C8 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, OCTOBER 20 , 2019
OBITUARIES
BY HARRISON SMITHDana Fradon contributed
nearly 1,400 cartoons to the New
Yorker, helping define its brand
of satirical, wry and sometimes
ridiculous humor in a magazine
career that stretched from the
Harry S. Truman administration
into the George W. Bush years.
“Under the Freedom of Informa-
tion Act,” a pajama-clad charac-
ter says in one of his drawings,
looking skyward in prayer, “I’m
requesting that you disclose
what you have on me in your
files.”
Mixing droll gags with acerbic
satire, Mr. Fradon skewered plu-
tocrats, hucksters, crass politi-
cians, corporate honchos and a
sensationalist media. In one car-
toon, a broadcaster intones:
“Those are the headlines, and
we’ll be back in a moment to
blow them out of proportion.”
Mr. Fradon, who once insisted
he was less a cartoonist than a
“misplaced baseball player,” gen-
erated ideas from radio, televi-
sion and especially the New York
Times, which he marked up with
a pen over his morning coffee.
The results were contemporary
but also timeless, in part because
corruption, greed and outright
lies never seemed to go out of
fashion.
One of his best-known car-
toons depicted a set of file cabi-
nets with labels reading, “Our
Facts,” “Their Facts,” “Neutral
Facts,” “ Disputable Facts,” “ Abso-
lute Facts,” “Bare Facts,” “ Unsub-
stantiated Facts” and “Indisput-
able Facts.” That drawing ran in
197 7, former New Yorker cartoon
editor Bob Mankoff noted in an
interview, but “come on, what
cartoon could be more relevant
to what we’re going through
now?” Perhaps the only thing
missing was a drawer labeled
“A lternative Facts.”
Mr. Fradon, who also wrote
children’s books and contributed
cartoons to newspapers across
the country, was 97 when he died
Oct. 3 at his home in Woodstock,
N.Y. The cause was liver cancer,
said his daughter, Amy Fradon, a
folk singer.
The New Yorker featured car-
toons beginning with its first
issue, in 1925, and had already
established itself as a leading
platform for humorists by the
time Mr. Fradon signed on in
1948 as the last cartoonist hired
by founding editor Harold Ross.
He went on to spend most of the
next 55 years at the magazine,
briefly leaving in the 1990s — he
was reportedly frustrated by the
new regime of editor Tina Brown
— before returning under cur-
rent editor David Remnick.
Mr. Fradon was “one of the
bedrock cartoonists” of the mag-
azine’s mid-century “Golden
Age,” f ellow New Yorker cartoon-
ist Michael Maslin said by email.
Along with artists such as Whit-
ney Darrow Jr., Frank Modell,
James Stevenson and Robert We-
ber, he added, Mr. Fradon was
“unbelievably adept at providing
high-bar work — much of it
evergreen — seemingly at a head-
line’s notice.”
“A s a fledgling artist, I paid
attention to the breadth of his
curiosity as well as the mastery of
his drawings — the structured
washes and tones and the ani-
mated line,” Edward Koren, an-
other New Yorker cartoonist,
wrote in a tribute for the maga-
zine. “This is what Fradon used
to satisfy the signature require-
ment of [the] magazine’s first art
editor, James Geraghty, who
asked of his artists, ‘Make it
beautiful.’ ”
Mr. Fradon’s “elaborate draw-
ings,” he continued, “were gener-
ous masterpieces of compressed
fun.”
One such cartoon, from 1991,
showed a couple standing in the
moonlight on a remote jungle
hilltop, watching as a volcano
erupted like a jack-in-the-box,
spouting a spring-loaded toy
head instead of molten l ava. “The
gods are antic tonight,” the cap-
tion read.
Much of his work was more
overtly satirical, addressing cur-
rent affairs without dipping into
partisan politics — albeit with an
unmistakably left-leaning point
of view. A self-described
Roosevelt Democrat, he served
for several years in the 1970s on
the city council in Newtown,
Conn., before deciding that is-
sues of underground utility wires
were taking too much time away
from drawing.
One Fradon cartoon featured a
pair of grumpy middle-aged men
sneering at a bird feeder, marked
“Squirrels Welcome.” It was ac-companied by a one-word cap-
tion: “Liberals!” Another showed
an angry invalid, tended to by a
doctor. “You should take it easy
for a while, Mr. Harner,” the
physician says. “You’ve been in-
fected by the virus of hate.”
