Vip: The Mad World of Virgil Partch - preview

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TABLE OF CONTENTSIntroduction

Partch ad absurdum Prologue: Under the Volcano

I. The Call of the Wild II. Of Mice and Men

III. Brave New WorldIV. The Divine Comedy

V. A Farewell to ArmsVI. Point of No Return

VII. The GeniusVIII. Three Men in a BoatIX. As a Man Grows Older

X. The Old Man and the SeaEpilogue: The Death of Virgil

The Unknown Quantity Cartoons from PM

War in PiecesReality Bites

Cork High and Bottle DeepThe Eternal ChaseBattle of the SexesThe Sporting Life

PartchedCovered

(m)Ad ManPolitical Partch

The Private War of Corporal PartchThe Vipper Comes to TownBourbon and Watercolors

Vacation for VipperInland Cruise of the “Lazy B”

CreditsAcknowledgments

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102115129140145146148150152154156158160162164166168174182192202206207


Partchad absurdum

as told by

Jonathan Barli

Being the tale of

Virgil Franklin Partch II



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Our story begins, as stories seldom do, in the middle of the Bering Sea, amongst the Pribilof Islands off the coast of Alaska, which is to say in the middle of nowhere. It is here on St. Paul Island — a treeless, fog-coated mass of tundra attended by heavy winds, frequent rain, snow, and occasional bouts of humidity — that hundreds of thousands of fur seals and very few humans can claim their birth. And yet it was in this most desolate of set-tings that a son was born to Anna Pavloff and Petty Officer Paul C. Partch on October 17, 1916. While births may be a quotidian occurrence no mat-ter the longitude, latitude, or hemisphere, the extraordinary circumstances leading to this particular debut would, in turn, foreshadow much of the life and career of a unique and original American artist.

To begin anew, we find ourselves on a different continent altogether, in an entirely different climate and culture. Paul Partch, born in Ning Po, China, as the son of missionaries at the close of the 19th century, fled to California with his parents, Virgil and Jennie, amidst the social and political unrest of the Boxer Rebellion. In order to care for Jennie’s health, the family then moved to Arizona, where Virgil worked for the Immigration Service and Jennie became a leader in the local women’s suffrage movement. At 19, Paul joined the United States Navy, where he served as an electrician.

PROLOGUE: UNDER THE VOLCANO

LEFT TO RIGHT: The Partch Family home in Ning Po, China; Paul Partch as a child in Ning Po; Paul Partch in the United States Navy, which he would reenter in 1941 at the onset of WWII.


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In 1915, Paul Partch arrived in Chiniak Bay on the USS Pro-metheus, a portentously named repair ship, to service Woody Island’s Naval wireless station. It had been destroyed in 1912 — only a year after it had been built — not by the instruments of war, but by the 60-hour volcanic eruption of Mt. Katmai and an accompanying lightning storm. The mas-sive eruption (the largest of the 20th century) of the Novarupta volcano, which was thought to be extinct, spewed approximately 3.5 cubic miles of magma and blanketed the tiny island 110 miles southeast in more than 18 inches of ash. As the volcano erupted, lightning lashed the radio station’s antennae, causing a fire that destroyed most of the building, including its living quarters. By 1914, when the wireless station was rebuilt and updated, the island’s inhabitants, who had been evacuated during the volcanic eruption, returned. Among them was Anna Pavloff, who had grown up on Woody Island. One of 17 children, Anna belonged to a family that was part of a once-prominent Russian community in Alaska. In fact, Anna’s grandfather, William E. Pavloff, served as Lieutenant-Governor of Alaska under Prince Matsoutoff during the mid-19th century. Following America’s purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867, much of the Russian community refused the benefits of American citizenship and instead chose to return to Russia. But some residents remained, including William’s son Nicholas, who married

Anna Hpifanoff, a native Alaskan woman. Nicholas became a manager at the American Russian Ice Company, remained active in community life, served as a psalmist in the island’s Russian Orthodox Church, and earned the name “Nicholas the Good” for his advocacy of native Alaskan causes. Soon after arriving on Woody Island, Paul met Anna. The couple married several months later and moved to Paul’s next post, on St. Paul Island. And the rest, as they say, is history.

THIS PAGE: William Pavloff (fourth from left) and family; Anna Pavloff on Woody Island, Alaska.



