(Zinga Zinga Za! is a book about growing up with a large, ...)
Zinga Zinga Za! is a book about growing up with a large, loving Italian family in Brooklyn 50 years ago. It's about hopping freights during the Depression, and about digging ditches and sketching cartoons for the Army in World War II. It is anecdotes about Mike Royko, Jimmy Breslin and Lydon Johnson. Among others. It's 121 pages of the kind of political cartoons that won John Fischetti a Pulitzer Prize. It's about hippies, de Gaulle, LBJ, inflation, women's lib and Watergate. Zinga Zinga Za! is even more than all that!
(By Leonore Klein, pictures by John Fischetti. This is a S...)
By Leonore Klein, pictures by John Fischetti. This is a Scholastic TW 497 book. Brave Daniel made friends with a witch and a ghost.. at a Halloween party. You can read more jokes about Brave Daniel inside.
John R. Fischetti was an editorial cartoonist for the New York Herald Tribune and the Chicago Daily News. He received a Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning in 1969 and numerous awards from the National Cartoonists Society.
Background
He was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Italian immigrants Pietro Fischetti, a barber, and Emanuela Navarra. Giovanni, whose name was anglicized to John by friends, was the youngest of five children. Growing up in Brooklyn's Little Italy, Fischetti was surrounded by neighbors who were struggling to survive but who were protective of one another.
When he was five years old, he was given a box of colored chalk at kindergarten and began drawing. He was soon showing artistic promise. By the age of thirteen, Fischetti had ambitions to become an editorial cartoonist.
Education
He greatly admired the political cartoons of Rollin Kirby of the New York World. Fischetti, whose political views were shaped by the Great Depression, dropped out of Alexander Hamilton High School at the age of fifteen and, unable to find work, moved west on freight trains to Albany, Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo, Erie, Cleveland, Chicago, and Kenosha, working at odd jobs, eating at soup kitchens and missions, and sleeping at shelters, transient camps, and in jail cells made available to the poor by police for a night.
Career
He returned to New York City and took a job as a cabin boy on the Western World, a Munson steamship. Fischetti spent a year at sea, sailing to Bermuda, South America, Barbados, and back to New York.
On his return to Brooklyn, he worked as a free-lance artist and then enrolled at the Pratt Institute, where he studied commercial art for three years and graduated in 1940.
Until entering Pratt, Fischetti was inexperienced in any art medium other than pencil and paper. At Pratt, he learned to work with oils, watercolors, and pastels; he also studied sculpture.
His passion and social consciousness began to emerge in his drawings.
The writings of John Steinbeck illuminated Fischetti's vision of America. At Pratt, he produced a set of illustrations for Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, which Steinbeck learned about after a public exhibition of Fischetti's work in Los Angeles.
Steinbeck sought to have Fischetti's illustrations published in a special edition of the novel, but his publisher already had Thomas Hart Benton under contract.
Fischetti's first job out of Pratt was as an illustrator with the Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, California. He was among the animators for Mickey Mouse but grew to dislike the work, which he described as "an assembly line for artists. "
Fischetti later worked as a free-lance artist for the Los Angeles Times, then lived in San Francisco, moving in 1941 to Chicago, where he drew for Coronet and Esquire magazines. Later in 1941, he was hired as an associate political cartoonist for the Chicago Sun.
From 1942 to 1946, Fischetti served in the United States Army; he was assigned to the 999th Signal Corps as a radio operator and then to Stars and Stripes, the army newspaper, as a correspondent and cartoonist. Fischetti covered combat, the trial of Marshal Putain, the fall of Nuremberg, and the liberation of the concentration camp at Dachau.
Returning to New York City in January of 1946, Fischetti worked as a free-lance illustrator for commercial clients, juvenile books, university magazines, advertising pamphlets, and for the New York Times Magazine and Coronet.
In 1950 the Fischettis moved from New York City to suburban Cos Cob, Connecticut Fischetti became a cartoonist in 1951 with the Newspaper Enterprise Association and for ten years worked out of his home and an office in New York City for the NEA.
Though he gained a national reputation during his decade with the news service, he grew frustrated with the requirement that he submit four or five cartoons to his editor for approval.
Fischetti's cartoons appeared in more than 800 newspapers through the NEA syndicate, but he wanted more freedom in the selection of his cartoons.
