished veterans of this art program did a group show in New York. Our guest, one of the fifty, organized the show and was one of the headliners, along with Milton Glaser and Gene Federico.
Even in high school he was curious about the great designers of the world, and when such people visited New York, he managed to corral them to lecture at his school. One of the most prodigious was the Hungarian painter Lazlo Maholy-Nagy, who Time listed as one of the ten most influential artists of the 20th century. Somehow, our guest managed to haul Maholy-Nagy and others out to Brooklyn to teach him and his friends.
He graduated high school just in time for the onset of the Great Depression, which he says he barely noticed. “We never had anything before, so it didn’t make any difference not to have anything after.” Yet he found work at one of the commercial art schlock houses that proliferated in the city, and learned the minutia of prepress, of typography, of illustration. They weren’t able to keep him long; he left as soon as he could and opened his own studio. His first client was Harper’s Bazaar, which in the early 30s would be about the equivalent of having one’s first client Amazon or Facebook. He lived well, and, like his siblings, helped to support his mother and father back in Flatbush.
War in Europe came in 1939. Our hero, still a Canadian subject, wanted to fight the Nazis, but was rejected by the US armed forces. Canada rejected him as well. Then came Pearl Harbor, and the services were no longer in a rejecting mood. He enlisted in the Army Air Corps and was sent to Minnesota to be trained as a radio gunner on a Flying Fortress.
The best thing you can say about radio gunnery is that it is slightly less suicidal than tail gunnery. With rare exceptions, radio gunners didn’t survive the war, or even survive more than a few missions, but he was game. He wanted to save humanity from monsters who wanted to destroy it. But then some suits at the Pentagon noticed that their cannon fodder recruit was one of the hottest young graphic designers in the country. They ordered him to Washington where he spent the war as art director of Air Force Magazine.
After the war, he was offered work as a professional ski bum. Instead he took a job designing titles for the legendary movie producer David O. Selznick. Selznick gave him a lot of money and a beautiful secretary. When he finished there, he headed back to New York with the money and with the secretary, who soon after became my mother.
Private schools. A country home as well as a town house on the most expensive block in Manhattan. Our dinner guests were artists, writers, activists, film directors, sculptors, visionaries. I grew up thinking that all of this was normal.
Maybe one story will give you a better idea of this guy’s achievements. A girl friend and I were involved in a joint enterprise in the 1980s, and her birthday was approaching. She and I had a little in-joke; we called ourselves Chase and Sanborn, after the coffee magnates whose brand of instant coffee cornered the market in America for decades. Their slogan was, “What Mr. Chase didn’t know about coffee, Mr. Sanborn did.” So I wondered if our guest had ever designed a logo for Chase and Sanborn Coffee; if he had, maybe he’d have some sort of memorabilia which I could use as a gift for my girl friend. So I phoned him and asked him if he’d ever designed the logo for Chase and Sanborn. I will never forget his answer:
“I don’t know.”
This would be like an actor not recalling whether or not he’d ever starred in a Steven Spielberg film.
A few days later, an old color transparency, lovingly protected with acetate, came in the mail, his logo design for Chase and Sanborn. It was quite good, as were his logos for Bell Telephone, for Western Electric, for NBC, for the United Nations, for Parliament Cigarettes, for the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine film, and for dozens of others. Some are still in use. At the UDF across the street they’re still selling Phillies little cigars, a product he not only designed the packaging for, but invented. The Phillies logo you see is the one he designed.
Some guys cast really long shadows. I mentioned that I thought my childhood was normal, and that our houseguests were the most prestigious people in their fields, artists of every sort, the best of the best. Through no merit of my own, I got to know them all.
But still there is no doubt that the finest artist I have ever known, by any possible definition, is our guest, and perhaps he would be good enough to stand up and allow you to recognize him, my father, Mr. Seymour Robins.
My students, an eclectic assortment of stoners, pseudo-intellectuals, bored hippies, wannabes, Wiccans, Goths and kids who genuinely wanted to be artists, went nuts. They applauded, they hugged him, they cried. They knew damn well that for at least once in their lives, they were in the presence of the real thing.