Cartooning: To Make Them Laugh

At 55, an age that sets many men to looking wistfully ahead toward retirement, Reuben Lucius Goldberg embarked on a new career. Into limbo he chucked Boob McNutt, Mike and Ike —They Look Alike, and Professor Lucifer Gorgonzola Butts, the not-so-mad inventor who gave the world such useful devices as the stamp-licking machine. In the next 26 years, Rube Goldberg produced some 5,000 editorial cartoons. But his heart was never really in his work. And last week, at 80 — an age that sets most men to peering wistfully back toward their youth — Goldberg embarked on a new...

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