A caricature of my late father is framed on the wall in my home office. This was my gift to him on his 70th birthday. Seventy seemed like a lot to me then. It was 1982, and I was just shy of 28.
Today, as I turn 70, it suddenly doesn’t seem so old anymore. Funny how that works. Age, like art, is a matter of perspective.
"I like Buffalo," Barth said. "The lake's polluted. The elms are blighted. The weather is gothic. The place is full of the phosphorescence of decay." He meant it as a compliment.
Tom Toles created this wonderful pen-and-ink portrait. (There it is at the top of this story.) My father was a man of letters – professor, poet, novelist, critic – and Tom portrayed him as emerging from the book of his own life. Look closely and you will see that the book is turned to page 70.
Charles A. Brady was born in Buffalo in the early morn of April 15, 1912, just as the Titanic went under. He liked to say that’s what determined his bent toward epic things.
I was born in Buffalo on May 6, 1954, the day that Roger Bannister ran history’s first sub-four-minute mile. I like to say that is what foreshadowed my ink-stained, lucky life as a sports scribe.
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Today the Light Horse tavern will be an oasis of Western New York in Northern Virginia. Revelers will eat kielbasa and pierogis and dance to a polka band. They'll have wings and weck, too, along with Pills Mafia.
I was a sports columnist at the Courier-Express some 42 years ago, as my father’s 70th birthday approached. Tom was then the Courier’s editorial cartoonist. I asked him if he would draw a caricature of my father for his milestone birthday. I offered a commission of $50, which even then was ridiculously low for an artist of Tom’s world-class talents. (It is a bit more than $160 in today’s dollars.) To my delight, Tom agreed to do it anyway.
I brought photos of my father to the office for Tom to work from. He captured my father’s big ears and bushy eyebrows and, best of all, his amused grin. Tom drew him carrying the blackthorn cane that his own father had brought over from Ireland in the 19th century – a perfect Tolesian touch.
When Tom gave me the completed work, he declined to accept the $50.
“I would rather you be indebted to me for the rest of your life,” he said.
That year, Easter happened to fall a few days before my father’s birthday, so I gave him his present early, when the whole family could see him open it. He was properly thrilled to have it. His own caricatures of literary figures often accompanied his book reviews in The Buffalo News, so he appreciated Tom’s genius more fully than the rest of us ever could.
You need only slip down to Sahlen Field to see the eclipse come April 8. You can see it other places, too, but where else offers the serendipity of a spot where Twain once lived — and where Bisons hit moonshots?
Tom and I had a standing bet in those days. Each year I wagered that he was going to win the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartoons, and he bet that he would not. The stakes were only a dollar, but Tom offered me exceptionally good odds.
The Courier-Express folded five months after my father’s 70th. My wife and I – newlyweds at the time – found jobs at USA Today, the new national newspaper. Tom wound up at The Buffalo News, though not right away. Through it all, the annual bet stood. And each year, when Tom didn’t win, I sent him a dollar.
Tom left The News in 2002 to join The Washington Post. He retired in 2020. Some 30 years before that, though, in 1990, Tom at last won the Pulitzer Prize he so richly deserved. (You can see his winning entry here on the Pulitzer site.) I called him at The News offices as soon as I heard the good news.
“I suppose you want your $50,” Tom said, for he had given me 50-to-1 odds all those years earlier.
“No,” I said, “but now we are even for my father’s caricature.”
Even? Monetarily, maybe. Otherwise, Tom was right all along.
I am, indeed, indebted to him for the rest of my life.