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We Went for Pogo
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10321 |
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Book World
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12 / 1986 |
2,018 Words |
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David Hallman
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What a wonderful balm it is in middle age to discover that a largely misspent youth was not totally wasted. Coming of age with Walt Kelly's Pogo during the Eisenhower fifties was, for many of us, more than a formative experience; it gave us, either directly or obliquely, a perspective on the world at large that we would never quite shed. Life was serious, but not too; it was funny if we could only look beyond our acne and inhibitions; and, most important, we ourselves were as ridiculous and dignified as a motley crew of Georgia swamp animals who celebrated an annual "World Serious" in the fall but who also managed to observe their yearly Christmas cheer with a roust of insane carols. For us, if Pogo was never elected to the White House, well he should have been. The strip was one of the high watermarks of American popular culture.
Comic strips need a context. While they are not original to the New World, they seem somehow as naturally American as Broadway musicals, tough-guy detectives, and Hollywood westerns. A critic once wrote that America lacked a myth to unite the country. We had no Arthurian legend, no Faust story, no Aeneid to celebrate our country, no Roland to sing. Our Revolutionary War was locked in Longfellow; the War Between the Status summarized a great American experience, but that story was really a link to the European past; the western expansion was perhaps our most native experience, but that has been turned into a John Wayne movie. But if our cultural experience is fragmented--is Hollywood or Wall Street a symbol for America? Nashville or Beacon Hill? Television wrestling or the Metropolitan Opera?--there are still the occasional ties that bind. For my generation, there were several: rock music, which I rejected out of hand; J.D. Salinger and Jack Kerouac, neither of whom spoke to me; and, of course, the beginning's of civil unrest, which passed more or less over my head, even though I lived in the racially torn South. Some of us looked for Truth in the bottom of a different glass. As a comic strip, Al Capp's L'il Abner had an irreverent appeal, but the true oracle was Pogo. I doubt that any cartoon has ever left such an indelible impression on a generation, and I feel pity for my student today to whom the title is not even a word.
To my knowledge, the story behind Pogo is not remarkable. Kelly was born in Philadelphia in 1913; he died in Hollywood in 1973. After an early newspaper apprenticeship, he took the archetypal American trek west and became an animator for Walt Disney, working most notably on Fantasia and Dumbo. Pogo has its origins in a 1943 strip called Bumbazine and Albert the Alligator, a story of a young boy who lived in the swamp with his pet gator. I have never seen these strips, but it would be fascinating to observe the evolution. Pogo did not appear, I believe, as the main character until 1948, after Kelly had served in World War II as an illustrator for U.S. Army luggage manuals. I think that I personally remember the strip almost from the start--or at least when the Memphis paper began carrying it--but it was not until his swamp friends decided to run a reluctant opossum for president in 1952 that Pogo became a symbol and a battle cry. Pogo was never elected, of course (although he might well have run ahead of Adlai Stevenson in 1952 and 1956). It would become part of the Pogo ritual that the "candidate" would be pushed, heels dragging, into the presidential ring every four years. There were not a few who wished he had won some of these exercises in democracy. He had a mandate.
The Pogo
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