Percy?” to which he answers, “No, –I’m playing checkers on the bosom of grandpa’s old blue shirt.” Goldberg yearned to move to New York, which he called, “the front row,” so he took a train across the country, landing a job at The New York Evening Mail, where he created comic strips and single-frame cartoons like "Boob McNutt," "Lala Palooza," “Mike and Ike-They Look Alike” and "Foolish Questions," all of which would become nationally syndicated.Ī single-panel cartoon, “Foolish Questions” showcased Goldberg’s humor (which, to be fair, hasn’t really held up over the decades) with his subjects giving sarcastic answers to obvious questions such as: “Are you cold?” “No, you musk ox – I’m shivering because I’m thinking how expensive prunes are in Egypt.” In another comic, a woman asks a man standing on a frozen lake with on blades on his feet, “Skating. After graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, with a degree in mining engineering, Goldberg worked for a time for San Francisco City Engineer’s Office, Water and Sewers Department, but he disliked the job so much and was so determined to draw for a living that he took a job as a sports cartoonist at the San Francisco Chronicle for less then a third of the salary his engineering job paid. At 12, he won first prize at his school for a drawing called, The Old Violinist it’s on view at the exhibit. “The Sunday newspaper was one of the main sources of entertainment and culture and he had four or five strips that appeared in cities and towns all over the country.Īs a kid, Goldberg loved to draw, but he never took formal lessons, except for some with a professional sign painter – something he was proud of later in life. “In the teens and early 20s, before radio and TV, cartoonists were rock stars,” he says. Renny Pritikin, a curator at the museum, says Goldberg’s influence on American culture is hard to overstate. Goldberg’s drawings, sketches, and cartoons, as well photographs, films, letters, and memorabilia from his life, is exhibited in The Art of Rube Goldberg, open now at San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum, the first retrospective of the artist’s work since a show 1970 at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of History and Technology (today known as the American History Museum). As early as 1931, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary defined “Rube Goldberg” as “accomplishing by complex means what seemingly could be done simply.” Goldberg, a San Francisco native who studied engineering at University of California, Berkeley, is, according to his estate, the only person whose name is used as an adjective in the dictionary. Goldberg approached them as a tongue-in-cheek critique of the havoc wrought by industrialization and put forward the idea that technology, intended to simplify people’s lives could have the opposite effect. In 1922, Goldberg was so sought after that a newspaper syndicate paid him $200,000 for his comic strips – the equivalent of around $2.3 million today, and in the ’40s and ‘50s, he was famous enough to endorse products like cough drops, socks and Lucky Strike cigarettes (although he personally only smoked cigars.)īut today his name is an eponym for his famed “invention drawings,” designs of overly complicated machines: using things like pulleys, levers, birds, and rockets to fix simple problems like fishing an olive out of a tall jar, or remembering to mail a letter to your wife. During his 72-year career, cartoonist Rube Goldberg produced more than 50,000 drawings and thousands of comic strips.
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