Karl Gude

I saw a look of fear in my students eyes. I was impressing them with a cartoonish, but brawny display of my speedy new Nikes. I sprinted in place for a couple of fierce seconds pumping my knees high, way up to my chin, and fast, until they were a blur of bony speed. Then I yelled, “GO!” and took off running out of the classroom like the Nutty Professor, tripped over a chair and crashed to the floor. Quick as a fat cat I picked myself up and flew out of the computer lab down the long corridor, howling with Animal House passion, in the complete wrong direction.

My students, not yet of an age where making a complete ass of yourself no longer matters, followed me by trickling out of the classroom coolly, eyes rolling at my clumsy antics, but with the same goal as mine: to find their treasure first.

We were playing Map Poker, a map learning game Kevin Hand over at Newsweek and I invented where my students hide a poker hand in a baggie somewhere on campus and then draw wordless treasure maps to find it using visual clues. The students then trade maps and the race is on. Prize to the first one back: a pair of genuine Halloween eyeglasses with grotesque holographic blinking eyeballs in the lenses.

(Some of my students)

I didn’t win, but the sprint I broke into toward my X-marks-the-spot caused my smoke-clogged lungs to practically burst and their wheezing to hit Defcon-5. Though I no longer smoke, in the good old 70s and 80s I smoked tons at my drawing table at UPI and then at the New York Daily News, right near a gross, perpetually coughing old artist who breathed with the aid of an oxygen tank because of his emphysema. Hack. (There was another artist there (a cartoonist, of course) who had completely wallpapered his drawing table area with sultry photos of women and as the new, kid-boss of the department, I got to order Playboyman to remove the pinup gallery, a tradition of his, I was told, that went back 30 years. Karl, the party-pooper.)

And, speaking of “poop…”

A thorough search of the scene where the treasure should have been (around a garbage can) resulted in finding a baggie all right, only this one contained doggie doos, which got me a big teasing from my class. Alas, someone had pillaged the real treasure. In the end, all but two of us found the prize, and the winning poker hand was three-of-a-kind.

After these two exhausting hours of punishing teaching (he said cynically) I retired to the cozy confines of my womb-like office in the journalism school at Michigan State to type up my class notes (so that I wouldn’t have to reinvent the class all over again next semester), and to work on other projects.

And…
……so…
……the…
…….hours…
……….ticked…
………………b…y………………………………..

Complete solitude.

Later I poked my head out of my office in search of some sign of life.

“Hello …?”

Nothing.

Then I spotted Cheryl Pell, a favorite hall neighbor and colleague.

(Cheryl and I, shot
by Darcy Greene)

“Hi Cheryl!”
“Hey Karl, what’s cookin?”
“Not much…”
“Are you still planning to speak at the MIPA (Michigan Interscholastic Press Association) conference?”
“Oh yes…definitely!”
“That’s great!”
“Okay, then, well, see ya.”
“Bye”

That was my big social event of the afternoon. I went back into office hibernation. No one knew that I was there. No one ever pounded on my door for some urgent request. I went home in time for an early dinner with my family.

I wasn’t in Kansas anymore.

Or at Newsweek for that matter. I hardly recognize myself.

There was no hiding at Newsweek: the offices had glass walls. I was, as everyone else in news is, pounded by a constant barrage of interruptions, often at the busiest possible times: designers needed art direction, editors needed ideas and problems needed solving, all while I’d be trying to get my own graphics done on a tight deadline. It often felt like I was working with a category-5 hurricane blowing through my department (fortunately, the eye would occasionally pass over and there would be a brief, momentary calm).

(A Newsweek team graphic
in progress)

There were times when I’d go home on the weekend feeling so battered, traumatized and so thoroughly drained of all that was Karl that I’d think I couldn’t do this anymore.

Enter: Repressed Memory Syndrome …

Mercifully, some bizarre form of amnesia would set in and by the beginning of the following week I’d be back at work, high-fiving everyone and sitting eagerly forward Colbert-like in my chair at the news meeting listening to what the plan was, happy to do it all over again.

(The news meeting)

The Cover department next to Graphics was wallpapered with a constantly growing mosaic of their good work forming a timeline of my decade at the magazine, about 500 covers, an overwhelming number. Sometimes, when I’d look at them individually, I couldn’t remember what graphics were in each issue, even the recent ones, despite the fact that they had been a friggin crisis to produce at the time.

I figured that my brain was too full and couldn’t hold anymore, but it didn’t matter because they were ancient history, forgotten relics. News marches forward.

I think I was exactly the right kind of person for Newsweek, and journalism in general. i really enjoy news and information and certainly art and design. My biggest motivator, though, is that I get bored easily, too easily, and have to be constantly doing things, looking for a thrill. After we bought a house in Connecticut, an hour train ride north of New York City where Newsweek is based (City: Gude. Suburbs: not so Gude…), my wife delighted in the forced R&R that had been suddenly built into my life (she’s certain of an impending heart attack). What trouble could Karl get into on a train?

