Serving Whitman County since 1877
Serving Whitman County since 1877
Milt Priggee was a suburban Chicago kid who liked to draw. Then something arose in him in November 1963.
Printed full-page on the back of the Chicago Sun-Times was a cartoon by Bill Mauldin.
In it, a depiction of the stone figure of Lincoln’s memorial in Washington, D.C., hung his head low in the aftermath of President Kennedy’s assassination.
“I get goosebumps thinking about it now,” said Priggee, a freelance political cartoonist and former Spokesman-Review cartoonist from 1987-2000. “Words inform. Pictures move.”
He will appear at the United Methodist Church Thursday, Sept. 18, as part of the Humanities Washington Speakers Bureau in partnership with local libraries.
Priggee now lives in Oak Harbor on Whidbey Island and wakes at 4 a.m. each weekday to turn out cartoons for syndication around the country along with ones for Washington state.
Three years after seeing that cartoon on the back of the Chicago Sun-Times, Priggee’s eighth-grade English teacher suggested he draw cartoons for the school newspaper. He was a paperboy then and before rolling up the day’s edition and putting rubberbands on them, he would open the top paper and check the cartoons.
“I loved to see people’s eyes light up when they saw my cartoons,” he said. “The more I did it, the better I got. The better I got, the more I did it.”
The son of an art director for famed advertising agency Leo Burnett, Milt got a degree in fine art from Adams State College in Colorado. Then he set to work on his goal to have his own comic strip.
But it was hard.
“I’d always worked for the school paper and dealt with issues,” he said. “Yet with a comic strip, what you’re doing is a book. You’re writing a novel.”
Meanwhile, he was paying more attention to political matters in the Vietnam era.
“The job of the political cartoonist is to provoke,” Priggee said. “Debate is democracy. My cartoon is how I feel on the issue. You’re a writer, but you write with pictures.”
Eventually, he got his start, a job with the Dayton Journal-Herald in Ohio.
After it folded, he started a job with the former Spokane Chronicle, which later was absorbed into the Spokesman-Review. After he worked there 13 years, he was turned loose and since then has been a syndicated cartoonist.
Today he produces five in-state cartoons per week as well as four national, which get picked up by various papers around the country.
A day for Priggee starts before dawn as he skims over various newspapers online.
Once he has an idea, he does an initial sketch, then scans it into the computer and finishes it in Photoshop with a Watcom tablet and stencil.
Before the online era, Priggee would often have two cartoons going at once, waiting for White-Out or ink to dry on one while he worked on another.
Of the thousands of cartoons he has published many have never run.
“The freedom of the press belongs to those who own one,” Priggee said. “The editor makes the decision to publish or not.”
Appearing in Colfax at the United Methodist Church, Priggee will talk about the history of political cartooning, show some prominent current cartoons and take questions.
“This is an opportunity to ask that question you always wondered about such and such cartoon,” he said.
He will appear in Colfax at noon Sept. 18, sponsored by the Whitman County Library and Colfax Rotary. Guests may call ahead to pre-order a catered lunch for $10 at (509) 338-3252.
He will speak later that day in Pullman at the Neill Public Library at 5:30 p.m.
Garth Meyer is a former Whitman County Gazette reporter.
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