Bob Lubbers: More than 90 Years of Manhasset Art and Music
“Headlights, Thighs, and Embouchure”
Robert Bartow Lubbers is best known for drawing many of the
sexy women who populated comic strips in the mid-20th century. It is a talent that earned Bob the
prestigious “Yellow Kid Award,” presented at the Italian Expo Cartoon Festival
in 1998
“I specialize in headlights and thighs,” the nonagenarian
tells me as we sit in the Marlboro Road home he shares with his second wife,
Siegie.
But this isn’t that story, so much as the one about how a
young Manhasset boy became the professional cartoonist he dreamed of being
while growing up in his home on Ryder Road.
Lubbers story begins in 1930 at the start of the Great
Depression. Bob’s father, Edward, a banker at 40 Wall Street, managed to pull
together three mortgages to secure a home in the newly incorporated Village of
Munsey Park.
“What a town,” Bob exclaims today. “I was 8 and kids my age
were everywhere. There were street games, just like we had in Queens’ Village,
but there were also acres and acres of surrounding dense woodlands, some with
meandering bridle paths and low lying vales.”
Northern Boulevard was known as North Hempstead Turnpike
then, and the defunct tracks of the New York & North Shore Trolley Company
were still visible in the pavement a decade after the trolley from Flushing to
Roslyn had been replaced by buses.
Groves of ancient hardwoods graced the land east of
Manhasset Wood’s Road until they met up with the newly-landscaped, Munsey Park
Golf Course, not far from its 14th fairway at Copley Pond.
There were commercial centers appearing along the future
boulevard, with the Munsey Center in development and Fifth Avenue stores opening
closer to Shelter Rock Road.
Locals shopped on Plandome Road, primarily. They had their
choice of grocery stores: Bohack’s, A & P, King Kullen’s, or Andy and Flo’s
(A&F Market today).
Jaffee’s Department store had moved from Spinney Hill to the
800 block of Plandome, just across from the Manhasset Cinema and not far from
Milo and George’s Ice Cream Shop and Davidoff’s Stationary Store.
Pete’s sold penny candy in his tiny shop which was south of
the LIRR station and across from the solid brick, K-12 Plandome Road School.
The Gay Dome bar stood at the corner of Gaynor Avenue and
Plandome, hence its name, just a block away from an Esso Station where a gallon
of gas sold for pennies. Drivers parked diagonally on all Manhasset streets,
sliding in and out of spaces with ease.
Bob started the third grade in 1930. He spent class hours
being bored with the 3R’s, and drawing WWI Sopwith Camel, Bi-planes like his
dad had flown. He created strips of ferocious, machine gun battles pitting
Sopwiths against the three-winged Fokker of Von Richtoven, the Red Baron.
For outdoor fun, Bob and his friends scared each other
pretending the Onderdonk House was a haunted mansion or during a winter snow,
they’d sled down Park Avenue or clear Copley Pond to ice skate.
On summer days they’d
make rafts, floating upon them in Polliwog Pond while playing “Huck Finn” or
cutting liana vines, drinking their water, then swinging like Tarzan through
the hardwood trees.
They played pick-up games of baseball in open fields
bordering the grand Shelter Rock Road estates and followed paths laden with
blackberries, eating their fill. They
discovered Indian arrowheads and looked for red hermatite bowls, then licked
them to make “War Paint.”
On rainy Saturdays, they headed to the Cinema’s double
feature, where they watched two movies, a Bugs Bunny cartoon, a Pete Smith
Novelty, a Grantland Rice Sports’
Special, plus Fox Movietone World News, a travelogue, and the coming
attractions - all for 25 cents.
Bob and his younger brother, Eddie, watched a steady stream
of moving vans bring families to new houses within days of their completion.
Everyone who lived in the Village remarked how the builders had kept their
promise: No two houses looked alike.
This was Munsey Park, a development created when the late
newspaper mogul, Frank Munsey, bequeathed his entire estate to the Metroplitan
Museum of Art. The museum’s board had sold 100 acres of his Manhasset holdings
to William Levitt and kept the remainder, developing elegant homes on
tree-lined streets named for fine American artists.
Construction continued at a rapid pace.
In celebration, 1000 people gathered to watch the Village’s
fireworks display on July 4th 1931, and that December, Santa Claus made his
first appearance at the Abbey Road Circle, a tradition which continues to this
very day (Atiyeh, 2).
