The post office gets a lot of criticism. Always has, always will.
And with the renewed push to get rid of Saturday
mail delivery, expect complaints to intensify.
But the United States Postal Service deserves a
standing ovation for something that's going to
happen this month: Bill Mauldin is getting his own postage stamp.
Mauldin died at age 81 in the early days of
2003. The end of his life had been rugged. He
had been scalded in a bathtub, which led to
terrible injuries and infections; Alzheimer's
disease was inflicting its cruelties. Unable to
care for himself after the scalding, he became a
resident of a California nursing home, his
health and spirits in rapid decline.
He was not forgotten, though. Mauldin, and his
work, meant so much to the millions of Americans
who fought in World War II, and to those who had
waited for them to come home. He was a kid
cartoonist for Stars and Stripes, the military
newspaper; Mauldin's drawings of his muddy,
exhausted, whisker-stubbled infantrymen Willie
and Joe were the voice of truth about what it was like on the front lines.
Mauldin was an enlisted man just like
the soldiers he drew for; his gripes were their
gripes, his laughs were their laughs, his
heartaches were their heartaches. He was one of them. The y loved him.
He never held back. Sometimes, when his cartoons
cut too close for comfort, his superior officers
tried to tone him down. In one memorable
incident, he enraged Gen. George S. Patton, and
Patton informed Mauldin he wanted the
pointed cartoons -- celebrating the fighting
men, lampooning the high-ranking officers -- to stop. Now.
The news passed from soldier to soldier. How was
Sgt. Bill Mauldin going to stand up to Gen. Patton? It seemed impossible.
Not quite. Mauldin, it turned out, had an ardent
fan: Five-star Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower,
supreme commander of the Allied
forces in Europe . Ike put out the word:
Mauldin draws what Mauldin wants. Mauldin won. Patton lost.
If, in your line of work, you've ever considered
yourself a young hotshot, or if you've ever
known anyone who has felt that way about himself
or herself, the story of Mauldin's young
manhood will humble you. Here is what, by the
time he was 23 years old, Mauldin had accomplished:
He won the Pulitzer Prize. He was featured on
the cover of Time magazine. His book "Up Front"
was the No. 1 best-seller in the� United States .
All of that at 23. Yet when he returned to
civilian life and he grew older, he never lost
that boyish Mauldin grin, he never outgrew his
excitement about doing his job, he never
big-shotted or high-hatted the people with whom he worked every day.
I was lucky enough to be one of them; Mauldin
roamed the hallways of the Chicago Sun-Times in
the late 1960s and early 1970s with no more
officiousness or air of haughtiness than if he
was a copyboy. That impish look on his face remained.
He had achieved so much. He had won a second
Pulitzer Prize, and he should have won a third,
for what may be the single greatest editorial
cartoon in the history of the craft: his
deadline rendering, on the day President John F.
Kennedy was assassinated, of the statue at the
Lincoln Memorial slumped in grief, its
head cradled in its hands. But he never acted as
if he was better than the people he met. He was
still Mauldin the enlisted man.
During the late summer of 2002, as Mauldin lay
in that California nursing home, some of the old
World War II infantry guys caught wind of it.
They didn't want Mauldin to go out that way.
They thought he should know that he was still their hero.
Gordon Dillow, a columnist for the Orange County
Register, put out the call in Southern California
for people in the area to send their best wishes
to Mauldin; I joined Dillow in the effort,
helping to spread the appeal nationally so that
Bill would not feel so alone. Soon more than
10,000 letters and cards had arrived at Mauldin's bedside.
Even better than that, the old soldiers began to
show up just to sit with Mauldin, to let him know
that they were there for him, as he, long ago,
had been there for them. So many volunteered to
visit Bill that there was a waiting list. Here
is how Todd DePastino, in the first paragraph of
his wonderful biography of Mauldin, described it:
"Almost every day in the summer and fall of 2002
they came to Park Superior nursing
home in Newport Beach , California , to honor
Army Sergeant, Technician Third Grade, Bill
Mauldin. They came bearing relics of
their youth: medals, insignia, photographs, and
carefully folded newspaper clippings. Some wore
old garrison caps. Others arrived resplendent in
uniforms over a half century old. Almost all
of them wept as they filed down the corridor
like pilgrims fulfilling some long-neglected obligation."
One of the veterans explained to me why it was so important:
"You would have to be part of a combat infantry
unit to appreciate what moments of relief Bill
gave us. You had to be reading a soaking wet
Stars and Stripes in a water-filled foxhole and
then see one of his cartoons."
Mauldin is buried in Arlington National
Cemetery . This month, the kid cartoonist makes
it onto a first-class postage stamp. It's
an honor that most generals and admirals never receive.
What Mauldin would have loved most, I believe,
is the sight of the two guys who are keeping him company on that stamp.
