Milestones

By Paul Gray

In Willie and Joe, cartoonist BILL MAULDIN, who died last week at 81, created an unlikely and imperishable pair of American icons. These unshaven, hollow-eyed, grimy World War II infantry dogfaces appeared in the pages of the Army newspaper Stars and Stripes, fighting not just the Germans during the Italian campaign but also tedium, wet socks, lousy K rations and their commanding officers. G.I.s everywhere laughed, or nodded in rueful recognition. Mauldin combined the satiric eye and brush of a Daumier with the ear of a Ring Lardner. He captioned a drawing of a sergeant addressing his bedraggled men: "I need a couple guys what don't owe me no money for a little routine patrol." His war works won Mauldin a Pulitzer Prize in 1945, and the 23-year-old, who'd grown up poor in the Southwest, found himself an uncomfortable celebrity. "If I see a stuffed shirt," he once remarked, "I want to punch it." Mauldin won his second Pulitzer for a cartoon in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1959, after the Soviets imprisoned writer Boris Pasternak; it shows one prisoner in ball and chain saying to another, "I won the Nobel Prize for Literature. What was your crime?" Mauldin moved to the Chicago Sun-Times in 1962 and stayed there 30 years. Skillful as he was with captions, sometimes his art required no words at all. After the assassination of J.F.K., Mauldin portrayed the statue of Lincoln in his Memorial, bent over, head in hands. --By Paul Gray