(This appeared in Newsday’s Act2 section)

Hands are a problem. I can doodle. I can sketch. I can produce what passes for cartoons: An oval-shaped head, dots and lines for eyes, nose, mouth, ears; bendy arms and legs. But draw hands that actually look like hands? That’s what separates the men from the boys.

I’m convinced that for any prospective artist, the mightiest challenge is to render realistic images of those human appendages with 27 bones, 27 joints, 34 muscles, more than 100 ligaments and tendons as well as plenty of blood vessels and nerves. Years — decades — of attempts haven’t gotten me much past depicting hands that resemble prehistoric claws or microwaved sausages. Hands that stick out like a sore thumb.

Nevertheless. In semiretirement, I find drawing to be great fun. My artwork is not up to most professional standards — OK, just a couple of steps up from stick people or the kind of creations that parents are known to display on the refrigerator door — but good enough to design goofy cards for my 2-year-old grandson without subjecting myself to scorn. I can do Mickey Mouse (who, by the way, has only four digits on each hand, so that helps). I recently have been gifted colored pencils, watercolors, pastels. It’s nice to be humored if not specifically encouraged.

It was as a grade-schooler that I began religiously perusing the daily funny pages, the start of a lifelong attraction to newspapers, and I commenced fashioning my own regular four-panel comic strip — short-lived and seen only by my mother. I was a “Dick Tracy” fan. “Peanuts” and “Beetle Bailey” came later, and I soon migrated to studying the sports pages so that, by high school, I was endeavoring to be both a sports writer and a sports cartoonist. Which came to pass. Sort of.

By the time I had enrolled in the University of Missouri School of Journalism, I was mimicking the work of Murray Olderman, whose columns and cartoons were in the midst of a 35-year run of syndication in 750 daily newspapers.

Olderman — who died at 98 in 2020 — had taken a journalism degree at Mizzou, where his drawings of sports figures first appeared in the Columbia Missourian, the daily paper operated by the journalism school. Roughly a quarter-century later, I too was getting my pictures and words published in the Missourian. I was on my way. Sort of.

 

Among the establishments I solicited for a postgraduate job in the late 1960s was the Newspaper Enterprise Association, of which Olderman was then editor, sports columnist and sports cartoonist. The reason he declined to hire me, he explained with kindness, was not my obvious inability to master realistic hands; rather, that I was likely to be drafted during the Vietnam War.

I never was. And several years on, having settled into my career as a Newsday sports writer, I took another shot at the cartooning thing. At the time, Newsday had a murderer’s row of elite artists, the most prominent being Bob Newman (who was appalled by any draftsperson who couldn’t draw hands). The art director then was Paul Back, credited with having given the paper in 1968 a distinctly attractive look that endured for 25 years, until his death, and it was Back who threw my request out on its ear. Having me draw pictures for the paper, he said, would be almost as silly as having him cover sports.

Still, occasional attempts at animation fascinated me and, with more time to myself now, they have become a fairly regular practice. It’s a hobby that can be applied to homemade holiday cards, family birthday greetings, jokey dispatches.

Hands present another problem for an artistic dilettante, though. The slight tremors that are not uncommon to aging can mess with some already unsteady portraiture. Noses slightly off-kilter, wiggly edges, inelegant forms. If what I’m generating is surrealism, I admit it’s accidental.