Mauldin, Bill, 1921-2003.

WWII's greatest cartoonist
Twice Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist
William Henry Mauldin
 

Bill Mauldin's Willie & Joe cartoons
His cartoons often featured two infantrymen called Willie and Joe.

Star Spangled Banter (Library of Congress)

"Just give me the aspirin. I already got a Purple Heart."
Bill Mauldin, Stars and Stripes (1944)

"When we realize finally that we aren’t God’s given children, we’ll understand satire. Humor is really laughing off a hurt, grinning at misery." -- Bill Mauldin
Time 21 Jul 61

+++++++++++++++++++++

Obituares:

from NYTimes
Bill Mauldin, Cartoonist Who Showed World War II Through G.I. Eyes, Dies at 81
By RICHARD SEVERO

Bill Mauldin, the Army sergeant who created Willie and Joe, the cartoon characters who became enduring symbols of the grimy, irrepressible American infantrymen who triumphed over the German army and prevailed over their own rear-echelon officers in World War II, died yesterday in Newport Beach, Calif. He was 81.

The cause was pneumonia, his family said. Mr. Mauldin had been suffering from Alzheimer's disease.

After Willie and Joe won the war, Mr. Mauldin became a syndicated newspaper cartoonist and went on for more than 50 years to caricature bigots, superpatriots, doctrinaire liberals and conservatives and pompous souls in whatever form they appeared. He won the Pulitzer Prize twice, once in 1944 for his World War II work, again in 1959 for his commentary on Soviet treatment of Boris Pasternak.

Mr. Mauldin gave up regular cartooning assignments in the early 1990's, complaining that arthritis made drawing too difficult.

He frequently lamented that editorial cartoonists were too soft and that more of them needed to be "stirrer-uppers." Mr. Mauldin worked full time at being a stirrer-upper, and while he was on duty nobody was safe from his editorial brush. During the war, he excoriated self-important generals, grassy green "90-day wonders," insensitive drill sergeants, palate-dulled mess sergeants, glamour-dripping Air Force pilots in leather jackets, and cafe owners in liberated countries who rewarded the thirsty G.I.'s who had freed them by charging them double for brandy. He was nothing short of beloved by his fellow enlisted men.

But no Mauldin characters were more memorable than Willie and Joe, the unshaven, listless, dull-eyed, cynical dogfaces who spent the war fighting the Germans, trying to keep dry and warm and flirting with insubordination. They were the stars of "Up Front," Mr. Mauldin's wartime best seller, and their exploits were reported regularly in various service publications, including Stars and Stripes and the 45th Division News. Their likenesses were found in pup tents and bivouacs from Brittany to Berlin, tacked up next to the inevitable glossies of those other G.I. favorites, Betty Grable and Dorothy Lamour. Mr. Mauldin began his sojourn with the 45th, which arrived in North Africa and fought into Italy, but he sampled many divisions and places as his fame grew.

Willie and Joe were the guys who always got sentry duty when it rained or snowed and shrapnel in their backsides whenever they left their foxholes. It was they who contended with lice and fleas, complained constantly about the K rations they were supposed to eat, slept in rat-infested barns, never seemed to find the soap when they had the rare opportunity to bathe, and suffered the incessant, grinding, morale-destroying boredom that only the infantry soldier knows.

The only thing that could never be questioned about Willie and Joe was their determination to survive and win. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme Allied commander, looked forward to their adventures, and Gen. Mark Clark so appreciated them that he saw to it that Mr. Mauldin got a specially equipped Jeep in Italy so that he could go where he wanted and draw what he wished. Ernie Pyle, one of the G.I.'s favorite correspondents, termed Mr. Mauldin the best cartoonist of the war because he drew pictures of the men who were "doing the dying," even though nobody could ever kill Willie and Joe.

Gen. George S. Patton was one of a small minority who had no use for them. He liked his heroes cleanshaven and obedient, and he was uneasy that the men who served under him revered the likes of such unorthodoxy. Asked toward the end of the war to comment on Sergeant Mauldin's cartoons, General Patton replied, "I've seen only two of them, and I thought they were lousy."

Mr. Mauldin's representations have endured in unforgettable images and words:

"Just gimme a coupla aspirin. I already got a Purple Heart," says a weary Joe to a corpsman seated at a table containing medicine and medals.