(Still for sale!)

Well, I sure didn’t relax. During my years trapped in that boxy prison car I drew hundreds of drawings of the people around me (I submitted them to the New York Times and they ran a full page of them!), I illustrated two successful children’s books and wrote over 18 journals (so that my kids would know how neurotic their dad was in case my wife was correct about certain health issues). One day the police got on the train at Stamford to remove me because I was going at it (verbally) with a cell phone guy. (In the end, he was the one they had a problem with, not me. Whew!) Here’s some of that work for the curious:

(Composite of drawings of people
who sat in front of me on the train)

(Old man)

(Dozer)

So much for R&R. And this was all before getting to work.

A colleague of mine, Christoph Blumrich, who left Newsweek Graphics a few years ago after he, like many others there, had accepted an early retirement offer, was invited back recently to help with their unpredictable workload while someone was out on vacation. Back in the 80s, when I was smoking all those cigarettes at UPI, Christoph held rock star status for me (as did his colleague, Ib Ohlsson, who influenced the way I covered breaking news after I saw his excellent diagram of the raid on Entebbe). Christoph was at Newsweek taking on Nigel Holmes, who was changing history over at Time with his fun graphics and pissing off academia. When Christoph offered a chart-making class (hand drawn in those days with French curves and rapidographs, a real craft) at a school in Manhattan, I signed up right away. Alas, because of deadlines, I only made it to a few classes, but a friendship was sealed.

(Some old UPI charts)

Christoph and I are both painters, and I asked him this week how his painting was coming along. We had traveled to Tuscany, Italy, two years ago, rooming in a monastery and painting two canvases a day for a week, a world away from the addictive mayhem at Newsweek.

(Painting in Tuscany with Christoph)

He wrote:

“There is an amazing professionalism, concentration, devotion, and patience all members of the graphics department bring to the job after their few days off. Every detail is researched, re-researched, worried over and filed until all is not only correct, but also beautiful—words as well as visuals. I was amazed to see that again. These professionals LIVE their jobs to the point of self-destruction. It amazed me to have been part of this.

(Recent graphics by Newsweek researcher
Marc Bain and Kevin Hand)

“At the end of my first week back at Newsweek I was wondering how I survived 22 years like that. One gets into a kind-of numb state, surrendering time, talent, and life to someone else’s cause. Sunday is the day to get your balance back—hopefully. Monday one thinks of starting something (a painting…), but raking leaves, fixing a door or vacuuming gets in the way; and on Tuesday one is too aware that tomorrow it all starts over again. You wonder where the years have gone.”

Christoph was also perfect for the job: creative, intelligent and definitely looking for something to do.

Newsweek is a homerun industry, where each week you and everyone else on the team have to hit one out of the ballpark, nothing less, and that takes tremendous focus. It’s stressful, but it also produces wicked highs, and you can’t wait to get the bat back in your hands.

(Happy in my Newsweek office)

Unfortunately, you reach a point (age) where you begin to think that the physical and mental tolls of the industry are getting to be a bit pricey. You begin to burn out, to lose a little bit of heart, which is suicide for journalists playing in the big leagues. As each week passes you step up to the plate to prove to yourself, and others, that you’re still in the game, since no one remembers, or really cares, what you did last week, a sort of Groundhog Day frustration.

But that’s all gone away and, after 27 fantastic years in news, this feels right for me now.

I sit in my office at Michigan State University’s School of Journalism and my time is my own. I’m expected to show up for class, teach a wildly interesting and unique program, have time for students who need me, and then, beyond those few hours a week, just do my thing: I grade student work, refine curriculum, serve on committees (undergraduate affairs, Remote Sensing & GIS Research, others…), lecture at conferences and have plans for my own, speak in other professor’s classes, learn new software, design (with Darcy Greene) brochures for the J-school (new stuff for me, particularly using InDesign, which I like), and I occasionally submit cartoons to the New York Times and the New Yorker that get rejected. (I have to figure out how Steve Duenes over at the NY Times gets in the New Yorker so much! Could…he…be….funnier? Arrrgh.)

(A rejected submission)

msu-school-of-journalism-brochure.pdf
(Pass it around!)

I’m still busy, but not like before. Now I’m in control of my own cause, which is to teach young, eager and creative people what I know. I decide what I do, how and where I do it and, mostly, when. I haven’t missed one of my son’s soccer games all season (okay, well, a couple).

Overall, I’ve been dealt a pretty good hand, I think.

(Heading to class. Don’t ask…)

————————————————————–

(P.S.: 25 more soldiers are dead since my last posting)