The Museum of Wisconsin Art recently named cartoonist Paul Noth of South Milwaukee to be the state’s first-ever Cartoonist Laureate. The New Yorker has printed more than 400 of Noth’s cartoons. In the thirty years I’ve lived in Wisconsin, I’m only now learning about the role of Wisconsinites in the history of comics and cartoons.

To boost sales of a Chicago paper in 1904, Reedsburg WI native Clare Briggs created the first regular, daily newspaper comic strip. Sidney Smith’s The Gumps in the Chicago Tribune (1917-59) made Smith wealthy enough to settle in a Lake Geneva WI waterfront mansion, with a statue of Andy Gump on the front lawn. In 1918, Frank King from Cashton/Tomah WI created Gasoline Alley, the oldest U.S. comic strip still running. Six years later, H.T. Webster from Tomahawk WI introduced the character Casper Milquetoast, whose name came to symbolize a socially awkward wimp.

The Western Publishing Company in Racine WI, publisher of the Little Golden Books, won exclusive book rights to all Walt Disney licensed characters in 1933. These came to include many of my childhood favorites, such as Donald Duck, Bugs Bunny, and Mickey Mouse.

Fast forward to 1970, when Denis Kitchen of Milwaukee launched the Kitchen Sink Press, originally a counter-cultural artists’ cooperative. The press also reissued historic comics such as Al Capp’s Li’l Abner from the 1930s. The designation of a Cartoonist Laureate continues Wisconsin’s comic tradition. Can’t we all use a good laugh?

Image: Wisconsin comic artist Clare Briggs, 1922, cropped.

I used to get through long winters by fantasy-planning vacation travel for the following summer. One such vacation resulted for every dozen I “planned.” Nowadays, in addition to working jigsaw puzzles, I get through winter by planning my next trail walk. These less ambitious fantasies, for unfamiliar places within an hour’s drive from home, come true as the days get warm. First, I explored city, county, and nearby state parks. More recently I’m working my way down parts of the Ice Age Trail (see here and here).

Does joy mean the same as enjoyment? I find pleasure and enjoyment in jigsaw puzzles, restaurant brunches, and watching episodes of Downton Abbey. Joy is stronger; it’s closer to elation or delight. All my life I’ve taken joy in country roads and forest footpaths, wondering what’s around the next corner, taking literal steps to find out. On a beautiful day in a beautiful place, what could be better?

“We pledge allegiance to the flag,” we children chorused at the start of each school day. I don’t recall questioning the meaning of allegiance. Even as an adult, I find it complicated to define. Allegiance involves the duties basic to a relationship with something or somebody, whether chosen or inherent. It and its synonyms—loyalty, faithfulness, commitment—mean honoring those obligations through thick and thin.

Lately, we hear about individuals’ loyalty or disloyalty as if it’s the prime qualification for public office. Is it, or should it be? To abandon solemn obligations on a whim or for personal gain is unworthy and in some cases criminal. That’s the easy part. The more challenging question is, loyal or disloyal to what?

Most of us have multiple loyalties we take seriously. We may be loyal to a partner, a friend, an employer, a movement, or a nation. We may be loyal to our ethics or our faith. The challenge arises when two loyalties collide. What gets priority when a pledge of confidentiality confronts an obligation to prevent serious harm? What happens when commitment to conscience conflicts with duty to obey the law?

These don’t always have easy answers. Individuals have left their posts because they found the clash of loyalties untenable. Military personnel, members of Congress, and others swear to support and defend the Constitution. That obligation outweighs any other political loyalty, no matter who claims otherwise.

Image: Grove Valley Elementary School, Oklahoma City OK, Facebook, June 14, 2025.

          The twenty-fourth of May’s
          The Queen’s birthday.
          If you don’t give us a holiday
          We’ll all run away.

Around our house in the 1950s, my father sang this ditty from his childhood to the tune of “The Farmer in the Dell.” It referred not to the newly crowned Queen Elizabeth II but to Queen Victoria, who died eleven years before Dad was born. Victoria Day is still a Canadian federal holiday, observed the Monday before May 25 in many of the informal ways Americans observe Memorial Day a week later.