"He's right Joe," says Willie after a superior admonishes them for the slovenly way they look. "When we ain't fightin' we should ack like sojers."

"Must be a tough objective," says Willie to Joe as they huddle on the side of a road, weapons ready. "Th' old man says we're gonna have th' honor of liberatin' it."

Joe was created first by Mr. Mauldin, well before Pearl Harbor. Joe was never an angel, but at least he was a cleanshaven, well-scrubbed young man, and he appeared in various Army publications, especially the 45th Division News. After Dec. 7, 1941, he met Willie, and the two went through the Italian campaign together, becoming disreputable in their personal habits.

During training Joe was a "Choctaw Indian with a hooked nose, and Willie was his rednecked straight man," Mr. Mauldin once recalled. "As they matured overseas during the stresses of shot, shell and K rations, and grew whiskers because shaving water was scarce in mountain foxholes, for some reason Joe seemed to become more of a Willie and Willie more of a Joe."

Willie and Joe and their creator made the cover of Time magazine in 1945 — the year after Mr. Mauldin won his first Pulitzer — and he came home from the war a celebrity. He had made a lot of money but wasn't very happy. "I never quite could shake off the guilt feeling that I had made something good out of the war," he said.

After the war, Mr. Mauldin seemed lost for a time. He covered the Korean War briefly for Collier's but was not entirely pleased with his work. He resuscitated Joe, made him a war correspondent and had him writing letters to the stateside Willie. In 1958 he visited Dan Fitzpatrick, editorial cartoonist for The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, who disclosed that he was planning to retire. Mr. Mauldin applied for the job, got it and won a second Pulitzer Prize in 1959 for a cartoon on the plight of the Russian author Boris Pasternak. The cartoon showed two prisoners in Siberia, one of whom said to the other: "I won the Nobel Prize for Literature. What was your crime?"

Mr. Mauldin remained with The Post-Dispatch until 1962, when he joined The Chicago Sun-Times. He seemed to regain his old form and was regarded as one of the most influential cartoonists of his day.

"If I see a stuffed shirt, I want to punch it," Mr. Mauldin once said. "If it's big, hit it. You can't go far wrong."

From his point of view, too many newspaper artists tended to "regard editorial cartooning as a trade instead of a profession."

"They try not to be too offensive," he said. "The hell with that."

Besides segregationists, redbaiters and dictators, Mr. Mauldin used his pen to strike at the Ku Klux Klan and veterans' organizations that he thought were too far to the right. He later said he thought he had gone too far in his denunciations and "became a bore." Many newspapers agreed and began to drop his syndicated cartoons.

He became an advocate for veterans and joined the American Veterans Committee, which saw itself as an alternative to more traditional organizations like the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars. He served two terms as its president in the 1950's.

Mr. Mauldin did not confine his activities to drawing. His postwar book "Back Home" was as much a job of writing as it was drawing, and it received good reviews on both counts. He also appeared in two movies, both made in 1951. One was John Huston's "Red Badge of Courage," with Audie Murphy, the most decorated hero of the war. Mr. Mauldin received good reviews, but the movie failed at the box office. The other was "Teresa," directed by Fred Zinnemann.

In the middle 1950's he moved to Rockland County in New York, and in 1956 he ran unsuccessfully for Congress against the incumbent in the 28th District, a conservative Republican named Katharine St. George. Mr. Mauldin, a Democrat, thought of himself as the left-of-center candidate.

"Up Front" was republished in a 50th anniversary edition in 1995. Among Mr. Mauldin's other books were "A Sort of a Saga," 1949; "Bill Mauldin's Army," 1951; "Bill Mauldin in Korea," 1953; "What's Got Your Back Up," 1961; "I've Decided I Want My Seat Back," 1965; and "The Brass Ring," 1972. He also illustrated many articles for Life magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, Sports Illustrated and other publications.

Mr. Mauldin married Norma Jean Humphries in 1942. They were divorced in 1946. The following year he married Natalie Sarah Evans, who died in a car accident. In 1972 he married Christine Lund. His survivors also include his seven sons; a daughter died in 2001, The Associated Press reported.

William Henry Mauldin was born Oct. 29, 1921, in Mountain Park, N.M., one of two sons born to Sidney Albert Mauldin, a handyman, and Edith Katrina Bemis Mauldin. As a child, he suffered from rickets, a disease caused by a deficiency of vitamin D, and was unable to engage in strenuous activity. His head seemed too big for his spindly body. When he was 8 he heard one of his father's friends say, "If that was my son, I'd drown him."

