The Summer of Kenosha Tribune

For today's wallow in history, let me take you back forty Augusts ago, when I was editorial cartoonist for a little start-up newspaper, the Kenosha Tribune. The Tribune was edited by Ken Meyer, my editor at the University of Wisconsin at Parkside Ranger in the 1981-82 school year. Initially offered for sale for 25 cents, by August, the paper was free.

in Kenosha Tribune, August 5, 1982

Most of my initial cartoons for the Tribune dealt with national topics, but by August, I was making a concentrated effort to focus on state and local issues. Thus the above cartoon concerned the problem of drunk driving, exacerbated by Wisconsin having, at the time, a lower legal drinking age than just over the state line in Illinois.

in Kenosha Tribune, August 19, 1982

Another cross-border issue was Commonwealth Edison's nuclear power plant in Zion, Illinois, and concern that communication to Wisconsin communities in the event of an accident at the plant was lacking. This was three years after the meltdown at Three Mile Island, and four years before that at Chernobyl, Ukraine.

A less severe accident at the Zion plant led to its being retired in 1998. A year earlier, someone incorrectly inserted and then removed some control rods in a reactor while it was shut down; ComEd ultimately decided that the reactor was no longer economically feasible, and it has been inactive ever since. It is scheduled for complete closure in December, 2026.

For the above cartoon, I sat outside the Kenosha Municipal Building in the heat of summer to sketch the place. Kenosha city government just moved out of the building this year.

for Madison Independent, July, 1982

I'm not sure whether this cartoon belongs in this blog post. For one thing, it's dated in July. For another, I'm having difficulty remembering what the Madison Independent was, and how I came to draw one and only one cartoon for it. I haven't found any record of the Independent on line, either.

But I vaguely recall that the Tribune's publisher, Al Holzman, had dreams of establishing a publishing empire in the area. Whether he had hoped to entice the management of Madison Independent into a deal with cartoons as part of the package, or whether the newspaper ever existed in the first place, I have no idea — except that I do remember that I mimicked the font of its flag for the credit line next to my signature.

for Kenosha Tribune, July/Aug. 1982

In addition to editorial cartooning, I drew illustrations for a number of news and feature stories, such as the above one for a article about drunk driving...

in Kenosha Tribune, July 8, 1982

...this one for a front-page article about competition for the cable TV monopoly in Kenosha...

in Kenosha Tribune, August 19, 1982

... and this one to accompany Ken's obituary for Henry Fonda. The editorial board also asked me to draw sketches of the regular columnists, on account of one who didn't photograph well; we were pleased with the resulting portraits. And I wrote a way-too-long-even-after-brutal-editing feature article about GenCon XV. (It's just as well that I wrote it under a pseudonym.)

Meanwhile, all was not running smoothly at the Trib. The publisher, owner of 51% of the paper, was at odds with the other seven members of the board, who owned equal shares of the remaining 49%. Somewhere along the line, Holzman's name was removed from the masthead, but he remained in control as majority owner.

One thing the seven other members of the board were able to do without Holzman's approval was to secure a lease on a second-story office suite in downtown Kenosha. They moved necessary equipment out of the shabby little storefront on 43rd Street, and didn't give the publisher keys to the new office.

Needless to say, this didn't sit well with Mr. Holzman. Lawsuits and injunctions were threatened and filed, advertisers withdrew their support, and the first issue published out of the Haugaard-Isermann building would be the Tribune's last.

in Kenosha Tribune, August 26, 1982

Good thing the economy was picking up. This was my editorial cartoon in that final issue, mocking one of the Republican candidates for Wisconsin's Governor — Wisconsin's fall primary being held in September in those days.

To wrap this all up, I have gotten back in touch with a few Tribune people through Facebook as we've gone our separate ways — and run into one or two around town whose ways have brought them back or didn't take them very far. Ken drowned in a swimming accident in Marble Falls, Texas in 1985. Al Holzman never became the Charles Foster Kane of the Midwest; I have no clue what ultimately became of him.

And Lowell Jackson didn't get the GOP gubernatorial nomination, but did serve as Transportation Secretary in Tony Earl's administration.