By: Dave Astor More than 10,000 people have sent letters to Bill Mauldin the past five months as he lay mostly mute in a Newport Beach, Calif., nursing facility.
The legendary editorial cartoonist also has received hundreds of visitors since Gordon Dillow, a columnist for
The Orange County Register in Santa Ana, Calif., wrote about Mauldin in a piece last summer (E&P Online, Aug. 6). But it was World War II veteran Jay Gruenfeld who got the ball rolling by telling Dillow about Mauldin, 81, who suffers from Alzheimer's disease.
Gruenfeld, 78, recalled being amazed six decades ago when he first saw Mauldin's Willie and Joe characters -- who embodied the weary average soldier. "I couldn't get over the fact that a guy could write so well at 22," he told
E&P in a phone interview from his home in Lompoc, Calif. "He hit the nail on the head. He was an infantryman who identified with the foot soldier and didn't glamorize war."
Mauldin won a Pulitzer Prize in 1945 and went on to a distinguished career as a syndicated cartoonist for the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the
Chicago Sun-Times.
Five years ago, Gruenfeld wrote a self-published book about his World War II experiences that he sent to Mauldin, but it was returned undelivered. Gruenfeld eventually managed to get in touch with one of Mauldin's sons, and learned how sick the cartoonist was. Then Gruenfeld called Dillow, "and things exploded."
Gruenfeld, who visited Mauldin three times last year, said the cartoonist sometimes responds to the words of World War II from fellow veterans of that conflict. "It definitely helps," he said.
Diana Schilling, administrator of the facility, said the cartoonist "rarely communicates verbally," but agreed that he's clearly buoyed by the visits from his admirers.
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