On my father’s ranch I learned that no task was beneath me, and that if a job needed doing, somebody needed to do it.
I was born in the heart of the Great Depression. Dad considered himself fortunate to find work herding sheep at $30 a month on the open ranges of the Crow Indian Reservation in southeastern Montana. With my mother and me, Dad followed the sheep to new grass and a variety of temporary homes—sheep wagons, tents, dugouts, cabins and ranch houses.
When I was about five, I found out comics were written and drawn by people called cartoonists. It had never occurred to me that a person actually wrote and drew comic strips; I’d thought they were some kind of a natural wonder, like Old Faithful or the Grand Canyon. I resolved from that day . . .