Mr. Fradon’s work drew on
Greek mythology, R oman history,
medieval lore and French litera-
ture, with one 1986 cartoon por-
traying what appeared to be the
Three Musketeers, lifting their
swords in unison and declaring,
“Every man for himself!” Others
ventured into the arcana of fi-
nance, showing a bank teller
punching a customer in the jaw
as part of “an extra ‘substantial
penalty’ for the early withdrawal
of your time deposit.”
“What motivates one cartoon-
ist to do amusing drawings about
cats, dogs, husbands and wives,
and another to delve into bribes,
kickbacks and political hacks?”
Mr. Fradon asked in the preface
of his 1978 collection “Insincerely
Yours.” His former editor, Ger-
aghty, offered one potential ex-
planation: “Let’s face it, Dana,
you’re not motivated by any love
for the oppressed, you’re moti-
vated by hatred of the oppres-
sor!”
“Taken with a grain of salt, or
salt substitute,” Mr. Fradon wrote
in his book, “it was a correct
analysis.”
It was also, perhaps, the result
of an upbringing in Depression-
era Chicago, where he was born
Arthur Dana Fradon on April 14,- His parents were Russian-
Ukrainian immigrants who cred-
ited President Franklin D.
Roosevelt’s New Deal with help-
ing them through the Depres-
sion, and his father served as a
precinct captain in their South
Side neighborhood.
Mr. Fradon was raised in part
by an older sister, Marion, and
developed an interest in art and
politics at a young age. He at-
tended the School of the Art
Institute of Chicago before being
drafted into the Army, and rarely
spoke of his war years aside from
noting that by then he was al-
ready drawing political cartoons.
Moving to New Yo rk, he stud-
ied at the Art Students League, “a
future cartoonists paradise”
where attendance wasn’t taken
and grades weren’t given, and
where he met Ramona Dom, a
fine arts student he married in- She later became a cel-
ebrated illustrator, drawing
Aquaman and Brenda Starr com-
ics.
“Both my mom and dad were
so busy drawing that they would
put a big sheet of paper on the
floor and drop colored pencils
down for me to scribble with,”
Amy Fradon told the New York
Times in 2000, recalling her
childhood. Mr. Fradon and his
wife divorced in the early 1980s
but remained friends, and in the
past four years lived together
with Amy and her husband, Peter
Schoenberger. No other immedi-
ate family members survive.
Mr. Fradon contributed to
publications including Collier’s,
the Saturday Evening Post and
the left-wing New Masses before
being pointed toward the New
Yorker by his brother-in-law, Al-
bert Hubbell, a writer and illus-
trator at the magazine. He later
wrote and illustrated several
children’s books inspired by his
love of the Middle Ages, includ-
ing “Sir Dana: A Knight, as To ld
by His Trusty Armor” ( 1988).
For decades, he worked out of
a pre-Revolution farmhouse in
Newtown, where his attic studio
was cluttered with drawings and
artists’ materials, including his
daughter’s coveted plastic farm
animals, which he arranged on a
wooden beam for inspiration.
When the toys didn’t help, he
enlisted his wife to help with
animal drawings, especially of
horses.
The couple collaborated again
in recent years, working on car-
toons they published on Face-
book. One showed the grim reap-
er at a man’s apartment door,
with a scythe in hand and
“Trump” campaign button on his
cloak. “Relax!” the caption reads.
“I’m only here to spread fear.”
Mr. Fradon said that he was
unable to stop drawing, long
after filing his last New Yorker
cartoon in 2003. “For a time,
when I thought of a good idea
that I thought would go i n today’s
New Yorker, I stifled it,” he told
Maslin in a 2013 interview. “A nd
then I said to myself: well don’t
do that anymore, write ’em down
— so I write them down on a
scrap of paper and throw them
into a pile.”
[email protected]
DANA FRADON, 97
Prolific New Yorker cartoonist had a sharp satirical edge
ANNE HALL ELSER
New Yorker cartoonist Dana Fradon, in 1988, worked out of a
farmhouse in Newtown, Conn. He generated ideas from radio, TV
and the New York Times, which he marked up over morning coffee.DANA FRADON FOR THE NEW YORKERFUNERAL SERVICES
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