Mr. Mauldin never forgot the insult and turned all his energy to teaching himself how to draw. His family moved to Phoenix, and while he was still in high school there he enrolled in a correspondence cartoon school.

He left high school without getting a diploma, moved to Chicago and continued his studies at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. His maternal grandmother gave him the $300 tuition fee.

He moved back to Phoenix and began to sell his drawings. Some of the first were published by Arizona Highways magazine. In 1940 Mr. Mauldin also created cartoons for both sides in the Texas gubernatorial campaign. He later said he joined the Arizona National Guard to avoid the Texas politicians, who discovered he was working both sides of the fence. The Guard required no physical examination — Mr. Mauldin doubted he could ever pass one — and he was accepted. When the Arizona Guard was federalized in 1940, Mr. Mauldin found himself in the Army.

He scored more than 140 on his Army I.Q. test and later said that once the Army became aware of this, it did with him what it tended to do with all bright people who become enlisted men: it gave him K.P. for four months.

He managed to get a transfer to Oklahoma's 45th Division so that he could draw cartoons for the 45th Division News, first as a volunteer, later as a member of the staff.

He had two war experiences after Korea. One came in 1965 when he visited his son, Bruce, a serviceman stationed in Vietnam. Mr. Mauldin wrote about an attack on Pleiku. He also visited troops in Saudi Arabia during the Persian Gulf war in 1991, toward the end of his career. He did not approve of the war, and his cartoons were especially hard on President George Bush. He made no further use of Willie and Joe.

In the last year, as Mr. Mauldin's health and memory declined in a nursing home in Orange County, Calif., veterans of World War II were alerted to his plight by an old soldier named Jay Gruenfeld, who had fought in the Philippines. After visiting Mr. Mauldin, Mr. Gruenfeld wrote to veterans' groups and newspaper columnists, urging them to rally other veterans to write their good wishes to Mr. Mauldin.

Thousands of letters arrived, many with sentiments that boiled down to the brief salutation in one message:

"From one old dogface to another. Thanks for the memories."

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

from Los Angeles Times

Posted on Thu, Jan. 23, 2003
 
Bill Mauldin, 81, WWII cartoonist
By Mike Anton
Los Angeles Times

Bill Mauldin, 81, the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist whose characters - two downtrodden GIs, Willie and Joe - spoke to a generation of soldiers who fought in World War II, died of respiratory failure yesterday at a nursing home in Newport Beach, Calif. He had lived there since 2001 while battling Alzheimer's disease.

A self-described "hillbilly from New Mexico," Mr. Mauldin rose from small-town obscurity to cult hero as a baby-faced Army sergeant working in Europe for the armed-forces newspaper Stars & Stripes.

His darkly funny and irreverent cartoons captured the mood of a changing military made up of citizen soldiers who questioned the leadership skills of their officers even as they battled the enemy. Mr. Mauldin went on to become one of the best-known, best-loved newspaper cartoonists in America.

His Willie and Joe, infantrymen who survived on a diet of ironic humor, were dirty and unshaven, slogging through mud and snow and sleeping in foxholes filled with water. They dodged the enemy's bullets as well as the poor morale brought on by incompetent officers.

"Beautiful view," says one officer to another while gazing at the French Alps in a Mauldin cartoon. "Is there one for the enlisted men?"

Mr. Mauldin's embrace of the average "dogface" on the front lines earned him the undying love of soldiers. For decades, veterans sought him out to thank him for helping them get through the war. In the nursing home, he was inundated with hundreds of visitors and thousands of cards and letters.

"I don't use this word lightly, but he was a genius," said Andy Rooney, the 60 Minutes commentator who was a reporter for Stars & Stripes during the war. "He was sharp, bitter and funny all at the same time."

Despite becoming wealthy and famous, Mr. Mauldin never abandoned his shy country sensibility. He went on to write and illustrate more than a dozen books and become one of the 20th century's most influential editorial cartoonists, sticking up for the little guy and skewering the powerful.

"Dad's philosophy in his work was always, 'If it's big, hit it,' " said his son Nat Mauldin.

Mr. Mauldin's childhood was marked by bickering parents and his family's scramble for cash. He was a rebellious youngster but a voracious reader, which his mother encouraged.