Finally, however, the stranglehold of the Great Depression
began to grip several Munsey homeowners in 1932. They scrambled to save their
homes from foreclosure, until Munsey Park drew support from a few hundred
residents to form the “Emergency Committee of Munsey Park.” The group
“collected funds...for the sole purpose of lending aid, unobtrusively, to
Munsey Parkers who were on the edge of mortgage foreclosures (2).”
Every penny was paid back.
These are the people who embraced and inspired generations
of Manhasset kids like Bob Lubbers who was just a pre-teen, absorbing the world
of heroes around him, when he knew he wanted to be a cartoonist.
Jack Abbott’s illustrations in the comic strip, “Riders of
the Purple Sage” seized Lubbers’ attention.
Each night, Bob waited for his father’s return on the 25
minute “Banker’s Special” from Penn Station. Mr. Lubbers would walk through the
door and hand his elder son The Brooklyn Eagle. As Bob recalls:
“The aroma of printer’s ink revved me up to read the latest
“Sage” strip. There were beautiful girls in danger and cowboys, with holstered
guns slung low, who always came to their rescue. My fascination with drawing airplanes turned
into drawing pretty girls. It was a life
sentence.”
But Bob was still a kid, and he had other fascinations to
pursue. One involved a huge oak that had fallen in the woods behind Thayer Road
where Les Dittman, the first person to buy a house in Munsey Park, lived.
Bob and his pal, Bud Walters, were enthralled by the tipped
stump of tangled roots and clay that remained after the trunk had been cut and
hauled away.
In no time they rounded up their 1934 Tootsie Toy Mini-Model
Cars, and began carving roads down from the highest level to send their cars on
a zig-zag run through the roots. They envisioned a bob-sled-type path, but were
having trouble with the curves.
Bob recalls: “That’s
when Bud’s older brother, Phil, appeared, spending a couple of days with us,
creating a super fast track, that sent our cars on a perfect run every time. We
loved Phil Walters. He was born to run street rods, and we used to take some
wild rides with him in his car on the old, two-lane, curvy Shelter Rock Road.”
Little did Bob and Bud know that Thayer Road’s Phil Walters
was to become Ted Tappet, who changed his name to prevent his mom from worrying
over his days as the hottest midget, race car driver on the east coast. In the
50s, at Le Mans, Tappet drove directly behind a car that left the track for the
stands, killing fans on the spot. Phil Walters never got over that, and never drove
in a race again. Bob saw him years later back in Manhasset after Walters was
presented an award for sailing mastery. “At that point,” Lubbers says, “he
still had racing in his blood, but his victories were measured in knots.”
Before all that in the late 1930s, Bob Lubbers was busy
being a teenager in Manhasset.
He began his cartooning career as a high school student when
his art teacher encouraged him to submit drawings to the school newspaper.
Lubbers’ highlighted MHS sports’ heroes in the “Portrait of an Athlete” style
of the great New York World Telegram cartoonist, Willard Mullins.
Attracted by the clever illustrations and quips, the editor
of the Manhasset Mail coerced Arthur Wright of Wright’s Hardware, to pay the
young artist $5 a week to create ads featuring comic interpretations of
locals. Lubbers’ distinct caricatures,
of well-known Manhasset folks praising Wright’s, increased subscriptions to the
fledgling weekly.
During that time, Bob had found an old violin in his
grandfather’s closet and was soon learning how to play it in the high school’s
orchestra.
As Bob tells it: “Someone must have heard the sound of music
emanating from 189 Ryder because Joe Simmons, a trombonist and MHS junior,
called. He asked me to audition for a
group being formed by a local clarinetist (Joe Pavlica). They’d been hired to
play at the 1935 MHS Senior Prom and already had a drummer, a piano player and
a base fiddler. Joe signed me on. I felt pretty cool - a 13-year old swinging
on a fiddle.”
This was when radio was king - and Martin Block’s show “Make
Believe Ballroom,” was listened to by every teenager in the metropolitan area.
The song of the day was Goodie, Goodie:
“So ya met
someone who set ya back on your heels.
Goodie, goodie.
So ya met someone and now ya know how it
feels. Goodie, goodie.”
The song had swept the country by storm, but the sheet music
wasn’t available yet.