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The early years of Virgil’s life were, ostensibly, like that of any other Army or Navy brat. Moving from post to post, the family, which welcomed the addition of another child, James (nicknamed “Bud”), in 1920, lived in Yerba Buena Island, Dutch Harbor, Kodiak, Sitka, and Puget Sound, all before Virgil was 9 years old.

Born with crossed eyes that he retained (even when dead sober, as he would later joke) until he was 7 years old, Virgil considered himself a se-rious child, “born into a family seething with a deadly serious dedication to the long-haired arts. There was papa Partch, oil painter, etcher, dabbler in music and literature, tournament chess player [...]. And Aunt Irene, never far from her cello and metronome. Uncle Harry was so far out in the field of advanced musical theory that he thought Stravinsky arranged for Spike Jones […].” (Harry Partch was a renowned avant-garde composer, music philosopher, and inventor.) Yet, despite his predispositions toward the seri-

ous, Virgil ultimately found it difficult to be solemn, or perhaps to be taken seri-ously, given his physical awkwardness: “I was quite tall as a kid and my hands and feet were as big as they are now but I only weighed about ten pounds and with the cross-eyes and the odd build it was kind of hard to be serious.” His perceived physical setbacks were not his only problem. Moving as frequently as the family did, Virgil never stayed in one place long enough to es-tablish any meaningful relationships. “I was always the new boy who was a stranger, ripe for getting beat up […] I wasn’t big enough to fight, so I began to tell jokes to make the other kids laugh, so they wouldn’t slug me.” Humor became young Virgil’s best defense … and would eventually become his greatest weapon. As a 7-year-old in the Kodiak grammar school, which packed four grades’ worth of students into each one of its three class-rooms, Virgil was in love with a girl — a

I. THE CALL OF THE WILD


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beautiful creature, as he de-scribed her — who was three years ahead of him (and would eventually become a featured dancer in Tijuana, he later hastened to men-tion, to prove his point). Trying to impress her with his physical prowess on the playground during recess one day, he strained on the chin-up bar (to the atten-tion of nobody), until his belt broke and his pants fell to his ankles (to the delight of everybody). He hammed it up with a laugh and some clowning, and a star was born. He never forgot the

ovation, and knew then that his “days of the serious approach were over.” From an early age Virgil had been encouraged to draw by his father. As far back as the third grade, Virgil took requests at the various Naval stations where they lived, from sailors who he later claimed provided him an informal education. “I had a ready audience for my work in the sailors who hired me to depict the low-ly gob outwitting the Shore Patrol and other such basic plots. I was a professional artist at the tender age of 10, if you want to count the nickels as payment.” Virgil’s penchant for pleas-ing people, which would continue throughout his life, firmly started to assert itself. So did his fascination with observing people, even if of questionable in-fluence at this tender age.

Throughout grammar and high school, he enrolled in every art course he could. In the fifth grade, Virgil and a classmate drew with col-ored chalk the entire course of the Lewis and Clark expedition on butcher paper that encircled the classroom. After a brief stay in the Puget Sound area, in 1926 the family moved to San Francisco, and then to San Diego. Virgil entered a local newspaper’s “Draw Jiggs” contest, rendering the lead character from George McManus’ Bringing Up Father. Virgil won the con-test and the success further encouraged him toward his dream. By now, after several years and several relocations, Virgil had developed a reputable sense of humor. “By the time my father put in his 20 years in the navy and retired, I was the fastest kid in school with a one-liner.”

ABOVE: Virgil ran around barefoot in Alaska, once sustaining a deep cut that became infected. Doctors wanted to amputate

his foot, but Paul would not allow them.

LEFT: Portrait of the Young Man as an Artist. ABOVE: Virgil, with trumpet, and Bud in Santa Barbara, California. The family had a talent for music: in addition to the trumpet, Virgil played the trombone, harmonica, tin whistle, and spoons. Bud went on to become a musician, singing and playing guitar, in addition to an artist.