At 13, he saw an ad for a correspondence course in cartooning in Popular Mechanics magazine that claimed the profession could earn one as much as $100,000 a year. Worried that his parents' crumbling marriage could leave him and his older brother, Sidney, to fend for themselves, he borrowed the $20 tuition from his grandmother and enrolled.

In 1940, at age 18, he enlisted in the National Guard. Within days, his unit was federalized, and he was suddenly in the Army. While training for the infantry in Oklahoma, he got a job drawing cartoons for the 45th Division's newspaper. In 1943, he was shipped off to Italy and transferred to Stars & Stripes - where Willie and Joe began to take shape.

In 1945, at 23, he won his first Pulitzer for cartoons done during the war. His work was syndicated in more than 300 newspapers. His book Up Front, a collection of cartoons with an essay about war, was a best-seller.

In 1950, he went to Hollywood and worked briefly both behind and in front of the camera, including a role in The Red Badge of Courage. In 1956, he ran unsuccessfully for Congress.

In 1958, Mr. Mauldin went back to editorial cartooning full time at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. There, he won his second Pulitzer for a drawing on the Soviet crackdown on author Boris Pasternak. "I won the Nobel Prize for literature," one Siberian prisoner tells another in the caption. "What was your crime?"

In 1962, he moved to the Chicago Sun-Times, where he got a lucrative syndication deal. He retired in 1991.

It was in Chicago that Mr. Mauldin drew what many consider his most memorable cartoon: Abraham Lincoln, as depicted in the Lincoln Memorial, head in hands and weeping on the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

Mr. Mauldin was married three times and divorced twice; his second wife died in a car crash. He is survived by seven of his eight children; 13 grandchildren; three great-grandchildren; and his brother.
 

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 

from http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/944/94428

Bill Mauldin
Author: Dennis Morehouse
Published on: August 16, 2002
 
Bill Mauldin is a national treasure. Retired for the past 10 years, Mauldin made his living as a cartoonist, which is kind of like saying that Shakespeare made his living as a writer.
Mauldin began his studies towards a career in cartooning when he completed high school in 1939. The formal studies were cut short when the 45th Infantry Division of the National Guard was mobilized for training prior to the entry of the United States into WW II. Bill had joined the National Guard a couple of years earlier, while still in high school, like many of his friends. (At that time, the National Guard provided a ‘fresh set of clothes', and a couple of meals every month, important considerations at the end of the Depression.)

In the Fall of 1940, because of the war in Europe, the National Guard was mobilized for one year of training. Bill Mauldin went with his unit, the 45th Infantry Division, as an infantyryman.

During the year of training Bill began drawing his most famous characters, Willie and Joe. They were a couple of nondescript infantrymen who were going through the same types of training that Bill and his friends were undergoing. The same frustrations, the same dreariness, the same hopes and fears. Bill didn't have to try to ‘get into the head' of the common soldier, because he WAS one. His cartoons exposed the daily lives of America's young men preparing for war.

Not too many people saw his drawings initially, though. He was drawing them for himself and his friends until he was noticed by the Divisional newspaper. Though he became a cartoonist for the paper. It was still some time before he was noticed outside of the Division.

The 45th Division arrived in North Africa as part of Operation ‘Torch' in 1942. His work was finally noticed outside the Division and he was assigned to the staff of the Stars and Stripes. Newspaper.

Mauldin's characters changed and matured as they followed the Allies through North Africa, into Sicily and North into Italy. Though Mauldin still spent quite a bit of time with the 45th, as time went on he expanded his horizons to include other Divisions, and, indeed, other branches than the Infantry. But his focus remained on the fighting man and those soldiers who were in immediate support of them.

Willie and Joe became the voice of the common soldier. They demonstrated the resolve and the courage of the American fighting man, and showed the conditions that they lived and fought in, while maintaining their sense of humor in the face of tragedy. Though they are now over sixty years old, Willie and Joe continue to be relevant. Anyone familiar with combat arms will recognize their travails, identify with them and gain encouragement from their example.

Before the war ended, Bill had won a Pulitzer prize for his depictions of the soldiers he worked with. After the war, he continued as an editorial cartoonist at several newspapers, winning one more Pulitzer along the way.