“So, we played it by ear,” Bob remembers. “You know, like
Dixieland - right from the heart, with some frisky fiddle harmonics. ‘Hoo-ray and Hallellujah, you had it comin’
to ya’. Goodie, goodie for you...’
Wow! That MHS prom was a blast.”
Soon enough however, Bob ditched the fiddle for a trombone
and joined the MHS Marching and Concert Bands.
It would turn out to be a wise choice.
“Ever since, that was it,” he says. “All the good things in my life came to me
through two things: music and art. One
would be my long life’s career, the other my lifelong hobby.”
It was in his MHS art class that Bob met Grace Oestreich,
who had been
born in town at 30 Summit Drive, but Bob had never seen her
before that day in high school.
The two became inseparable. They talked and flirted so much,
the teacher sent them to another room where their romance blossomed.
Then came more music as Bob worked on his embouchure.
Hearing a pitch on the Tommy Dorsey Radio Hour for brass
musicians to play in an Amateur Hour, Lubbers reported to 30 Rockefeller Center
in the city to audition in 1938. He walked down the hall carrying his trombone
and a toilet plunger cap, hoping they wouldn’t ask him to read music and hardly
noticing Boris Karloff was walking towards him.
Lubbers played “Wabash Canonball” and won $75, which his
father matched so Bob could buy a 1934 Ford Phaeton. The car provided
transportation to his new gig, playing with a band at the White Horse Tavern on
Post Avenue in Westbury.
Bob was feeling good. He had a car. His cartoons were a hit. He had a beautiful
girlfriend, a regular music gig, and an open invitation to play with the groups
who made the MHS GO dances jive. It just didn’t get any better.
Sometimes while playing at those dances, he enjoyed the best
of two worlds. He’d blast a hot Lindy
“for the MHS jitter-buggers,” then sit out a slow tune to dance “cheek to cheek
with my girl.”
After the GO dances, he and Grace would drive all the way
over to Jericho Turnpike’s Howard Johnsons to sample a few of those 28 ice
cream flavors.
Or else they’d go to Milo and George’s and get a hand packed
pint of vanilla, with two wooden spoons, for 50 cents. On those nights Bob and Grace would share the
treat while “schmoozing in the Phaeton after riding through a secret entry off
Plandome down a two-rut, dirt trail to a little beach where the moonlight
glistened on Manhasset Bay.”
When he wasn’t with Grace, he was answering the call of the
LIRR trestle challenge which seemed to have been heard by all Manhasset boys
for a number of decades.
The rite of passage in Bob’s time involved a teen boy walking
across the rickety expanse, 100’ above the estuaries of the Bay, to Great Neck
- while a train was coming towards him.
Lubbers recalls flattening himself against the trestle’s
fencing, feeling the horrific shake and the long whoosh of the train as it passed.
When it was over, with his heart pounding in his chest, he felt an overwhelming
sense of accomplishment.
I asked him if this made him eligible for a fraternity. He
quipped, with his 90 year old blue eyes shining: “Not unless it was I Felta
Thigh.”
Following high school, Lubbers followed his art teacher’s
advice again and was accepted into the prestigious Art Students League on 57th
Street in Manhattan. Known for its founding by artists in 1875 to be “run by
artists for artists,” the classes provided Lubbers with the fundamentals he
needed to launch his career as a cartoonist. He studied for two years with
famed instructors like George Bridgman, but one day the time came to leave:
“My pal Stan Drake [also an accomplished cartoonist] and I left Bridgman's
life class, marched down to Centaur Comics, and sold the comic mag features
we'd created. Before long I was doing features at Fiction House.”
Best known for its pin-up style “good girl art,” Fiction House and Bob’s
years of drawing headlights and thighs were a natural blend, until World War II
broke out just after Bob had married his girl, Grace.
Bob says what followed was an incredible string of serendipitous events
that framed his life.
First, remembering his father’s WWI flights, he signed on with the
U.S. Air Corps, even though Ken Molloy
and the rest of Manhasset’s eligible youths were enlisting in the Navy.
Bob trained to be a waist-gunner, but got swit ched from a crew at the
last minute to fill in for a radio operator on another run.
Lubbers’ originally scheduled flight went down in a German field where
the farmers pitchforked the entire crew to death. He knew he’d drawn a lucky
straw on that mission and the rest he flew - unlike the seven Manhasset boys
who never made it home from the war.
