Nino Carbe: 
Behind the Animations

You probably haven’t heard of Nino Carbe, but if you were a kid any time from the 1940s through the 1980s, you have seen his work. Carbe drew backgrounds for many of the great animators — from Walt Disney and Walter Lantz to Hanna Barbera and Filmation — whose productions appeared both on the big screen and on television.

Carbe, who lived in Ridgefield in the 1950s and early 60s, also illustrated many books, especially for children.

A native of Sicily, Nino Carbe was born in 1909 and immigrated with his family when he was three. He was soon exhibiting talent at both art and classical violin, but excelled at the former. At the age of 16, he began studying art at the Cooper Union.

By his early 20s Carbe was illustrating books for New York City publishers, including such classics as Tales of the Arabian Nights, Cyrano de Bergerac and Frankenstein. In 1936, he moved to California and was soon hired by Walt Disney for whom he drew backgrounds of such Disney feature-length classics Fantasia, Bambi, Pinocchio, and Dumbo, as well as many shorter “cartoons.”

During World War II, he worked on Victory through Air Power and other projects for the Army. Disney also lent his talents to Walter Lantz — creator of Woody Woodpecker — who was producing military training films using animation.

After the war Carbe returned to illustrating books for children and also began ranging into such work as designing fabrics and Christmas cards. He and his wife, Betty, moved East to be closer to publishers and in 1953, he bought a house on Ledges Road. 

In 1964, he returned to California and to Disney, working on films such as The Jungle Book. When Walt Disney died in 1966, he joined Walter Lantz, creating the backgrounds for some of the last Woody Woodpecker cartoons, along with TV series like Chilli Willi and The Beary Family.

He then worked for Hanna Barbera as an artist for The All New Superfriends Hour, and Filmation, creating settings for He-Man and the Masters of the Universe series on TV. He also designed and drew backgrounds and layouts for Ralph Bakshi’s 1978 The Lord of the Rings animation.

Late in life, Carbe turned to painting, producing many oils, acrylics and watercolors,   experimented in bronze sculpture, and designed batik scarves and even clothing. And on the more practical side, he also built furniture.

Nino Carbe died in 1993. Betty died in 2018; they are buried in her family’s plot in Bonaparte, Iowa.

Nino and Betty Carbe had two daughters. Elizabeth “Liza” Carbe, a writer and journalist in California, maintains a website, ninocarbe.com, displaying and honoring her father’s work. 

Daughter Victoria “Vicki” Carbe Valentino, an alumna of Veterans Park and Ridgefield High Schools, became an actress who appeared in a dozen movies and on TV. In the 1960s, she was a Playboy Bunny — she was “Miss September” in 1963. She later became a registered nurse. 

More recently, Vicki Carbe  was in the news as one of the dozens of women who publicly accused comedian Bill Cosby of sexual assault.  In 1970 when she was 24, she said, Cosby raped her at his apartment after giving her a pill that rendered her immobile. “We are vindicated, we are validated,” she told USA Today after Cosby was sentenced to prison in 2018.

Bob Gustafson: 

Ridgefield’s Cartoonist

Several nationally known cartoonists have lived here, but none has taken up Ridgefield as a subject for his art as Bob Gustafson did. The Ridgefield Press’s cartoonist for more than 40 years produced literally thousands of cartoons for the newspaper. Some teased town officials for their actions or inactions, others illustrated community problems,  many promoted good causes in a good-natured way, and a few were just good gags. 

 A native of Brookline, Mass., Robert D. Gustafson was born in 1920. He  was a paperboy as a youngster, served as a pilot in the U.S. Army, pitched semi-pro baseball in the Boston area, played drums in a band, and studied at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts School. 

Before he was 21, he was sending cartoon gag ideas to The New Yorker, and several were purchased and used. He later did cartoons for magazines like Good Housekeeping and Saturday

Evening Post.

“You have to come up with something you like and let everybody judge it,” Gustafson said in a 1991 interview about his work. “Sometimes it flops. It’s not like being a plumber — when you go in and fix a pipe and turn the faucet on and the water comes out, you know it’s OK.”