Why Victoria? Reigning from 1837 to 1901, she was the longest-ruling British monarch until Elizabeth (1952-2022). Those years saw tremendous societal, political, and industrial changes. Much work that had once been a family enterprise moved outside the home for a growing, urban middle class. Home was seen as a place of respite from the sordid outside world. Gender roles solidified. Talk of sex was taboo (though discrete prostitution thrived). Queen Victoria and her husband, Albert, held up the ideal of the perfect family.

Last month the royal family marked the hundredth anniversary of Elizabeth’s birth, April 21, 1926. I can’t help but wonder how future generations will look back on her era.

Image: Heinrich von Angeli, portrait of Queen Victoria, 1875, in Royal Collection Trust. Cropped.

I lack expertise in international relations, but my personal relationships have generally been positive and deep. Good luck, good choices, and good models all helped. I’m conflict-averse but not conflict-avoidant; that’s to say, I’ll raise issues but strive to resolve them without a fight. That means moving away from winners and losers, away from who’s right and who’s wrong, in favor of creative solutions everyone can live with.

As a young parent, when children blamed each other for causing a mess, I told them I only cared how we were going to fix it. I much prefer problem solving over punishment, revenge, or finger-pointing. Even in disagreement, two people who care about each other both want the same thing: We each want us both to be happy. Figuring out how to make that happen takes collaboration.

In Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In (1981), Roger Fisher and William Ury describe a process focused on underlying interests, rather than the specific outcome each party demands. If you want to return to the lakeside cabin because you love beaches, and I want to go somewhere new because I crave variety, let’s brainstorm solutions like finding an unfamiliar vacation spot with a beach.

Whether between individuals, political parties, or nations, I doubt unconditional surrender often brings lasting peace. That may say more about my temperament than objective fact. I do believe that understanding another’s viewpoint and letting everyone save face accomplishes more than preening in one-sided victory. Too bad not everyone has the willingness or the skill.

Image: Baja California Sur, Mexico, 2018. Photo by Chris Sabor on Unsplash. 

I don’t think my mother either loved cooking or hated it. It was just a daily task like making beds or sweeping the floor. We dined on meat, potatoes, and vegetables from a can, unless fresh vegetables happened to be in season. Mashed or boiled potatoes were so predictable that I could start them after school without knowing the dinner plan for the day.

Schoolmates spoke of ethnic foods from their Irish or Italian traditions. My Anglo-Canadian heritage offered none, I thought. In time I realized that breakfasts of porridge (instead of “hot cereal”) and marmalade (instead of jelly) on toast were ethnic, too.

Mother rarely cooked from recipes during my childhood. Later, when I asked her to dictate instructions for making meatloaf—no one else’s tasted as good—she had me write “a handful of this” and “that, not so much.” Even a carefully written old recipe card can lose precision through the generations. I hoped exactly to replicate my mother-in-law’s mother’s favorite casserole dish until I read on the ingredients list, "One ten-cent bag of potato chips.”

My mother taught me basics of cookery, and so did the women with whom I shared an apartment and meals in my twenties. I treasure friends’ family recipes named for people I never met: Susie’s sweet potato pie, Aunt Dorothy’s hot chicken salad. A housemate’s mother’s delicious “up yonder rolls” got their name from the old gospel hymn, “When the roll is called up yonder, I’ll be there.”

Half a century ago or longer, some women described struggling to find their voice. They’d been so socialized to be sweet and accommodating, they scarcely knew who they truly were, much less how to express it. I couldn’t relate. In my smart and vocal family of origin, at times my only choices were to agree or be wrong. But given the opportunity to write or say something of my own, wow, did I jump at the chance!

