Judy Dixon, the Leader’s Hall of Fame cartoonist, proved that the pen is mightier than … just about anything.
Long-time Jefferson County newspaper editor Jack Lovelace was one of the first to lure Judy, then working as an advertising artist at the old Daily News-Democrat, from the ad department into the fray of the newsroom.
He recognized the power that Judy, who died last week at 95, could add to his editorials.
“For all the words I would write, the visual often did more to make the point to the readers,” he said.
I inherited the wonderful asset that was Judy in the late 1980s after Lovelace moved out of state. For most of the next 30 years, Judy and I were a tight team on the News-Democrat’s editorial page, and then the Leader’s. Lovelace was right-on in his assessment — frequently Judy could outpunch an 800-word column with a single image.
“I loved how she would laugh when an idea (for a cartoon) tickled her,” Lovelace said.
Yep. I can still hear it clearly.
Judy didn’t care who was being lampooned if the idea was sound and the treatment fair. County commissioners, bureaucrats, mayors, council members, county politicians of all stripes and police chiefs were fair game.
Art seemed to be a pre-ordained career for Judy – her father told her she presented her first recognizable drawing at age 2. She honed those skills at Washington University, from which she graduated with a fine arts degree in 1949.
She worked for a while doing fashion design for stores such as Famous-Barr, then settled into the role of wife and mom. She and her husband, Lee, raised five children in their Festus home, then Judy re-entered the workforce, first at Concordia Publications and then landing at the local newspaper in the early 1980s.
Her own political beliefs – and she was an unrepentant Democrat – were secondary to what needed to be said in her cartoons, which were almost always nonpartisan. That delightful cackle would end brainstorming sessions with her editors, signaling that the correct concept had been found and approved.
What Judy appreciated most – and reveled in – was a well-developed sense of the ridiculous. Her sweet spot was catching public officials either doing something really pompous and boastful, or incredibly dumb or incompetent.
Hundreds (thousands?) of cartoons later, it’s hard to pick favorites because they were uniformly excellent. That excellence was recognized in 2014 when the Missouri Press Association installed Judy as the first – and so far, only — cartoonist in its Hall of Fame.
When the Twin City flood levee project dragged on years past its projected completion date, mired in bureaucratic whatever, Judy drew a skeleton hunched over a drawing board at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the suspected source of the bottleneck.
A FEMA man poked his head into the skeleton’s office.
“Reggie, got that levee approval done yet?”
One of my favorites was a cartoon of Steve Huss, then the president of Comtrea, the local mental health agency, pulling the curtain on the stage of the old LaJade Theater in top hat and tails. Huss, who we believed to be a frustrated song-and-dance man, had engineered the purchase of the old Festus theater in 2003 with some imaginative justification as to how it could be used to promote mental health. The agency sold the building a few years later.
I tell that story on Huss because he liked that cartoon almost as much as I did – he had a framed copy on his office wall.
He wasn’t the only one. Ron Scaggs, long-ago Festus Police chief who kept a close eye on local politics, summed it up well.
“You really aren’t in Jefferson County politics,” he said, “until you’ve been in a Dixon cartoon.”
Being immortalized in pen and ink by a five-foot tall great-grandma meant that person had arrived.
In the early days of the Leader, we had a tiny staff, which meant constantly pushed deadlines, if not severely mistreated deadlines.
We went to press on Tuesday afternoons, and sometimes I would get a demanding phone call at 10 or 11 a.m.
“And what do you have for me today?” Judy would ask, meaning, “What am I illustrating?”
“Call you back in five minutes,” I’d say, meaning, “I have no clue.”
A column idea would form, I’d call her, describe the concept and hope. An hour later, a brilliant cartoon would come through the door and we’d averted disaster for another week.
Judy was a great lady, full of fire and fun and vinegar and enthusiasm. She worked well past her 90th birthday, embarrassing me, who wimped out at 67. It was like retiring before your mom did.
Her professional legacy is that of a classic artist: a character – feisty, independent, somewhat eccentric, illustrating her world honestly as she saw it. There were no sacred cows, no pompous windbags spared from her pointy pen.
Not many small-town newspapers have cartoonists anymore. Even fewer have an enormous talent like Judy Dixon plopped in their laps. Her co-workers – and especially Jefferson County readers – shared for decades in that amazing good fortune.