After working for a Boston magazine and a newspaper, he got a job with King Features, ghosting several comic strips and eventually taking over the nationally circulated strip, “Tilly the Toiler,” which had started in 1921 when he was only a year old.  He later worked for Mort Walker on both Beetle Bailey and Hi & Lois. And on the side, he did cartoons for The Press.

“Cartoonists never stop learning,” he said. “They’re always observing.” 

Although he lived in Ridgefield only from 1954 to 1960, Gustafson continued to “observe” town affairs at his Greenwich home through the pages of The Press, which he read thoroughly for ideas. He’d also chat by phone each week with the Press’s editor, looking for ideas on timely issues — and giving the editor hell if he had changed a word or two in a caption the previous week.

Gustafson had several favorite subjects, including the Cass Gilbert fountain. He was aghast at suggestions that the landmark be moved from its island at Main Street and West Lane, complaining repeatedly about that work of art’s being sacrificed to “the almighty automobile.” In cartoon after cartoon, he dealt with the issue. Saddened by cars all too often crashing into the monument, he’d offer entertaining suggestions for protecting it — one shows the fountain, raised on a mound and a

tunnel running under it to carry the traffic. But one week, seemingly giving up hope, he drew another showing the fountain, well-protected from cars by big railings, being hit by an airplane.

He also attacked vandalism, often portraying vandals as evil-looking thugs. Being a senior citizen himself, he encouraged help for Ridgefield’s elderly, and would offer suggestions on how to

improve their lot. He supported many town organizations, but especially the Community Center — he was active in the center in its early years and, as an accomplished photographer, used to take publicity pictures for them.

One of his favorite subjects in the 1950s and 60s was Leo F. Carroll, the colorful and charismatic first selectman and former state police leader. Carroll, who lived directly across Wilton Road West from Gustafson, was often teased for his pronouncements such as when he declared that

Ridgefield’s dump was “the most delightful dump in America.”

Though most of his Press cartoons were very local in nature, some captured wider attention. When controversy erupted over a new gas station’s need to cut down some large trees to make access to the highway safer, Gustafson drew a cartoon showing a couple of giant trees like the redwoods in California with a big opening so people could drive through them. Shell Oil Company offered to buy the cartoon. 

A gag, playing on the idea that we’ve all seen supermarket shopping carts in strange places,

showed an Arab on a camel in the middle of a desert coming upon a shopping cart. Grand Union later bought it.

Gustafson won many awards for his work including commendations from professional cartoonist organizations and from the New England Press Association. 

For relaxation, he enjoyed golf and following the Boston Red Sox. For many years he loved teasing Yankee fans, but by the late 1990s had come to enjoy watching the Sox’s arch enemy — he especially admired Derek Jeter.

Bob Gustafson died in 2001 at the age of 81. 

Robert Kraus: 

Cartoons and Kids

Robert Kraus was an author, illustrator, New Yorker cartoonist, and publisher who produced dozens of popular books for children.

 "I write books to console myself, to encourage myself, to encourage others," he said in a 1979 interview. By then he had written and illustrated more than 60 books, had created dozens of covers for The New Yorker, and had become a publisher whose titles won several Caldecott Medals. 

A native of Milwaukee, Wisc., he was born in 1925. While still a boy, he decided he wanted to become a cartoonist and sold his first work — to a barbershop — when he was 10. "The greatest compliment anyone can give you is to buy your stuff," he said. 

By the time he was a teenager, he was selling to magazines like Esquire and Saturday Evening Post. 

He studied at the Art Students League in New York, where in 1944 he met his wife, Pamela Vivienne Evan Wong, who was also a student. A year later, he joined the staff of The New Yorker, where he worked for 20 years and created more than 40 covers and hundreds of cartoons. 

While at The New Yorker, he also wrote and illustrated more than two dozen children's books — many reflecting happenings in his own life. “I wrote ‘Leo the Late Bloomer’ when I was having business problems,” he said. “I tend to write about problems — ‘Miranda's Beautiful Dream' was inspired by Martin Luther King.”

He wrote "Junior" and the "Spoiled Cat" to keep himself calm when his wife, Pamela, was in labor and he couldn't reach the doctor. 

