Celebrity Deathwatch: Jeff MacNelly, "Shoe" cartoonist, 52

["Deathwatch Central" <cdw@slick.org>]

http://www.cnn.com/2000/books/news/06/08/obit.macnelly.ap/index.html

'Shoe' cartoonist Jeff MacNelly dead at 52

June 8, 2000
Web posted at: 10:16 a.m. EDT (1416 GMT)

CHICAGO (AP) -- Chicago Tribune cartoonist Jeff MacNelly, three-time
Pulitzer Prize winner and creator of the daily comic strip "Shoe," died
early Thursday. He was 52.

He died at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore after battling lymphoma since
late last year.

"Jeff was simply the most brilliant political cartoonist of the time,"
Tribune editor Howard A. Tyner said. "No one had an eye and a sense of humor
like his. And he was as funny personally as he was in print."

MacNelly, who lived in Rappahannock County, Virginia, won the Pulitzer Prize
for his editorial cartoons in 1972, 1978 and 1985. He won the first one when
he was only 24, after working at the Richmond News Leader in Virginia for
only 16 months.

After 12 years at the Richmond News Leader, he joined the Tribune in 1982.

But editorial cartoons weren't his only outlet. In 1977, MacNelly began the
daily comic strip "Shoe," about a newspaper's cranky editor and its two-bit
hacks, all of whom just happen to be birds. The cigar-chomping boss of the
Treetops Tattler was P. Martin Shoemaker, inspired by MacNelly's former boss
Jim Shumaker, now a University of North Carolina professor.

He also illustrated humorist Dave Barry's syndicated column.

The New York native took his first cartooning job in 1969 when he dropped
out of the University of North Carolina to take a $120-per-week position
with a weekly paper in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

MacNelly announced in January that he would cut down his output during the
treatment of his illness, but he continued to produce "Shoe" and other
cartoons until his death.

He is survived by his wife, Susan, and two sons, Danny, 13, and Matt, 25.
Another son, Jeffrey Jr., died in 1996 of injuries received in a
rock-climbing accident in Colorado. He was 24.

Copyright 2000   The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

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