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Marschall: Not many did in those days.
Hart: There were four or five musketeers there -- myself and Mell Lazarus, Al Jaffee, Arnie Roth, and . . . David Gantz, did Don Q?
Marschall: Dudley D back then.
Hart: Dudley D, yeah, so that was their stable of guys.
Marschall: And some old-timers. You had Harry Haenigsen's two strips, Penny and Our Bill. Mr. And Mrs. was still running, the old Clare Briggs strip; Kin Platt was drawing it when B.C. started. You overlapped. It was a very interesting section -- these new, hip strips and these old, moldy leftovers, all in the same section. And Peanuts ran in the Trib.
Hart: That's what I was remembering, because all of us were brand new, Arnie and all, we were just starting. Al Jaffee and Arnold Roth went down with their features, in my estimation, because of syndicate meddling. Al had a strip called Tall Tales. It's a thing that syndicates do, and they may be right but they'll never prove it by me, is when they say that you have to have an established, recognizable character with a name. Now Al's was a pantomime strip that didn't have established characters. They tried to make Al change and they did the same thing to Arnie with Poor Arnold's Almanac. I thought Jaffee was great. You know, the hardest things in the world is to do is a pantomime strip, sustain it, keep it up. I think Jaffee did it very well. Anyway, once they started meddling, they started losing papers.
Marschall: As you're pointing out, you were all, maybe not avant garde, but you were all doing fresh stuff, probably more than any of the big syndicates' strips at that time. Did Harry Welker or Sylvan Barnettt have their heads on right or was it that they knew their home paper was really dying, and they were just really desperate for new features, new blood?
Hart: That's why Harry was hired, to beef up their comic pages. That's what he told me. I think the whole paper [the Herald-Tribune] was on the ropes. I just knew that I was getting a chance to something that I had always wanted to do. I knew nothing about New York newspapers; having heard about it later, it was a home for alcoholics, the old New York Herald-Tribune. The first thing that we did when we got there was, we'd all go piling downstairs to Blake's. Walt Kelly was always hanging around down there at the bar. Sometimes I'd join in with him, not every night, but after they'd been there all day they'd start singing harmony and I'd join in with him, and it would be a lot of fun.
Marschall: That used to come with the territory, didn't it, drinking and cartooning in the old days?
Hart: We used to fall into it because everybody loved to do that. Sit around all afternoon, be one of the guys. Listen, it was cool with me. I was a young dude, this was all new with me, my big chance, hanging out with these guys, drinking booze, singing songs.
Marschall: What kind of a list did you have with the Trib? Did they sell it well?
Hart: They started with 30 newspapers. Pretty good ones. In those days that was pretty reputable. Because they called me up and said you've got 30 newspapers now, you can quit the day job. No, they started with the 30 and it was about six months later that they started the Sunday; they waited to see what would happen.
Marschall: Before we leave your pre-syndicate days, I'd like to ask about your Christian commitment. Did that start early?
Hart: My mom and dad didn't go to church except on Christmas and Easter but they made sure that I went to Sunday School. At least they started me off in that direction, so I used to go to Sunday School when I was a kid -- and didn't learn anything there, either! [laughs] I don't know where my mind has been all of my life. Someday I'm going to find it. And when I do, I know I'm going to be disappointed. Unquote, Jackie Leonard.
I was always totally intrigued and fascinated by Bible stories but never really got into them and never really totally understood what it was totally about, but my mother and father were good people and so was I. I tried to get serious about going to church, being a good Christian. But I never got into the Bible . . .
Marschall: What church was it? What denomination?
Hart: It was Methodist. Recently when we moved out here, see -- everything comes out now -- it was orchestrated by God. That's why we moved out here, to get away from the kind of life that we were leading -- because we were just going along with the happy times, you gotta party, can't have any fun unless you drink, that kind of thing. And you were just kind of miserable all your life and didn't realize it. And trying to get rid of all that misery in the obvious ways that people do: "Oh, the Super Bowl this weekend! Now we're really going to have fun!" "What's next week?" "I don't know! What are we going to do?" "Shoot up!" It's a weird life and people are missing it. But I thank God that somehow I was directed in this direction. When came out here to live where we are living, we lost communication with the world, sort of, television-wise.
Marschall: You moved from where to . . .?
Hart: We moved from Endicott and moved 30 miles up. Out in the country, in the middle of nowhere.
Marschall: And when was this?
Hart: This was in 1977. Just shortly after that, a friend of mine -- my carpenter who used to work for me in Endicott -- used to come out here and work for me here. Some guys came by and asked if they could set up a satellite in the vacant lot next door so they could set up a tent and have people come by and visit it so they could sell satellite systems, which were fairly new then. So he asked me it I would like to see one. Bobby and I went in and bought a system. So those guys came out here and looked at the 150 acres. We had to run a line like 1,500 feet from the house and bury it underground, all this wacky stuff, and these guys had never installed anything like this before. So they came out here and they began to live with us, staying at the studio at night; it was in the winter.
These guys were born-again Christians, this guy and his father. And they're all over the studio and all over the house, we've got several sets in each place, and they're in here setting up and testing out all these things, and they're using PTL [a Christian television network] as a test pattern. And all day long it was preaching and preaching and all this stuff. I said, "What is this? Can't you guys tune in some other station?" And they said, "Oh, we're sorry!" I said, "Oh, that's OK." And then I began to see Kenneth Copeland come on and I'd drop my pen and start watching, and suddenly I'm having favorite preachers. So when those guys left, this was my favorite channel! I said, "I wonder what made them come in here and do that?" Like I didn't know! This whole thing was orchestrated by God.
