BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
especially from Charles F. Batchelder, his assistant and friend, he was "in charge," and that fact he did not forget. He had a "comic page" to censor, a drove of nimble young artists to shepherd, news pictures sometimes to bother him, an engraving room to reckon with. He liked to have the department telephone on his desk, and to answer it himself. So he encountered a lot of details that he might easily have avoided.
"How do you do it?" he was often asked by people who did not see how he could produce his thoughtful-cartoons next door to an "art room."
He would only smile in reply, with the "what-does-it-matter" look he wore when asked about himself.
The fact was that he had a mind capable of utter absorption in the action of the moment. He could lay aside his drawing and forget it while he was consulted on some matter of the department, or to look at the sketches of a humble stranger, or to tell a mother what to do about her gifted son, aged eight. This done, he would resume his pen, and go to cross-hatching just where he left off. Elevated trains clattered past his window, and a multitude of other noises rose from the street. They could not detach his mind from the big idea of the day. And when the day was over and he had carried that big sheet of cardboard, the completed drawing, to the etchers, he could discard all the excitements and troubles of the last eight hours, and go home free for complete relaxation.
He carried with him from the office neither portfolios nor "atmosphere." He did not dress the artist part, nor try to look it. His work was his work. He never threw a halo around it, nor did he ever imply that because he did that sort of work, he was a being of a higher order. In connection with this absence of "pose" it is worth mentioning that Luther Bradley produced his cartoons without nearly as much academic preparation as they seemed to reveal. He read three weekly periodicals regularly, others desultorily, and he dipped into thoughtful books as they came out. But he did not try to know everything. His real library was the picturesque, laughable, dreadful book of life itself, as disclosed to him in the news of the day.
17