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In 1930 the family relocated once again, to Tucson, Arizona, where sanitariums could properly treat Anna and James, both of whom had contracted tuberculosis years earlier. Anna’s health was further compro-mised by the earlier pregnancy and birth of a daughter who did not survive her first year. Initially, the family lived in an apartment, but soon after, Virgil helped his father build a tra-ditional adobe home which had a hard dirt floor. At home, Paul cooked for the family, as Newsweek would later report, “influenced by whatever he happened to be reading at the moment. If it was Roman history, the family dined on tough-fibered meats, rabbits, and a concoction made of rabbits’ eyes.” Virgil also claimed that chicken feed was a breakfast sta-ple, and Paul would remind his family that “you can get a lot of mileage out of dry beans and oatmeal.” While attending Roskruge

Junior High School, Virgil first fashioned what was to become his trademark signature. Students were required to initial math problems done on the blackboard: Virgil’s F’s looked like I’s, so Vip became his signifier, and the math problems they adorned, “Vip’s follies.” Deane Fowler, a classmate of Virgil’s in ju-nior high school, remembered him as shy and quiet, and as someone who “did his talking with his drawings.” Fowler recalled how “if the teacher left the classroom, Virgil would get up and draw a caricature of him on the blackboard.” By his last year of junior high he was drawing for the school paper, The Roundup.

ABOVE: Anna, Virgil, and Bud in Arizona. RIGHT: Virgil in repose at the family home.



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Once in Tucson High School, Virgil began to emerge from his shell. He finally grew into his awkward hands and feet, joined the football team, and became more comfort-able with himself. Mary Igo Bingham, a classmate, recalled that, “he was not an introvert in high school […]. He was a lot of fun, he liked sports, and he liked girls — though no one in particular.” Virgil later recalled highlights of his ath-letic career: “I had moments of greatness. Such as the time I helped tape the ankle of the chap who kicked the winning point […].” Another class-

mate, Pete Charowhas, said that although “he was not a bad football player […] his interest was not there.” Virgil drew posters for the school’s sign shop, drew cartoons for the school paper, the Cactus Chronicle, and served on the staff of the yearbook, to which he also contributed drawings. In 1933, his art teacher, Mrs. Ostrander, further encouraged Vir-gil’s budding talent by taking him to the outskirts of Tucson to meet the legendary editorial cartoonist John T. McCutcheon. The “Dean of Midwest Editorial Cartoon-ing” had influenced scores of car-toonists before and after young Virgil Partch, who later said that McCutcheon “was so goddam nice, rich, and complimentary, that I took up cartooning as a ca-reer instead of managing massage parlors or acting.” While a senior in high school, Virgil Partch set his eye on the prize: the Disney Studio in Los Angeles was his goal.

ABOVE: Virgil described his position on the football team as “center and scapegoat.” BELOW: Virgil’s varsity letter from

Tucson High School .


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When Virgil Partch graduated from high school in 1935, America was in the panic-stricken throes of the Great Depres-sion. Thanks, however, to what eventually would be characterized as the golden age of popular culture and the role it played dur-ing the Depression, Disney Studios, like virtually all of Hollywood, was inoculated against the dire conditions affecting so many companies from coast to coast. The animation industry was thriving thanks to the international success of a rambunctious rodent, and Disney Studios was hiring. In response to his application, Partch took a standard drawing test: Mickey Mouse walking through a muddy field carrying a heavy bucket; Donald Duck walking a tightrope; and so on. After a subsequent exchange of letters, Partch was advised that an academic foundation at an art school would be a more appropriate first step. The Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles was recom-mended. The school was a breeding ground for Disney artists and its staff had direct ties to the studio. There, he would attain the proper training in life drawing, composition, and de-sign. Partch later joked

about his ability to draw anatomical figures: “It took me a long time to learn how, because in the early days of my academic training I couldn’t afford muscles.” Since the family’s finances were strained and Partch helped care for his mother at home, Partch jettisoned Chouinard and

enrolled instead in the University of Arizona’s fine arts program. He con-tinued to play football there and drew for the Arizona Kitty Kat, the school paper, where he garnered attention for a cartoon depicting an admiral ad-monishing a sailor who has his pants on backwards. Already able to ruffle feathers, his cartoon was reprinted (without any compensation) in maga-zines and as a postcard that Newsweek later tracked down to “such widely separate places as a saloon in Panama and a disorderly house in Seattle.”

It did not take Partch long, though, to realize that his studies in Arizona were bringing him no closer to his dream of working at Disney. He found a job working for Pacific Fruit Express icing refrigerated railroad cars on the Southern Pacific Railroad, with the goal of earning enough money to attend Choui-nard. Helping the cause, he subsisted on canned-bean sandwiches — an impecunious artist’s rite of passage. After a year at the University of Arizona, Partch and his childhood friend Brice Mack traveled to Los Angeles to finally attend Chouinard. Partch received a small allowance from his parents, contin-ued on a meager diet that included old vegetables, and worked as a longshoreman in Stockton during

II. OF MICE AND MEN

ABOVE: An early attempt at a gag. BELOW: From the Arizona Kitty Kat.

