Copyright 1999 Joe Shea. All Rights Reserved.

LIGHT IN THE ATTIC FIRST SHONE IN THE PACIFIC

By Allan R. Andrews
American Reporter Correspondent

WASHINGTON, May 13 -- Shel Silverstein, the songwriter, cartoonist, children's poet and storyteller who illustrated his own books, died in Key West, Fla., earlier this week of a heart attack. He was 66.

Anyone who read the published obituaries of the talented writer, especially those of the Associated Press, learned in an almost thrown-away line that Silverstein "began as a cartoonist for the Pacific Stars and Stripes while in the Army in Japan and Korea."

PFC Shel Silverstein served with the U.S. Army between 1953 and 1955. He was stationed in Japan and assigned as a journalist to Pacific Stars and Stripes, the daily newspaper for GIs born during Gen. Douglas MacArthur's occupation of Japan and still published out of Tokyo to bring news to servicemembers throughout the Pacific theater.

On the staff of the newspaper, Silverstein served as a cartoonist, drawing an almost daily panel that poked fun at Army life under the rubric, "Take Ten."

Silverstein's lampooning of the military often got him in trouble, he once said, especially with higher-ranking officers and sergeants. The cartoonist admitted at one point he was told "all I could attack were civilians and animals." In its obituary of him, the Los Angeles Times referred to Silverstein as a "ribald cartoonist."

In a 1969 interview with his old newspaper, the famous alumnus said when he left Stripes and the Army he found he could barely get any of his cartoons published. Then someone introduced him to Hugh Hefner, who at the time was laying plans for a new magazine venture called Playboy.

Hefner hired Silverstein, and the cartoonist told Stripes he literally moved from a ground floor apartment to an executive suite in the Playboy Mansion.

Stripes launched his career, but Playboy catapulted him to fame as a songwriter and illustrator, and eventually as a favorite writer of children's poems and stories, among them the children's classics, "The Giving Tree," "Where The Sidewalk Ends," and "A Light in the Attic." A fine biography of Silverstein can be found on the Web at a site maintained by Sely Friday at: http://194.178.234.54/Silverstein/bio.html

In 1995, Pacific Stars and Stripes published a 50th anniversary edition, and the editor at the time, Bob Trounson, wrote to Silverstein hoping to enlist the cartoonist to do something special for the anniversary edition.

"Shel was a difficult man to deal with," Trounson recently noted, "but he finally did come through with a drawing that we were able to use. A brilliant, reclusive kind of guy."

The drawing Silverstein did for the anniversary edition was more symbolic than humorous. It showed a caricatured left arm raising the letters "50th" above the flat horizon. Though drawn in 1995, it was signed, "P.F.C. Shel Silverstein. 53-55."

In that same anniversary edition, writer Hal Drake, a long-time reporter and columnist for the Pacific Stars and Stripes, wrote that old-timers remembered Silverstein in the Stripes office of the early '50s as thinking and behaving as if he were "an indentured civilian."

Drake recounted tales of Silverstein's troubles while drawing cartoons of soldiers. One almost got him court-martialed because it implied that quartermasters stole uniforms for their families. The cartoon pictured a woman and her child in cut-down U.S. Army uniforms. Investigators bought Silverstein's story that he meant it to show that quartermasters were so gung-ho they dressed their families in uniforms.

Another Silverstein cartoon almost brought him and the newspaper into conflict with military authorities. For an April Fool's edition, Silverstein drew a cartoon of a soldier going through a mess line with a slab of toast on his plate -- labeled by GIs as a "shingle." An Army cook is sprinkling dark matter over the toast and exclaiming, "Today it REALLY is."

When complaints about the cartoon reached the news room, the editor who had approved the cartoon confronted Silverstein, asking, "Shel, what does this mean?"

"You know," Silverstein countered. "Powdered milk, powdered eggs. Today it's the real thing. April Fool. Get it?"

Behind their snickers and amid a flood of complaints from gasping readers, many editors remembered Silverstein pulling one past the censors.

Perhaps Silverstein best explained his relationship to the military and the sergeants he loved to make fun of when he said of his work at Stripes, "They even made zebras off limits to me because they had stripes."

A mellow Silverstein recalled his military experience with gratitude in the 1969 interview. "It did me good," he said. "Taught me things about life and gave me the freedom to create."

Millions of readers and music fans who will miss Silverstein's clever work are appreciative that the military and Pacific Stars and Stripes helped to turn on the bright light in the attic.

ED NOTE: Another great Silverstein Web site can be found at:
http://members.tripod.com/ShelSilverstein/intro.html

Allan R. Andrews can be contacted at allan.andrews@reporters.net

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