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Thursday, June 15, 2000
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-MACVJBIY
This was Mac Nelly's first drawing to appear in The Daily Tar Heel. It ran in the
October 27,1967 issue and promoted a men's soccer game that day.
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f WOW! HOW LONG
have vou been
WAITING?
Jim Shumaker: Inspi
This column was originally pub
lished in The Charlotte Observer
on Sept. 18, 1977.
Bv Jim Shumaker
This has been a crowded
week for me, being an
instant celebrity and all.
A publisher once told me, in
my newspaper days, “You
belong on the comic page
instead of the editorial page.” And that is where I have finally
landed, it seems, after all the years of striving, thinly disguised
as Purple Martin Shoemaker. (The publisher, incidentally, now
writes his own editorials, and I wish him well.)
I owe the instant celebrity to Jeff Mac Nelly, who, it turns
out, lacks proper respect for his elders. In our days together on
the old Chapel Hill Weekly, when he was doing the editorial
page cartoons and I was unwittingly creating the prototype for
P. Martin Shoemaker, I had taken Mac Nelly for a regular
enough young man, if a trifle loose-jointed. He was the only
one I’ve ever seen who appeared to be sprawling all over the
place while standing up straight.
I still have right much regard for him, even though he won
the Pulitzer Prize at the disgusting age of 24. He said at the
time that the Pulitzer judges had to be out of their minds and I
readily agreed. (This was not said out of envy or any sense of
injustice. Having been passed over for 30 years running, 1
know better than most how unstable the Pulitzer panel is.)
Anyway, Mac Nelly’s comic strip, entitled “Shoe,” began
WiUy.coß f Y
35 YEARS.
running last Monday in The Observer and i
papers. I had been given plenty of warning l
used to be a reporter for The Observer and
Editor of the Winston-Salem Journal. Jo’e sei
advance copies of the comic strip along.witf
you, Shu, it’s you.” I figured Joe had been w
and needed a rest.
Then, last Monday night, when I gut hon
around in the post office, there was a good f
the door stoop, clutching the comic page in
ed me to autograph the confounded thing. I
Mac Nelly, Pulitzer Prize Winner."
A former colleague telephoned to ask if I
tennis shoes that I always wore to work at th
wanted me to have them bronzed, for ciyinj
have the tennis shoes. I contributed them to
taking a tax deduction, and the Thrift Shop
Several stopped me on the street to ask if
Martin Shoemaker and I denied it hotly I h;
life used a trash can for a desk - orange era
no.
Then a graduate student at the University
Mac Nelly on network television, the Today i
identified me as the inspiration for P. Martin
her you couldn’t believe anything nowadays
in the newspaper.
To seal me up tight, an editorial writer for
Daily News who, I take it, was having a.terri
come up with something fit to print, said I w
Martin Shoemaker. I am about halfwaV thro
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