“Just for that, stupid, you’ll get fifteen yards!”



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the summer. In one episode that epitomized the starving side of this art-ist’s life, Partch and a friend took bets eating goldfish from the Chouinard patio fishpond at 25 cents a fish. Partch earned $1.75 that day. “In those days beer was a nickel and you could get chicken fried steak for 25 cents with mashed potatoes and everything. I just ate my brains out.” But when Mrs. Chouinard learned of the episode, she called Partch into her office and told him that she would not abide a student going hungry, and offered him lunch money if ever he should need it. After six months at Chouinard, the penniless Partch found himself in a familiar place. His tuition money had dried up and with no place to go but home, he and Mack retook the entrance exam at Disney. Mack was accepted, but Partch was not. Fortu-nately for him, Phil Dike, a painter and one of Partch’s teachers at Choui-nard, arranged for him to go to work for Disney as an office boy.

Hardly discouraged, Partch saw the silver lining. It was December 1937, he was 21 years old … and he was in.

Walt Disney was enjoying the success of his animated short films when, in early 1934, he began production on what was to become the first feature-length animated film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Disney proceeded against the advice of his brother and wife in order to ascend the artistic and commercial ladders of high art in animation. But a ballooning budget nearly six times its original estimates obliged him to mortgage his home for financing. Despite the fact that Snow White was referred to deri-sively during its production as “Disney’s Folly,” the film realized wide in-ternational acclaim and financial success. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs premiered the very month that Virgil Partch arrived at the studio. It was a period of rapid expansion, the development of talented artists, and the cultivation of young, creative energy, and Virgil Partch found himself right in the middle of it.

Disney’s standards of quality were exacting, and he made signifi-cant investments in his studio to that end. Having struggled to gain the proper education to enter Disney Studios, Partch must have thought it ironic that the studio ran a school of its own on its premises. The school was created to educate and train its animators, and the studio made its courses available to all personnel.



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Despite the insouciance and fanciful nature of Disney films, the artists who created them took their craft seriously. The various essential disciplines instrumental in fulfilling Disney’s vision were meticulously studied, from life drawing to caricature. It was in these very classes — what Partch would later call “one of the world’s best art schools” — that he sharpened his quill. Partch forever affirmed the importance of an academic education. Speaking of a hypothetical student, he later cautioned, “Well, if he does not get an academic training, he will certainly rue the day if he goes on in his career. He might have a certain gift that allows him to become a successful commercial artist or a cartoonist but he will find as he goes along that he is lacking certain tools that he wishes to goodness he did have.”

Partch first worked as a “flat-foot flyer” during the day — running errands, cleaning out Walt Disney’s office, moving equipment, and deliv-ering mail as well as coffee and donuts on film canisters transformed into serving trays — and took as many art courses as he could in the evenings. He was soon assigned to the Disney training class: the minor leagues, but at least he was in the game. His days as an office boy not only afforded him

the opportunity to hone his craft as an artist after work, but, just as impor-tant, to receive a wider informal education observing the staff of different departments. The story department was one of his favorites. “Those story men, always tickled with their work, were my idols.”

In May 1938, Partch married Helen Marie Aldridge, a sculpture student at Otis College of Art and Design he had been introduced to at the Polar Palace skating rink one month earlier. The following year, they welcomed a son, Nicholas, just as Partch was starting to realize the fruits of his labor. Although he would later tell TIME magazine, in his usual self-deprecating way, that “You are sitting before a man who is utterly devoid of ambition,” Partch climbed the ranks at Disney, first as an “inbetweener” during production on Pinocchio, essentially providing the drawings be-tween points A and, say, D in a sequence of action. Despite the promo-tion, Partch found the work unsatisfying. “Inbetweening could get rather monotonous, especially when one realizes that twenty-four drawings flash on the movie screen in one second, and that the inbetweeners accounted for about three quarters of all drawings to eventually reach the projec-tor.” In 1940 Partch was promoted again, as an assistant animator to Ollie

LEFT: Early self-portrait. Partch often signed his self-portraits as an artist he greatly admired.


