My father’s drawing board, tilted to its customary steep diagonal, stands across the room from where I write. Above it hang some of his paintings, sketches, and comic strips, along with work by other cartoonists and illustrators who were among his friends. The surface of the drawing board is five feet long and three feet high, and a polished declivity on the cross brace marks where my father rested his right foot as he sat and drew. Every square inch of the oaken face is covered with flicks and curls of paint or ink, creating an inadvertent pattern as intricate as a Pollock. That surface was the product of almost 60 years, from the late 1940s until my father’s death, in 2004.

And if you had a sort of cinematic omniscience, you could connect each daub of ink and stroke of color to a moment of life in a vanished world. I grew up in an unusual environment—not only the child of a cartoonist and illustrator but among a network of families where everyone’s father was a cartoonist or illustrator. The place was Fairfield County, Connecticut. In the peak years of the American Century, for reasons I’ll come to, it was where most of the country’s comic-strip artists, gag cartoonists, and magazine illustrators chose to make their home. The group must have numbered a hundred or more, and it constituted an all-embracing subculture. Its members sometimes referred to themselves as the Connecticut School, with the good-natured self-mockery that betrays an element of seriousness. In the conventional telling, the milieu of Wilton and Westport, Greenwich and Darien, was the natural habitat of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit—and I was certainly aware of the commuters who took the train into Manhattan every morning from my own hometown of Cos Cob. But, for me, those salarymen with their briefcases seemed like outlandish outliers.

To my seven siblings and me, and so many others we knew, “normal” was something else entirely. Normal was coming home from school and finding a father who had done nothing but draw pictures all day while watching Million Dollar Movie on TV. He might not have changed his rumpled clothes since rolling out of bed—and, yes, that could be a piece of rope holding up his trousers. He may have played a round of golf or enjoyed a long lunch with some of his other artist friends, so when you visited his studio after school you would perhaps have to wake him from a nap. Or he might be posing for himself in front of a Polaroid, plunger in hand to snap the picture from a distance; maybe wearing a dress and wig, experimenting with drapery and composition; maybe yelling after the electrician to please come back, it wasn’t what it seemed.

ARTISTS’ COLONY

Greenwich Avenue in Greenwich, Fairfield County, Connecticut, 1962. From The Greenwich Historical Society; Digital colorization by Lorna Clark.

Normal meant appreciating the difference between “plate” and “vellum” finishes on three-ply Bristol board—the one smooth as glass, the other slightly textured. It meant understanding that a Hunt No. 102 pen nib was good for ordinary lines but that a Gillott No. 170 was best for lettering. It meant thinking of “bigfoot” as an aesthetic category, not a biological one. It meant knowing that the cartoon starbursts that convey intoxication are called “squeans” and the wavy lines that convey aroma are called “waftarons.”

At some point in the mid-1960s, Mort Walker (the creator of “Beetle Bailey”) and Jerry Dumas (who with Walker produced “Sam’s Strip” and “Sam and Silo”) drew an aerial map of Fairfield County and wrote in the names of the cartoonists who lived there, quickly running out of room. Westport had a large cluster: Bud Sagendorf (“Popeye”), Leonard Starr (“On Stage,” “Little Orphan Annie”), Dick Wingert (“Hubert”), Stan Drake (“The Heart of Juliet Jones,” “Blondie”), Jack Tippit (“Amy”), John Prentice (“Rip Kirby”), and Mel Casson (“Mixed Singles/Boomer”). The great illustrator Bernie Fuchs was in Westport, too; imagine, my father would say, if Degas had worked for McCann Erickson and Sports Illustrated. Fuchs’s career was all the more remarkable because he had lost three fingers on his drawing hand in an accident when he was a teenager. Dick Hodgins (“Henry”), Whitney Darrow Jr. (a New Yorker mainstay), and Dik Browne (“Hi and Lois,” with Walker, and his own “Hägar the Horrible”) lived in Wilton. Stamford was home to Ernie Bushmiller, who drew “Nancy,” a feature so stripped down and elemental that academic theorists can’t let it alone. Dick Cavalli (“Winthrop”) and Noel Sickles (whose work included the original drawings for Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea as well as the comic strip “Scorchy Smith”) lived in New Canaan. So did Chuck Saxon. Saxon was the John Cheever of gag cartoonists, whose evocations of self-satisfied but oblivious suburban grandees yielded 92 covers and 725 cartoons for The New Yorker. Up in the Ridgefield area were the gag cartoonists Orlando Busino, Joe Farris, and Jerry Marcus (who created the syndicated strip “Trudy”). Jim Flora, another illustrator, lived in an enclave tethered to Rowayton. His edgy, angular confections—think of the album covers for any jazz artist in the 50s and early 60s—epitomized the era’s graphic sensibility of high-end hip. Also in Rowayton was Crockett Johnson (the comic strip “Barnaby” and the children’s classic Harold and the Purple Crayon). Greenwich was home to Mort Walker and Jerry Dumas, and also to Tony DiPreta (“Joe Palooka”), the political cartoonists Ranan Lurie and John Fischetti, and my father (“Big Ben Bolt,” “Prince Valiant”). This is just a sampling, and leaves scores of people out.