Bill Mauldin is in need of his buddies now

Bob Greene

August 11, 2002

Someone from the 3rd Infantry Division got in touch and said he thought I'd want to know. He said it was about Bill Mauldin.

What followed was not so good.

I'll get to that in a moment. For those of you too young to recognize the name: Bill Mauldin, who is now 80 years old, was the finest and most beloved editorial cartoonist of World War II. An enlisted man who drew for Stars and Stripes, he was the one who gave the soldiers hope and sardonic smiles on the battlefields; Mauldin knew their hearts because he was one of them. Using his dirty, unshaven, bone-weary infantrymen characters Willie and Joe as his vehicle, Mauldin let all those troops know there was someone who understood. A Mauldin classic from World War II: an exhausted infantryman standing in front of a table where medals were being given out, saying: "Just gimme th' aspirin. I already got a Purple Heart."

Baby-faced and absolutely brilliant, Mauldin became a national phenomenon. Talk about a boy wonder: By the time he was 23 years old he had won a Pulitzer Prize, been featured on the cover of Time magazine, and had the country's No. 1 best-selling book, "Up Front." Yet he remained the unaffected, bedrock genuine, decent and open guy ... his fellow soldiers loved him.

And he stayed that way -- right down to the baby face -- all the way into his 50s and beyond. I was brand-new in Chicago, 22 years old and a beginning reporter, when I walked by the old Riccardo's restaurant one night, and there was Mauldin having a drink at one of the outside tables with his friend Mike Royko. Mauldin had seen me around the hallways; he motioned me over and invited me to join them. I sat down and tried to act as if this was nothing exceptional at all, as I looked around me at the table and thought to myself: You're six weeks out of Bexley, Ohio. That's Bill Mauldin. That's Mike Royko. This is a dream.

He was always so nice to me; he volunteered to write the foreword to one of my first books. We sort of lost touch after he moved to the Western part of the U.S. full time, and I guess that when I thought of him it was still as the eternally boyish, eternally grinning, eternally upbeat Mauldin.

And then the message came the other day from the 3rd Infantry man.

Bill Mauldin needs help.

He suffered terrible burns in a household accident a while back; his health has deteriorated grievously, and his cognitive functions are barely working. He lives in a room in a nursing home in Orange County, Calif., and sometimes days at a time go by without him saying a word. He was married three times, but the last one ended in divorce, and at 80 in the nursing home Mauldin is a single man.

I spoke with members of his family; they said that, even though Bill hardly communicates, the one thing that cheers him up is hearing from World War II guys -- the men for whom he drew those magnificent cartoons.

Which is not what you might expect. Mauldin was not one to hold on to the past -- he did not want to be categorized by the work he did on the battlefields when he was in his 20s. He went on to have a stellar career in journalism after the war, winning another Pulitzer in 1959. Many Americans, and I'm one of them, consider the drawing he did on deadline on the afternoon John F. Kennedy was assassinated -- the drawing of the Lincoln Memorial, head in hands, weeping -- to be the single greatest editorial cartoon in the history of newspapers.

But it's his World War II contemporaries he seems to need now. The guys for whom -- in the words of Mauldin's son David -- Mauldin's cartoons "were like water for men dying of thirst." David Mauldin said his dad needs to hear that he meant something to those men.

He needs visitors, and he needs cards of encouragement. I'm not going to print the name of the nursing home, so that this can be done in a disciplined and scheduled way. A newspaper colleague in Southern California -- Gordon Dillow -- has done a wonderful job organizing this, and he will take your cards to the nursing home. You may send them to Bill Mauldin in care of Dillow at the Orange County Register, 625 N. Grand Ave., Santa Ana, CA 92701.

What would be even better, for those of you World War II veterans who are reading these words in California, or who plan on traveling there soon, would be if you could pay a visit to Mauldin just to sit with him a while. You can let me know if you are willing to do this (bgreene@tribune.com), or you can let Gordon Dillow know (gldillow@aol.com).

Bill Mauldin brought hope, and smiles in terrible hours, to millions of his fellow soldiers. If you were one of them, and you'd like to repay the favor, this would be the time.

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- Bob Greene comments on the news of the day Thursdays on the "WGN News at Nine."