He left The New Yorker in 1966 and founded Windmill Books, which published not only his own titles but also the work of such illustrators and authors as Jacob Lawrence, Whitney Darrow Jr., Edward Koren, Norman Rockwell, Mickey Spillane, William Steig, and Charles Addams. Within a year, the house had won a Caldecott Medal and over the years, published more than 200 titles on three continents. 

Kraus was known for his sense of humor. In the early 1980s, he wrote "101 Reasons Not to Have Sex Tonight" under the name, I.M. Potent, M.D., whom Simon & Schuster touted as "one of the leading authorities in the world today on not having sex." 

In 1983 he began a syndicated Sunday comic feature, called "Zap! The Video Chap," that was aimed at children addicted to the then-new phenomenon of video games. 

However, his main interest was always in children's books. "I never slant my books to children," he said in 1979. "My books are not sickening, cloyingly sweet, and they have a point. I'm not a person who likes to write a lot, and children's books are the ideal forum for my ideas." 

Among his last titles were "Mouse in Love," published by Orchard Books, and "Little Louis,

The Baby Bloomer," published by Harper Collins, both in 2000. Many of his books are still in print in 2016. 

The Krauses moved to Ridgefield in 1965, owning the 1896 Colonial Revival house at the southeast corner of Main Street and Branchville Road. Walking his pug named Hoover and carrying a shillelagh, he was a familiar sight along Main Street sidewalks for many years. 

He and his wife moved to New York City in the late 1980s, but "he always considered Ridgefield his home," one of his sons said. 

He died 2001 at a nursing home in Kent, Conn., at the age of 76. He is buried in Fairlawn Cemetery in Ridgefield beneath a stone that includes an illustration from his series of books about a character named Spider, with such titles as "How Spider Saved Santa Bug" and "How Spider Stopped the Litterbugs."

E. W. Kemble: 

He Pictured Huck

Like his friend and fellow illustrator Frederic Remington, Edward Windsor Kemble moved to Ridgefield from New Rochelle, N.Y., and wound up dying here not long afterward.

Kemble was born in California in 1861, a son of the founder of the first daily newspaper on the Pacific Coast. By age 20 the largely self-taught artist was living in New York City. In an era before photographs were used in periodicals, he worked as an illustrator at the Daily Graphic, the first illustrated daily newspaper in New York, and did drawings for other publications such as Life and Harper’s magazines — Life was published by Ridgefield’s John Ames Mitchell.

“While contributing to Life I made a small picture of a little boy being stung by a bee,” Kemble said in a 1930 interview. “Mark Twain had completed the manuscript of ‘Huckleberry Finn’ and... casting about for an illustrator, Twain happened to see this picture. It had action and expression, and bore a strong resemblance to his mental conception of Huck Finn.” 

Still in his early 20s, Kemble was hired to illustrate Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, now considered one of the greatest American novels of all time. He went on to do other work for Twain, including Puddn’head Wilson.

His “understanding and sympathetic” portrayal of black Americans in Huckleberry Finn was considered remarkable at the time, his obituary in The Ridgefield Press said. However, he himself admitted he had known hardly any blacks, and that the model for Jim (and most of the other characters, including Huck) was a teenage white boy named Cort Morris, who would pull down a black wool cap over his face to create the effect of being black.

Other publishers were taken by Kemble’s portrayal of Jim and approached him to do illustrations for works about blacks. Kemble, who had never been south of Jersey City, decided he needed to learn more about his subject, and for many months lived on a cotton plantation in the South to gain firsthand knowledge. He wound up being commissioned to illustrate Uncle Tom’s Cabin as well as an early edition of the Uncle Remus stories. 

While his illustrations of blacks often displayed “great empathy,” they sometimes reflected “the most outrageous of stereotypes,” one biographer said.

Kemble also drew scores of political cartoons for newspapers and was so effective at it that President William Howard Taft once remarked that “Mr. Kemble and his satiric drawings were one of the few forces in the country that he feared,” The Press obituary said.

