His reputation preceded him. Long before I set eyes on Jack Higgins, the man, I knew of the gifted editorial cartoonist who, for some unfathomable reason, was stuck drawing for the Daily Northwestern.
Actually, we all knew the reason: Jack was knocking at a barred door. Editorial cartoonist jobs were scarce even in 1978, the year Jack joined the Daily. The Chicago Tribune had Dick Locher and would soon add Jeff MacNelly — syndicated in almost 1,000 newspapers and drawing the popular comic “Shoe.” And the Sun-Times had even better — Bill Mauldin, the World War II legend with two Pulitzer Prizes, plus John Fischetti.
So where was Jack supposed to go? He couldn’t leave Chicago — the son and grandson of Chicago cops, he had Chicago politics, like art, in his blood. So work for a tiny student paper at a suburban college he didn’t himself attend? Sure!
“He was a mensch,” remembered Robert Leighton, Jack’s editor at the Daily, now a veteran cartoonist for The New Yorker. “He was a sweet, sweet guy. He taught me how to draw clothing on people. He said you have his arm going up and the lines on his shirt going down.”
That was Jack. Helpful. Good-natured enough to take orders from kids. Not that he’d be drawing for a student newspaper long — by 1981, he was freelancing for the Sun-Times. He joined the staff in 1984; two years later, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, which he won in 1989.
Like all the greats, Jack loved what he did. It wasn’t a job but a calling, like being a priest.
“Jack found politicians and their antics endlessly amusing,” said his wife, Missy. “He tried to be a voice for the citizens of Chicago who had no voice and had a great feel for the regular working people, across many classes, in Chicago. He sensed their resentments, sadnesses and outrages, but, when he found something just plain ridiculous, he reveled in it.”
Jack was the last of a breed going back to Thomas Nast, who brought down New York’s Boss Tweed singlehandedly. Editorial cartoonists were once household names drawing unforgettable images — Herblock at the Washington Post, having Nixon arrive at a campaign rally by crawling out of a sewer. “Here he comes now!” an enthusiastic supporter cries. Mauldin, at the Sun-Times, depicting the statue at Lincoln Memorial, face buried in his hands, weeping at the death of John F. Kennedy. No words needed. Just the perfect drawing.
“Editorial cartoonists, like film critics and indeed editors, are an endangered species in these days of the Internet tsunami against the printed press,” Roger Ebert wrote in a 2009 appreciation of Jack. “I am proud that my paper continues to be the home of one of the greatest.”
When an editor told me Tuesday that Jack had died, two moments came to mind, book-ending his quarter century at the Sun-Times.
The first was early on. Jack and a few others at a red-and-white checked table in the Billy Goat Tavern, doing what young newspapermen in their 20s did back then — talk and laugh and drink Old Style. Jack iced his beer. I’d never seen that done. A South Side thing. He was a proud South Sider, proud Catholic, proud Chicagoan, the sort who would brag that the obstetrician who delivered him was the same one who delivered Richard M. Daley — whom he sincerely liked, yet nevertheless caricatured as a sneering, sweating, button-nosed homunculus of a man.
The other memory is at the very end of his career. Jack had been pushed to come into the office so editors could gently guide him. Whenever I saw Jack in a corner of the newsroom, I would make a beeline over to say hello. It was always a pleasure to talk with Jack. He was a proud father of five, and we’d compare notes.
His family didn’t name the illness that he died of, and neither will I. I’m not a doctor. But it was clear that Jack was not himself. The nimble mind that could distill a complex political situation into a searing drawing on deadline had undergone a startling change. That last time, he had a drawing in front of him, which, of course, I looked at — looser, airier, still carrying the hallmarks of the craftsman. But the caption Jack had written under it had no bearing at all on the image. The two didn’t go together.
I suggested a more apt punchline. Jack was always eager to accept suggestions.
“That’s good!” Jack said and wrote it down on the paper beneath the drawing. We talked another moment or two.
“What was that line again?” Jack asked. I tapped it on the paper with my finger. “Right there,” I said.
He thanked me, and I walked away, chilled. I never saw him again. We never spoke. He didn’t come back into the newsroom, and my efforts to reach out to him were unsuccessful.
I want to remember that first Jack, laughing in the Goat over his iced beer, the whole world ahead of him. He was the nicest man, the most skilled artist, a cherished colleague, devoted Chicagoan, devout Catholic, enraptured husband and doting father, and it was cruel, both to him and to his family, what fate served up to Jack Higgins.