Mauldin is now eighty years old. He lives in a nursing home in Orange County, California and is approaching the end of his life. An article in the Chicago Tribune, http://www.chicagotribune.com/search/chi... explains his current situation and what help is being asked for him.

For those who are not familiar with Bill Mauldin or his work, a couple of websites are available to get you started. http://darbysrangers.tripod.com/id36.htm has a synopsis of Mauldin's career. www.45thdivisionmuseum.com and http://www.warfoto.com/giviews2.htm have a couple of his cartoons and www.toonopedia.com/mauldin.htm has a short biography of his life.

Bill's books are the best way to learn about the man. ‘Up Front' was his first, then ‘Back Home', ‘Bill Mauldin in Korea', ‘The Brass Ring' and others.

Bill Mauldin was an exceptional talent whose work continues to touch those who see it. Look him up. It will be worth your while.
 

++++++++++++++++++++++++++

William Henry Mauldin joined the Army newsletter Stars and Stripes as a cartoonist during World War II. There he perfected Joe and Willie, the muddy, weary "dogfaces" who portrayed the drabness of the foot soldier's life. Despised by the conservative brass as disrespectful but loved by G.I.s as their own, the cartoons won Bill Mauldin a 1945 Pulitzer Prize. A self-styled "stirrer-upper," Mauldin joined the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1958. Dubbed "the hottest editorial brush in the U.S.," he won his second Pulitzer Prize that year. Syndicated in over 250 newspapers, Bill Mauldin battled injustice and pretense with irony and humor.
 

++++++++++++++++++++++

from http://www.toonopedia.com/mauldin.htm

Bill Mauldin
Born: 1921
Job Description: Cartoonist
Worked in: Newspaper editorial cartoons
Noted for: Willie & Joe, and decades of prize-winning cartoons

Bill Mauldin is an ordinary guy from an ordinary town, who makes cartoons about ordinary guys, from an ordinary point of view. But he does it so well, he has long since joined the ranks of cartoonists whose work, in all likelihood, is immortal — and that's far from an ordinary achievement for a man whose cartoons almost exclusively concern topical matters.

William Henry Mauldin was born October 29, 1921, in Mountain Park, New Mexico. He knew from an early age that he wanted to make cartooning his career, and after high school, began studying toward that goal at Chicago's Academy of Fine Art. But World War II intervened, as it did for so many young men of his generation, and he'd scarcely begun his studies when he found himself a member of the U.S. Army's 45th Division.

But the war didn't even slow his career down. In 1940, he created Willie & Joe, a couple of cartoon soldiers, for the division's newspaper. They resonated so well with the army's rank and file that by 1944 Mauldin was cartooning full time for Stars & Stripes, also a military newspaper, but one that served the entire U.S. Army. His work there received a favorable write-up by the famous war correspondent Ernie Pyle. As a result, by the time the war was over, Mauldin's cartoons were being syndicated by United Feature, alongside The Captain & the Kids and Nancy.

In 1945, he won his first Pulitzer Prize for newspaper cartooning, and published his first book — Up Front, which reprinted dozens of Willie & Joe cartoons, accompanied by Mauldin's comments on the real-life situation his fictional characters were in. It has remained in print for decades, and even now stands as one of the most vivid and true-to-life accounts of the typical American soldier's life during World War II.

More books followed — Back Home (1947), Bill Mauldin in Korea (1952), The Brass Ring (1971), and several others. He also wrote a few short stories, and appeared in the 1951 movie, The Red Badge of Courage. He won a second Pulitzer in 1959, so it was almost an anticlimax when, two years later, he took home The National Cartoonists' Society's Reuben Award, as Cartoonist of the Year.

By that time, he was working as editorial cartoonist for The St. Louis Post-Dispatch. United Feature had found his cartoons hard to sell in many markets, because of his tendency not to pull punches when cartooning about McCarthyism or The Ku Klux Klan; and he'd been so discouraged that for a few years during the '50s, he'd actually given up cartooning altogether. It was a mistake he didn't make again — but he did find larger urban areas, where a wider range of opinion has always flourished, more receptive to his viewpoints.

Mauldin moved to The Chicago Sun-Times in 1962, and stayed there for many years. By the time he retired, in 1992, his cartoons were being syndicated to about 250 papers.