Kemble moved here around 1930 to live with his daughter on Wilton Road West, where he enjoyed gardening and gatherings with friends. He died in 1933 at age 72 and is buried in Mapleshade Cemetery.

Herb Green: 

A Good Ol’ Cartoonist

During his long career, Herb Green worked for some of the nation’s top magazines and socialized with many of America’s leading cartoonists. 

Herbert L. Green was born in 1927 in Olathe, Kans., and graduated from the University of Missouri. He drew cartoons for many national magazines, especially The Saturday Evening Post and Playboy, and was a former president of the American Cartoon Society.

Mort Walker, whose comics include “Hi and Lois” and “Beetle Bailey,” recalled in his book, “Backstage at the Strips,” when Charles Schulz first came to New York City in 1951. The young “Peanuts” creator stayed at Herb Green’s apartment, sleeping on the living room couch.

Green and Schulz became good friends.  In 1954, when Schulz decided to make a major change in the character of Charlie Brown — turning him from mischievous and smart-alecky  into the lonely and downtrodden kid he’s now well known as — he did so with the Feb. 1, 1954 strip. And he gave the original of that strip to Herb Green, together with the dedication, “For good ol’ Herb Green — Charles Schulz.” Herb Green’s widow, Crystal, donated it to the Charles M. Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, Calif.

Two years later, Schulz snuck Green’s name in a strip — very unusual for “Peanuts.”

The Greens moved to Ridgefield in 1983. For many years, villagers often would see Mr. Green walking his dog along the sidewalks of Main and Catoonah Streets. He always greeted passersby with a smile.

He died at his home in 2012 at the age of 85.

Wayne Boring: 

Superman's Man

If you were among the many fans of Superman between 1940 and the 1960s, you saw the work of Wayne Boring, a Ridgefield cartoonist who brought the man of steel to life for millions who read the newspaper comics. 

Born in 1916 in Minneapolis, Mr. Boring studied at the Chicago Art Institute where he took a course by J. Allen St. John, the then-famous illustrator of the Tarzan books, to learn how to produce the muscular, Tarzan-like figure. 

In 1940, after a stint as a newspaper illustrator and some freelance comics work, he was hired to help illustrate the new but growing   Superman strip, started in 1938 by Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel. At first he “ghosted” strips, filling in bodies after Shuster drew the faces. 

By the mid-1940s, he was the sole illustrator of the daily and Sunday comics and by 1965 had drawn more than 1,350 Sunday and 8,300 daily Superman strips, and also did some of the comic books. 

In all of those strips and books, incidentally, he never once drew Superman changing into costume in a phone booth, a TV series technique that always annoyed the artist. 

In 1957, Boring moved to Lincoln Lane in Ridgefield. Eleven years later, DC Comics started cost cutting and dismissed several of its veteran artists, including Mr. Boring. He then ghosted backgrounds for Prince Valiant series by Hal Foster, who lived in Redding, until 1972. He also drew for Marvel comics on and off, but late in life was forced to work as a bank security guard in Florida where he died in 1982. 

"Wayne Boring's Superman is one of the most enduring characters in the comics hobby," a comic art historian has written. "Boring's stylized artwork and fine linework along with his ability to handle science fiction subjects has made him one of the most popular artists of his time, and among the most remembered in comics history."

Jerry Marcus: 

A White House Favorite

In 1960, Gary Powers’ U-2 spy plane flight was shot down over Russia. Thinking the pilot had been killed and the plane destroyed, American officials tried to cover up. Premier Nikita Khrushchev produced the live pilot, pictures Powers had taken of Russian military bases, and then promptly cancelled a big Paris summit meeting. Soon after, a rather embarrassed President Dwight Eisenhower had to make a speech in Portugal.  He began by saying, “Have any of you seen that recent cartoon that said: ‘The next speaker needs all the introduction he can get’?” 

The cartoon was by Jerry Marcus, and soon it was hanging in the White House, the first of two to be so honored. 

In the last half of the 20th Century, Marcus’s gag cartoons appeared in every major magazine, from The New Yorker to the Paris Match, and for many years, he was ranked among the top 10 magazine cartoonists in the country.

