By: E&P Staff One reason why Mike Luckovich
won the Reuben Award in May was his 2005 "Why?" editorial cartoon about the Iraq War. So "Why" was Luckovich presented with a statuette given to Chester Gould for his 1977 work on "Dick Tracy"?
R.C. Harvey has the answer in the latest issue of his "Rants & Raves" online cartooning magazine at RCHarvey.com.
The Reuben Award is given to the cartoonist of the year at the annual National Cartoonists Society convention. The NCS (which asked Harvey to keep the trophy-mishap story a secret until it could be explained in the organization's newsletter) had ordered the Reuben statuette as usual. But it didn't arrive in time at the Chicago convention locale.
According to Harvey, a desperate NCS decided to try borrowing a statuette from a past winner who lives or lived near Chicago. Gould (1900-1985) fit that bill. The late "Dick Tracy" creator's daughter, Jean O'Connell, happened to be at the Reuben weekend, and she gladly agreed to lend the NCS her father's statuette.
So, wrote Harvey, O'Connell's son and son-in-law were put in a limousine for a two-hour-round-trip ride to Geneva, Ill., to fetch the trophy. O'Connell instructed them to make sure they brought back Gould's 1977 rather than 1959 Reuben, because the earlier one was made of metal that tarnished more easily.
Harvey recalled that he congratulated Luckovich "on winning the Chester Gould Reuben."
The editorial cartoonist replied: "Oh, you heard?"
Luckovich, who also received the Pulitzer Prize this spring, is with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Creators Syndicate. "Dick Tracy" is now done by Pulitzer-winning editorial cartoonist Dick Locher of Tribune Media Services.
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