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Art Buchwald: Misfit With a Mission
| Article
# : |
19913 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1992 |
2,770 Words |
| Author
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Heather B. Hayes
Heather B. Hayes is a freelance writer living in the
Washington, D.C., area. |
Art Buchwald's columns are zany, irreverent, off the wall, And, of course, and fun. To look at him, Buchwald seems a cherubic elfin, all chuckles and chutzpah, and, indeed, for forty years now he's been society's unofficial prankster, with a pocket full of incriminating notes to pin on the backside of the Establishment.
Some people take his columns seriously. They even send hate mail, which Buchwald doesn't mind. Some of his favorite letters are framed and hung in places of honor on the walls of his Pennsylvania Avenue office in Washington, D.C. One letter lambastes him as a "sin-sick, lust-crazed fanatical fanatic." Another letter uses the "F" word on him. It's signed: "City of Cleveland." He changes these letters periodically, replacing them with the best from among a constant flow of worthy missives. Other cities get equal time, and Buchwald stays out of a rut.
His latest bunch of notes for the backside have been gathered together into his recently published book Lighten Up, George. This makes number twenty-nine for Buchwald, who won a Pulitzer Prize for outstanding commentary back in 1982; most of his books are biennial collections of his columns, which now appear in more than 550 newspapers around the world.
It all started sixty-six years ago, when Buchwald was born in Mount Vernon, New York, on October 25, 1925. His mother, Helen, died when Art was an infant, and his father, Joseph, found raising four children by himself during the Great Depression an economic impossibility.
So five-year old Art and sister were sent to the Hebrew Orphan Asylum in New York City. He spent the rest of his childhood in and out of different foster homes in Queens, seeing his family on weekends only. "I had no sense that I belonged to anyone," recalls Buchwald. "Looking back, I'm sure I resented it, but I didn't admit it."
Admit it or not, life demanded that Art find a way to cope. " I became a funny man," he says. That's how he "beat the whole system. If you look into the analysis of humorous people, you'll find that most of the people like me were misfits when they were children."
Just before his seventeenth birthday, in 1942, Buchwald decided to drop out of high school, to join the Marines. "Not only wasn't I doing well in school, but it seemed like a waste of time," he
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