While most successful cartoonists stick to either magazine gags or newspaper strips,  Marcus was successful at both. His King Features daily and Sunday strip, Trudy, appeared in more than 200 newspapers since it began in 1963, and focused on the life of a suburban homemaker — modeled, he said, a bit after his strong-willed mother who, as a young widow, had to raise four children in a cold-water flat in New York City.

Marcus was born in 1924 in Brooklyn of immigrants from Austria-Hungary. His father died when he was three, and his mother, who had crippling arthritis, depended on welfare to help support her family.

Marcus would recall how one welfare department caseworker would periodically burst into

their room without knocking, and walk around looking for any signs that the welfare money had been improperly spent. One time, he said, the caseworker opened the icebox door, and found a half pint of ice cream that his mother had bought to celebrate one of the children’s birthdays. The woman scolded her for squandering taxpayer money on such a luxury.

As a young boy, he knew he wanted to be a cartoonist. When he was still in grammar school, he sold his first cartoon for $2.50 to the School Bank News, a periodical published by a local bank for distribution to school children.

When World War II broke out, he tried to join the Navy, but lacked the weight. Instead, he served in the Merchant Marine aboard aviation fuel tankers in the North Atlantic until he had built up enough weight to be accepted by the Navy. After a stint with the Seabees in the Philippines, he was discharged in 1946.

After the war, he studied at the Cartoonists and Illustrators School in New York City. Almost immediately after his graduation in 1947, his cartoons began appearing in national magazines, including The New Yorker, Look, Saturday Evening Post, McCall's, and Ladies' Home Journal.

Department store Santas were among Marcus’s favorite topics. Financier Bernard Baruch was so tickled by one of his panels featuring a little boy sitting on Santa Claus’ lap that he asked for and received the original. The cartoon’s caption said, “I’ll tell you want I want... I want to go to the bathroom.”

Marcus would often spend more than 40 hours a week at his drawing board, but many more hours were devoted to coming up with gags. Sometimes that inspiration came in the middle of the night. “Believe it or not, there have been times when I’ve dreamed of a gag and drawn it when I woke up,” he told an interviewer. “It’s really not so unusual. I know any number of people who keep a pad near their bed to jot down ideas that come to them when they’re dozing. In my case, I’m a cartoonist, so I keep a piece of drawing paper handy.”

More than a dozen books containing his work, including many Trudy collections, have been published. Hundreds of his cartoons have also appeared in his hometown newspaper, The Ridgefield Press, especially during the 1960s and 1970s when his work ran weekly.

Marcus came to Ridgefield in 1956 and lived there more than 40 years before moving to Danbury and then to Waterbury. For many years he would often be seen walking along Main Street in the village with his friends, especially fellow cartoonist Orlando Busino of Ridgefield.
“Jerry Marcus was truly one of America's funniest cartoonists,”  Busino said after Marcus died. “He had a genuine sense of humor, and his drawings and captions were superb.” 

Throughout his career,  Marcus also did work with advertising agencies, and his series of cartoons for American Airlines was considered a classic. 

He often appeared with fellow cartoonists in programs at schools and libraries in the area, and at VA hospitals. He made several trips to Europe and the Far East with other cartoonists, visiting veterans hospitals where they would draw caricatures of the hospitalized veterans and entertain them with comic routines.

Cartooning wasn’t his only “career.”  Marcus, who’d acted in high school, was proud of the fact that he had a bit part in “Exodus,” the 1960 Otto Preminger movie, as well as in other movies including “Loving” with George Segal and Eva Marie Saint. He also starred in a number of commercials, such as for Timex, Burger King and Kodak, and he had been a member of the Screen Actors Guild since 1970 when he did his first commercial.

“I think, had my life taken a different direction, I would have liked to get into movies,” he said in 1983. “And I think I would have done OK.”
Marcus died in July 2005. His former wife, WMNR radio broadcaster Delphine Marcus, had died just two months earlier.

The second Marcus cartoon to hang in the White House appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in 1961, just after the Kennedys had moved in and not long after “John-John” Kennedy was born. It showed two guards outside an otherwise darkened White House, with a single brightly lit window.

“It’s probably the 2 o’clock feeding,” one guard says.