A WORD ABOUT THIS ONE

This one is for my husband. For forty-one years he went out after supper, every night it wasn't pouring, and leaned on the back fence and looked at the cows, and the cows looked at him. Nobody said much. I always thought it was the best part of his day, and I suspect it was the best part of theirs.

We have the computer now, and I will admit that I have been at it after supper more than once this month. It is in the sewing room. There are no cows outside the sewing room window, which is probably just as well.

ABOUT ME, AND THIRTY-FIVE YEARS OF IT

My name is Odessa Kohn. I was born in 1928 on a farm in southwest Wisconsin, the youngest of five, and I have never lived more than twenty miles from it.

I taught myself to draw out of library books. When I was nine my father took me to town with him on Saturdays, and the library had two books on how to draw cartoons. I checked them out so many times that the librarian finally gave me the old copy of one when they got a new one. I copied every page of it on the backs of feed store calendars. That is all the art school I ever had.

In 1962 I had been sending drawings to our county paper for a couple of years, and the editor needed something to fill a hole on the farm page. He said he would try me for a month. I drew Over the Back Fence for that paper every week for the next thirty-five years, a single cartoon with a line under it, from the spring of 1962 to the fall of 1997. I kept count in a notebook. It comes to about eighteen hundred.

The closest I came to missing a week was in 1974, when I had my gallbladder out. I drew those two in the hospital bed with the tray table cranked up. The nurses wanted to be in one, so I put them in one.

They were about the people around here, but never anybody in particular, which is what I told everybody who called to ask if it was them. Farmers and the co-op, the weather, church suppers, the county fair, grandchildren, the cows. If you want to know what a county thought about for thirty-five years, it is mostly the weather.

In 1997 the paper changed hands. The new people wanted something else in that space, and I was sixty-nine years old, and I said all right. I thought that was the end of it. Then my grandson Roland got me on the computer, and he would not let it alone until I drew one for it. So here we are. I am told I have a home page. I am still not sure where it is, exactly, but Roland says people can see it from Oregon.

HOW I DRAW THEM

People ask, so here it is.

I draw at the same table I always have, in the corner of the sewing room by the window. My husband built it for me out of an old door in 1963, with a hinge so it tips up.

Pencil first. I rough the whole thing in with a soft pencil, light, and I push people around until the joke is in the right place. Most of the work is deciding where everybody stands. If I have to explain it, I start over.

Then the ink, over the pencil. I use a crow-quill pen, which is a little steel nib in a wooden holder that you dip in the bottle. Press down and the line gets fat, ease up and it goes thin. It took me about ten years to get the hang of it, and I am still working on it. The ink is India ink, black, the waterproof kind, so I can erase the pencil when it's dry and nothing smears. Shadows I do with lines one way, and if it needs to be darker, lines the other way over them. Grass is little flicks. The border goes around last, with my husband's steel rule, once.

The paper is two-ply bristol board. I draw them about twice as big as they come out, because a line tightens up when it is shrunk down. At the paper they shrank them with a big camera. Now Roland's scanner does it.

The dots in some of the old ones are shading film, sheets of little dots on clear plastic that you cut out with a razor blade and rub down onto the drawing, for a sky or a pair of overalls. I used up the last sheet on one of my last ones for the paper, and the store has quit carrying it, so the new ones are all pen.

The words. I letter the signs myself, and the KOHN in the corner with the year. The captions were always set in type at the paper, so Roland types them up on the computer and prints them out, and I cut them out and paste them under the drawing with rubber cement, the way the paper did.

The crow. There is a crow in every one of them. That started in 1963 with a crow that used to sit on the fence outside this window and watch me work. After a year or so people started writing in when they couldn't find him. So he stayed.

A NOTE FROM ROLAND

Hi, I'm Roland, the grandson. I set this page up for Grandma and I do the scanning, so here is how that works.

Grandma draws the cartoon during the week, and on Saturday afternoon I come over and scan it on the flatbed scanner I bought with lawn mowing money. I scan it in grayscale, shrink it down to 400 pixels wide so it doesn't take forever on a modem, and save it as a GIF with only a few shades of gray, which keeps the file small. I put it up on Sunday after church.

You might notice they're all a little crooked. That's me. I lay the drawing on the glass by hand and it never goes on exactly straight. I asked Grandma if she wanted me to straighten them out on the computer and she said a little crooked shows a person did it. So they stay crooked.

The old ones are scanned out of her scrapbooks. She has thirty-five years of them on the shelf in the sewing room, one clipping a week, pasted in. The newspaper has gone yellow, so they come out yellow. You can't get them out of the scrapbook without wrecking them, so I lay the whole book face down on the scanner and hold the lid shut with my elbow.

If you e-mail Grandma, I print it out and bring it over, and she writes back on paper and I type it in. She reads every one. So far a man in Oregon has written to say the guy at the feed mill is his uncle. He isn't. -- Roland

THE CARTOONS SO FAR

New ones, for the computer:
Sunday, August 29, 1999  -  the mouse
Sunday, September 5, 1999  -  the Ferris wheel
Sunday, September 12, 1999  -  the pager in church
Sunday, September 19, 1999  -  Y2K at the feed mill
Sunday, September 26, 1999  -  the cows (this one, above)

From the files, out of the scrapbooks:
April 25, 1968  -  daylight saving time
June 21, 1979  -  the gas lines
January 20, 1994  -  the information superhighway

Roland says he'll put up another old one from the files every so often. I have about eighteen hundred to choose from, so we won't run out.