++++++++++++++++++++++

Bill Mauldin Article from Chicago Tribune
8/14/2002 5:00:35 AM Central Daylight Time
Ron@workingreporter.com

By: Bob Greene
Bill Mauldin is in need of his buddies now
Published August 11, 2002
Chicago Tribune

Someone from the 3rd Infantry Division got in touch and said he
thought I'd want to know. He said it was about Bill Mauldin.
What followed was not so good.

I'll get to that in a moment. For those of you too young to
recognize the name: Bill Mauldin, who is now 80 years old, was the
finest and most beloved editorial cartoonist of World War II. An
enlisted man who drew for Stars and Stripes, he was the one who gave
the soldiers hope and sardonic smiles on the battlefields; Mauldin
knew their hearts because he was one of them. Using his dirty,
unshaven, bone-weary infantrymen characters Willie and Joe as his
vehicle, Mauldin let all those troops know there was someone who
understood. A Mauldin classic from World War II: an exhausted
infantryman standing in front of a table where medals were being
given out, saying: "Just gimme th' aspirin. I already got a Purple Heart."

Baby-faced and absolutely brilliant, Mauldin became a national
phenomenon. Talk about a boy wonder: By the time he was 23 years old
he had won a Pulitzer Prize, been featured on the cover of Time
magazine, and had the country's No. 1 best-selling book, "Up Front."
Yet he remained the unaffected, bedrock genuine, decent and open  guy ...
his fellow soldiers loved him.

And he stayed that way — right down to the baby face — all the way
into his 50s and beyond. I was brand-new in Chicago, 22 years old
and a beginning reporter, when I walked by the old Riccardo's
restaurant one night, and there was Mauldin having a drink at one of
the outside tables with his friend Mike Royko. Mauldin had seen me
around the hallways; he motioned me over and invited me to join
them. I sat down and tried to act as if this was nothing exceptional
at all, as I looked around me at the table and thought to myself:
You're six weeks out of Bexley, Ohio. That's Bill Mauldin. That's  Mike Royko.
This is a dream.

He was always so nice to me; he volunteered to write the foreword to
one of my first books. We sort of lost touch after he moved to the
Western part of the U.S. full time, and I guess that when I thought
of him it was still as the eternally boyish, eternally grinning, eternally upbeat Mauldin.

And then the message came the other day from the 3rd Infantry man.
Bill Mauldin needs help.

He suffered terrible burns in a household accident a while back; his
health has deteriorated grievously, and his cognitive functions are
barely working. He lives in a room in a nursing home in Orange
County, Calif., and sometimes days at a time go by without him
saying a word. He was married three times, but the last one ended in
divorce, and at 80 in the nursing home Mauldin is a single man.
I spoke with members of his family; they said that, even though Bill
hardly communicates, the one thing that cheers him up is hearing
from World War II guys — the men for whom he drew those magnificent cartoons.

Which is not what you might expect. Mauldin was not one to hold on
to the past — he did not want to be categorized by the work he did
on the battlefields when he was in his 20s. He went on to have a
stellar career in journalism after the war, winning another Pulitzer
in 1959. Many Americans, and I'm one of them, consider the drawing
he did on deadline on the afternoon John F. Kennedy was
assassinated — the drawing of the Lincoln Memorial, head in hands,
weeping — to be the single greatest editorial cartoon in the history of newspapers.

But it's his World War II contemporaries he seems to need now. The
guys for whom — in the words of Mauldin's son David — Mauldin's
cartoons "were like water for men dying of thirst." David Mauldin
said his dad needs to hear that he meant something to those men.
He needs visitors, and he needs cards of encouragement. I'm not
going to print the name of the nursing home, so that this can be
done in a disciplined and scheduled way. A newspaper colleague in
Southern California — Gordon Dillow — has done a wonderful job
organizing this, and he will take your cards to the nursing home.
You may send them to Bill Mauldin in care of Dillow at the Orange
County Register, 625 N. Grand Ave., Santa Ana, CA 92701.
What would be even better, for those of you World War II veterans
who are reading these words in California, or who plan on traveling
there soon, would be if you could pay a visit to Mauldin just to sit
with him a while. You can let me know if you are willing to do this
(bgreene@tribune.com), or you can let Gordon Dillow know
(gldillow@aol.com).

Bill Mauldin brought hope, and smiles in terrible hours, to millions
of his fellow soldiers. If you were one of them, and you'd like to
repay the favor, this would be the time