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Johnston, one of Disney’s legendary Nine Old Men, during production on Bambi. Partch also worked in the story department, where he co-wrote the story Duck Pimples, which was released in 1945. His paycheck jumped to $35 a week, and then to $44.

At Disney’s, it was not “all work and no play,” by any means … and Virgil was hardly a dull boy. To break up the monotony of repetitive drawing, Partch kept a water pistol under his table that he used to squirt his colleagues when their attentions were diverted. The studio in Silver Lake, California, had far more employees than when Disney had first moved production there in 1925. As a result, the staff would bounce off one another, figuratively and sometimes literally, and a true familial bond developed among them. Practical jokes were common; caricatures of one another circulated like memos. These were, after all, the forte of someone

as shy and soft-spoken as Virgil Partch. The studio became a home away from home, and the artists would spend “a couple hours a day of Disney’s time just doing jokes about each other and our lives and what we’d done the night before and the day before or planned to do. I had such a tremendous kick out of these because I could do the drawing and slip it under the door of the guy next door and then stand there silently to see whether it killed him or not. I remember sometimes I would slide the drawing under the door and there was no laugh and then I was convinced he wasn’t there. Of course, open the door and yes, he was there and looking at the drawing. So I’d take him off my list.”


THIS PAGE: Sketches from Partch’s early days at Disney.


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Partch’s gags displayed a stylistic variety that re-flected certain characteristics of their subjects. His draw-ings of Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas, for instance, poked fun at the geometric foundations utilized in ani-mation, including one of Johnston on a date, oblivious to the attentions of a young woman he was with; another of Johnston struggling with a newly installed air-condi-tioning system. Far from frowning on such horseplay, Disney knew this sort of camaraderie was integral to the well-oiled machine and time-consuming undertaking of producing an animated film. Partch later recalled his days at Disney with fond-ness: “I feel the sort of warmth that an old grad feels for his college days […]. Walt Disney had surrounded himself with the best young artists he could find in this country and abroad [...]. Simply being in this group was exhilarating. There’s something downright contagious about talent. It rubs off on you.” Some of the luminaries Partch worked with during those days, leaving aside the legends of animation, included Walt Kelly (Pogo), Hank Ketcham (Dennis the Menace), Eldon Dedini (The New Yorker, Playboy), George Baker (Sad Sack), and Sam Cobean (The New Yorker). It was during this period that Pinocchio, Fantasia, and Bambi were all in produc-tion simultaneously, with Dumbo not far behind. In 1940 Disney Studios moved to a newly constructed, spacious lot in Burbank, California. The move, logical and necessary, was accompanied by collateral damage. Expansion diluted the elbow-rubbing pressure-cooker of talent and energy that had gilded Disney’s golden age. Additionally, the commencement of another World War, even before America joined the fight, saw Disney’s foreign release markets severed by 40%, which resulted in commercial failure for Pinocchio and Fantasia. Suddenly, Disney could no longer afford to dole out the across-the-board bonuses of more prosperous times. Pay-cuts and layoffs ensued. Attempting to ameliorate the stark reality, Disney implemented salary adjustments, in effect compensating (variably and arbitrarily) those he felt more deserving. Pay structures became lopsided and resentment began to build. Many of the artists joined the Screen Cartoonists Guild and temperatures on both sides of the dispute began to flare. Escalating in every wrong way possible, on May 29, 1941, Disney staffers, Virgil Partch included, went on strike. The strike was only resolved several weeks later, when, on behalf of the U.S. Department of State, Disney went on a goodwill tour of Latin America with a group of employees and a federal mediator stepped in to resolve the disputes. Ultimately finding in favor of the Guild on each issue, the matter was finally settled and a new contract was signed … but the damage was done. Friends had become foes, and although emotional and psychological scars endured, work once again commenced at the Mouse Factory. A few months later, Virgil Partch sauntered into a bar near the Disney Studios in Burbank. It would be a drink-laced occasion that would change the course of his life forever.

ABOVE LEFT: A cariature of Frank Thomas in goucho garb during the tour of Latin America. LEFT: An original handbill from the Disney strike.


TOP: A gag cartoon Partch drew of Ollie Johnston, himself, and Frank Thomas. Gags such as these were commonly in response to a recent conversation or activity the individuals depicted were involved in. BOTTOM: Gag cartoon of Ollie Johnston. Many of the artists at Disney were in their 20s and bachelors, and their dates became fodder for their colleagues.




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Vip: The Mad World of Virgil Partch - preview

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