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32 4 Punching the Clock and Turning Left The ramifications of a financial panic are—SAY! . . . That never occurred to me! . . . Your dad fired! Denied access to means of producing the necessities of life! You and your mother in rags! The icebox bare— Cushlamochree! The icebox bare! —Mr. O’Malley, in Crockett Johnson, Barnaby, 5 April 1945 In 1926, unable to afford their home of a dozen years, the Leisks moved about two miles west into a house at 53 North Prince Street (now 33-43 Prince Street) in Flushing, Queens. The new house was only ten feet wide, especially cramped for a family that included Dave’s cousin, Bert Leisk, and his friend, Jim McKinney, who had fled Britain’s postwar economic slump in 1923. Glad for a temporary escape from these close quarters, Dave sought work.1 Department stores were thriving in the 1910s and 1920s—Marshall Fields in Chicago, Filene’s in Boston, and Macy’s in New York. In the winter of 1926, on the strength of his Cooper Union art courses, Dave became the assistant art director in Macy’s advertising department, a position he described as “a glorified office boy.” Macy’s had strict rules for its more than five thousand workers: As at Newtown High School, those who arrived at work after 8:45 needed to obtain a special pass, without which they could neither enter the locker rooms nor go to their jobs.Working in the advertising department gave Dave a chance to develop skills in typesetting and illustration but few opportunities to express his creative side. Department managers requested ads, staff members drew items to be advertised, and other staff created advertisements that conformed to Macy’s style, using the company’s distinctive typefaces and trademark red star.Artists had no control over the final layout.2 If these rigid conditions clashed with Dave’s creativity, the culture of advertising could not have increased his job satisfaction. As copywriter Helen Woodward wrote in 1926,“To be a really good copywriter requires a passion for converting the other fellow, even if it is to something you don’t believe in 33 Punching the Clock and Turning Left yourself.” Naturally skeptical, Dave did not stay at Macy’s for very long, quitting just before he was fired for wearing a soft collar instead of a regulation stiff one.3 Dave next found employment hefting ice in an icehouse. He may also have played semi-professional football for the Flushing Packers. He enjoyed the game because it wasn’t much of a “passing game. It was mostly just a bumping -down-on-the-ground game.”All Dave, a big offensive lineman, had to do was lean. Dave and the other linemen would mock the alleged arrogance of the quarterback.“The slick quarterback thinks he’s the team,” Dave would say. After a pause, he would add,“We are.”4 Just two weeks after his twenty-first birthday, Dave returned to publishing , becoming the first art editor of Aviation, which eventually evolved into Aviation Week. The cover of the 7 November 1927 Aviation, the first issue on which Johnson worked, displays a photo of Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis flying back to New York. Just a few months after his historic solo flight from New York to Paris, Lindbergh had undertaken an aerial tour of all fortyeight states to promote aviation, appearing before huge crowds and receiving accolades. Moreover, the latter half of 1927 saw four other successful transatlantic flights as well as the first flight from the continental United States to Hawaii, events that Aviation covered with enthusiasm.5 On the strength of his new income, Dave and his mother and sister moved to more comfortable quarters at Hyacinth Court, a new four-story apartment building in Flushing. During his years at Aviation, Dave began taking typography and graphic design classes at New York University’s School of Fine Arts, where one of his teachers was Frederic Goudy, a master of print design who invented more than a hundred typefaces. Goudy described his work as “simple[;] that is, it presents the simplicity that takes account of the essentials, that eliminates unnecessary lines and parts,” articulating an aesthetic that finds echoes in Johnson’s later view of his illustrations as “simplified, almost diagrammatic, for clear storytelling, avoiding all arbitrary decoration.”6 Dave was also receiving an on-the-job education in layout and design. In early 1929, publisher James McGraw added Aviation to...

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