“Sam-I-Am”: The Passing of Cartoonist Sam Gross

Sam Gross could have followed in his father’s footsteps, earning a decent living working as a tax accountant. Not that there is anything wrong with being an accountant; my uncle Joe became a CPA, and every year I continue to send my tax information to his firm. For those who are good with numbers, being a tax accountant is a profession one can count on. In an oft-quoted quip penned by Benjamin Franklin in 1789, he said that “in this world, nothing is certain except death and taxes.” Well, a few days ago, the former came for Sam Gross.

Sam will not likely be remembered for his numerical wizardry by any of his tax clients, because he had the chutzpah to make a different choice, to pursue his dreams, and go in a very different direction. Sam decided to gamble on his art and sense of humor, and he succeeded in making a living doing what he loved: rendering witty and clever cartoons that made and continue to make people laugh. Many of his illustrations are just universally funny; others reflect a slightly off-beat sensibility.

I first had the opportunity to meet Sam in person while I was visiting some collectors in New York City. He invited me to come to his Upper East Side office where we sat surrounded by filing cabinets filled with more than 30,000 cleverly rendered cartoons produced over the course of his long and prolific life. Sam’s parents hailed from Eastern Europe and came to the United States about the same time that my own great-grandparents arrived from Italy. All of them had their names garbled and “simplified” by linguistically challenged immigration agents. I imagine their experiences were not so unlike those depicted by Charlie Chaplin in this silent classic, The Immigrant (1917):

Born in the Bronx at the nadir of the Great Depression, Sam grew up and spent his formative years living there. After graduating from DeWitt Clinton High School, he attended City College, starting out as a business major before shifting his focus to advertising. It was expected that Sam would become a certified public accountant like his father, but while he inherited his father’s work ethic and organizational skills, he longed to use those traits in more creative and artistic endeavors. He was also courageous enough to use his comic genius to ridicule neo-Nazis, often using adorable animals to heap scorn on their hateful swastika symbol.

Nearly twelve of these original cartoons are currently on display at The Wolfsonian museum in an installation that creates a dialogue between Sam’s contemporary critiques and some historical lampoons of Nazis from the 1930s and World War II era.

Even while working for his father during tax season, Sam spent much of the less-busy months drawing cartoons. He first started regularly drawing cartoons while serving overseas in the Army, rendering a series of weekly cartoons that were afterwards republished in book format as Cartoons for the GI. He later returned to Europe, earning a dozen or so francs for his work before moving back to the States in the early 1960s. Many of his cartoons demonstrate his breadth of knowledge of Western civilization, art, and culture, even when such details are subtly inserted in a cartoon with an anti-Nazi message.

Some of Sam’s work graced the pages of The New Yorker and Cosmopolitan; others were submitted to, and printed by, various satirical magazines catering to a male clientele, such as The Realist and National Lampoon. But regardless of whichever publication chose to print his cartoons, Sam claimed to have drawn his cartoons for his own amusement rather than designing them for a particular audience. Asked in 2011 by The Comics Journal interviewer, Richard Gehr, about his philosophy of cartooning, Sam simply stated that “The highest form of cartooning has no caption.” I can think of no better cartoon from the installation to close with than his iconic cartoon of a man sawing off a limb of a swastika to create Love.

The Wolfsonian Library is privileged to have received ten books of Sam’s collected cartoons and to be exhibiting nearly a dozen original illustrations in our library exhibit.

My condolences go out to Sam’s wife, Isabelle, and all of his family, friends, and fans. We will miss Sam’s pictorial wit and humor. My thanks to his family, his loved ones, and his executor, Pat Giles, for giving me permission to include a few of Sam’s cartoons in this post, which, more than my words, best capture his spirit and sense of humor. We are grateful to the family for also allowing the original works that Sam loaned us for our library installation, Tyrants and Terrorists: Satirists Bite Back, (originally scheduled to close on May 28), to remain on view as we extend the exhibition through August 27 in his memory.

~ by "The Chief" on May 19, 2023.