One of his more powerful cartoons appeared in 1961 after the death of United Nations secretary-general Dag Hammarskj"ld in a plane crash while on a peace mission in Africa. Fischetti drew a corner of the Secretariat Building at United Nations headquarters against a dark sky. In the lower right, he depicted a female peace figure, face in hands, head bent. The caption of the cartoon was: "My son, My son. "
Fischetti said that he got more reaction to the Hammarskj"ld cartoon than to any other cartoon in his career. United Nations under secretary Ralph Bunche obtained the original Fischetti cartoon and placed it on display outside the secretary-general's office at the United Nations.
Fischetti joined the New York Herald Tribune in 1962 as an editorial cartoonist with an arrangement to work from his Connecticut home. Publisher John Hay Whitney, a multimillionaire who had served as American ambassador to Britain during the Eisenhower administration, told editors that Fischetti was to have complete editorial freedom.
The Herald Tribune syndicated Fischetti's cartoons to seventy-five newspapers. Fischetti's style influenced a generation of American editorial cartoonists.
Before joining the Herald Tribune, he had begun working with brush and pen instead of the more traditional grease pencil, and began using dotted paper to achieve shades of gray in his cartoons. He introduced what he called "new look" cartoons that literally changed the shape of American cartooning.
After the Herald Tribune collapsed in 1967, Fischetti was hired by the Chicago Daily News and moved to Chicago.
Fischetti was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning in 1969. When the Daily News folded in March in 1978, Fischetti joined the Chicago Sun-Times, which was under the same ownership as the Daily News had been.
Fischetti, who underwent triple heart bypass surgery in 1979 after suffering two heart attacks in the early 1970's, died of heart disease after collapsing at his Near North Side home.
After his death, a national award for editorial cartooning was established in his memory and a Fischetti scholarship fund was organized for journalism students at Columbia College in Chicago.
Quotations:
"We were very much aware of being an island in this country, and so we clung together like Pilgrims, " Fischetti said.
In choosing topics for his illustrations at Pratt, Fischetti later wrote: "I found that I naturally always chose something about the poor, the unfortunate, the put-upon. I saw the crummy places these people lived in and that not many people really cared about them. I grew to hate injustices and the people responsible for these injustices. "
Fischetti lamented the lack of creativity in political cartooning in the United States. He was disdainful of the cliche symbols used by some of his colleagues. "I haven't used Uncle Sam, a donkey or an elephant for years, " he said in 1969.
A memorable cartoon in 1968 showed an African-American man manacled with chains labeled "white racism" and the caption: "Why don't they lift themselves up by their own bootstraps like we did?"
"I've tried to use what talent I have to do my damnedest to make things just a little better, to alleviate some suffering and neaten up this spaceship we all live on for such a short time, " Fischetti wrote in his autobiography.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
"John pioneered the modern-day horizontal-shape editorial cartoon in this country, " Herbert Block of the Washington Post said. "It was popular in England and elsewhere, but for a long time the standard American editorial cartoon had been vertical. . John persevered against the herd instinct of editors who resisted the shape of his cartoons. And he probably would have been amused and outraged to find another generation of sheeplike editors feeling that a political cartoon was somehow unfashionable if it was not horizontal. "
Connections
On October 25, 1948, Fischetti married Karen Mortenson, a flight attendant with the Scandinavian Airline System and a native of Denmark. They had two children.
Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning
the National Cartoonists Society's Editorial Cartoon Award; Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning; The Fischetti Editorial Cartoon Competition Award
In 1969, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning in honor of the body of his work. He also received the National Cartoonists Society's Editorial Cartoon Award in 1962, 1963, 1964, and 1965. The Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartoon is one of the fourteen American Pulitzer Prizes that are annually awarded for Journalism.
Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning
the National Cartoonists Society's Editorial Cartoon Award; Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning; The Fischetti Editorial Cartoon Competition Award
In 1969, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning in honor of the body of his work. He also received the National Cartoonists Society's Editorial Cartoon Award in 1962, 1963, 1964, and 1965. The Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartoon is one of the fourteen American Pulitzer Prizes that are annually awarded for Journalism.
and 1965
he won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning in honor of the body of his work. He also received the National Cartoonists Society's Editorial Cartoon Award in 1962