It took years and experience to realize more is not always better. Though I’ve always tried to be both honest and kind, other criteria came later. Is it necessary? Is it helpful? In my first job in the corporate sector, I made the mistake of challenging my boss publicly about a matter we’d already discussed, on which I’d been overruled. In my former academic setting, arguing a minor point forever was perfectly normal.

Interrupting is an unfortunate habit I’m still trying to tame. The childlike fear resurfaces that I’ll never get my turn unless I barge in. Another is taking the role of devil’s advocate. Multiple perspectives fascinate me. How could someone in another time or place or culture see things so differently from me and the people around me? I’m learning that a friend distraught with anger or fear may need a quiet listener more than a curious explorer. She may need my understanding more than my efforts to fix or guide her.

“To everything there is a season . . . A time to keep silence, and a time to speak.” (Eccles. 3:1, 7) I don’t have to say everything I’m thinking.

Image: Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash.

Marijuana was never a big part of my life. In the late sixties, I was married to a soldier with a top-secret security clearance. He had no interest in risking it with a drug violation. I tried pot twice in the seventies and felt no effect. I probably didn’t know how to inhale. While modest drinking made parties livelier, smoking weed made participants quiet and dull, so we left. With a child in tow, conversation could turn awkward.

Child: Was that marijuana?
Me: Yes.
Child: Isn’t that illegal?
Me: Yes.
Child: Are you going to call the police?
Me: No.
Child: Why not?

The code name “420” for marijuana dates from 1971, when five California teens met after school at 4:20 p.m. to smoke pot. One of them later worked as a roadie for the Grateful Dead. Fliers distributed by Deadheads in 1990 encouraged people to smoke “420” on April 20 at 4:20 p.m., and High Times magazine promoted the idea. By then I was paying no attention at all.

​Image: Cannabis sativa.

The best children’s books speak to readers of all ages. One of my favorites is Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.* From the moment he wakes up until nightfall, everything goes wrong for Alexander. One mishap builds on another. He just wants to get away. He wants to move to Australia. At bedtime his mother says gently, “Some days are like that, even in Australia.”

Alexander’s troubles—and most of mine—are minor in the greater scheme of things. Still, when the little stuff all fails at once, it’s like being nibbled to death by guppies. Even knowing full well that computer crashes and burnt-dry tea kettles aren’t in a class with major surgery or job loss, I can border on tears when the guppies overwhelm.

How does Alexander reassure me? Without comparisons, shame, or denial, it reaffirms that this too shall pass. Like traumas and calamities, mishaps are part of human experience. It’s not a character flaw to feel stressed by an onslaught of transitory troubles. Some days are like that, even in Australia.

​* There’s also a movie. I’ve only watched the trailer. This is about the book.

I’m finally watching the Netflix series The Crown. Thank you, public library, for lending the episodes on disk. Queen Elizabeth II’s story is filled with drama, romance, political intrigue, family dynamics, and of course history. Much of the history I never knew, some I remember from news reports, and some I’ve written about (see “Great Stink and Killer Fog”).

Monarchy was unremarkable to my Canadian-born parents. My feminist mother, sister to my Aunt Margaret and bearing the middle name Elizabeth, took pleasure in seeing a young woman on the English throne. My father sang to the tune of the Farmer in the Dell, "The twenty-fourth of May’s the Queen’s birthday. It you don’t give us a holiday, we’ll all run away!” The queen in the ditty was Victoria.

Americans are ambivalent about royalty. The Declaration of Independence is largely a detailed list of King George III’s “repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.” The U.S. Constitution prohibits titles of nobility. In spite of this, or perhaps because of it, Americans’ fascination with the royal family seems to have no limits.
 
On this side of the Atlantic, “No Kings” rallies this past year hark back to the injuries and usurpations of a British king 250 years ago. The signs at supportive rallies in Europe read “No Tyrants!” instead. European nations with constitutional monarchs are now more democratic and less tyrannical than some without a king or queen. Watching The Crown suggests that modern British monarchs may be more deserving of sympathy than of protest.

​Image: Buckingham Palace gates, photo by Mark Stuckey on Unsplash.