We drank a lot, because, you know, you get thirsty in the tropics. We stayed at a “guesthouse”…now you’d call it a “bed and breakfast”…except we got dinner, too. The food was OK, but my most distinct memory is a peanut punch the landlord made…a peanut butter based beverage. I dislike peanut butter, but it wasn’t bad.
One distinct memory is the crowing of roosters at every dawn…for a suburban boy this was a novel, if not welcome, awakening. These days, I might not mind it so much.
I met a sailor in Port Of Spain named Carl Meade. I can’t remember the circumstances, and though I was leary at first, it worked out fine. He was from Antigua but knew his way around T&T. We crashed at his half-brother’s house and then took the ferry to Tobago. That was my first “voyage” on ocean waters.
There was very little going on there…at least of which that I was aware. I hadn’t even planned on winding up there.
I’m heading out of town, so I am posting a week’s worth of pictures from another time I headed out of town around 1975…down to the sleepy island of Tobago….
And yet another Tribune illustration…Rapidograph and brush on paper and I used screens for the midtones, a technique I never used much. Devotees of root vegetables will find several depicted. The Food Dreamer at lower right is my father, who was in his late 40s at the time…younger than I am now!
These roughs were alongside other sketches which looked like Chicago Tribune material…I did a number of pieces for a food-related section called “Taste” in the late ’70s-early ’80s. Whatever they were for, these characters never made it pass this stage…a potato-headed man and a turnip-headed woman.
Not completely root vegetable nor humanoid, here is the invesgitater of the abnormal, Joe Potato, deep in the ground where he makes a startling discovery….
On St. Patrick’s Day, 1879, the Irish-American Henry McCarty aka Henry Antrim aka William H. Bonney aka Kid Antrim aka Billy the Kid met secretly with Governor Lew Wallace (a famed Civil War general) of New Mexico to make a deal regarding his activities during the Lincoln County War. The Kid agreed to submit to token arrest and give testimony in exchange for amnesty. However, the district attorney refused to play along with the arrangement and the Kid slipped jail and resumed his outlaw ways. While governor, Wallace wrote the beloved novel “Ben Hur”. I drew this with Rapidograph, brush and ink and it is one of the series of T-shirts sold at the Billy the Kid Pageant.
A gentleman representing a groundswell of public opinion requested graphics of root vegetables. That is not a subject matter which I have assayed much in the past…but I found several tenuous examples. Here is a piece I did for the Chicago Tribune in 1979. If this looks familiar to followers of this blog, it may be because I based one of the cards in the OD deck from it a few years later.