When it was all finally over Fiction House welcomed Lubbers back, a
small stroke of serendipity that was followed a few years later by perfect
timing.
In 1950, Lubbers’ mentor - Abbie an’ Slats cartoonist, Raeburn Van Buren
- told him the Tarzan artist at United Features was leaving.
Thinking back to his days swinging on Munsey Park liana vines, Lubbers
made up a sample book that won him the job and an eventual membership in the
National Cartoon Society, “where I met all my heroes,” Lubbers says.
From there, Bob’s life was sheer good fortune.
Soon he and Grace started a family with the birth of their daughter,
Wendy, in 1953 which was followed in no time by a huge break.
In 1954, Lubbers met Al Capp, the mega-star creator of L’il Abner, who asked him to “Come up and see me
at Noon tomorrow. I’m at the Waldorf Astoria.”
Lubbers waited in the lobby “forever,” until Capp finally rang for him
to come to his suite. On his way in the door, Bob was passed by a very
disheveled looking blonde on her way out.
“Capp gave me a great shot to draw with his studio of artists,“ Lubbers
recalls, adding that those years put him into a whole new world of driven New
York artists.
In time Lubbers became one of them, writing and drawing the story lines
of as many as five different strips a day. His work covers an amazing spectrum
of images from The Saint to Secret Agent X-9 (as Bob Lewis), and Long Sam - a
gorgeous hillbilly imagined by Al Capp, but given life by Bob Lubbers.
The daily newspapers had a six week lead and Sunday editions, only two
weeks; Lubbers was always on deadline for something.
As hectic as they were, Lubbers has amazing tales of the those days.
On the dark side, there are yarns about receiving Capp’s “cigar-stinking
packets of vulgar ideas that I’d have to clean up every week,” and the insanity
of the years Capp hid in a hospital while under investigation for two sodomy
charges by college girls.
But there are also bright stories about the fun times. There was the day Carol Burnett called to say
she loved his work or the night he, Grace, Bob Jr. and Wendy had front row
seats at Broadway’s production of “L’il Abner“ with Julie Newmar playing
Passionata Von Climax.
Back home in Manhasset, Grace gave birth to Robert Winters Lubbers in
1958, and Bob joined North Hempstead Country Club in 1959. There, he played
golf twice a week with a foursome that included his dear friend, John Gambling
Sr., until the WOR radio host’s death.
The years passed. Bob went to the games at MHS fields, stood on Plandome
Road cheering the marchers in all the parades, and couldn’t believe it when his
kids graduated from MHS, as he and Grace
had done.
He rode the same train his dad had ridden into the city, and came home
to the same town. Manhasset remained static until the 1980s when little changes
took away landmarks and big money tore down perfectly fine center-hall,
Colonials to build mega-mansions with three-car garages.
But Bob didn’t change; he is still all about art and music.
He has been known to scoop up the mud from a brook to sculpt it into
Grace’s profile on the spot. Once on a
whim, he created a crossword puzzle that was not only published in the New York
Times’ Sunday Magazine, but which also appears in their bound copy of the 50
greatest puzzles of all time.
He played the trombone well into his 70s, and in his 90s is working on
restoring his embouchure.
While I’m visiting with him he shows me a graphic comic book he
illustrated tracing the history of his mother’s family.
Isabelle Bartow’s tree dates back to 1683. Bob’s beautifully drawn story
tells of the Barteau’s escape from France to a farm in Flushing before settling
in Huntington, and later, Brooklyn. That’s all before Isabelle moved to
Manhasset in 1930 with her husband and two boys to find a future in the newly
incorporated Village of Munsey Park.
Sixty years later, Bob is still here.
He lost “his sweetheart Grace,” in 2000, 62 years after they met and 57
years following their marriage.
But there was another bit of serendipity in store for Lubbers in his 80s
when he met Siegie Konrad while taking an art class in Manhasset.
Siegie lived in Manhasset too, but they’d never met before - and just
like the first time he met a sweetheart in an art class and married her, Bob
hasn’t left Siegie’s side since.
We sit around the dining room table in their Marlboro Road home and
enjoy a delightful lunch filled with stories, most of which you’ll have to wait
for because this multi-talented artist is currently writing a memoir about his
days as a cartoonist.
This is his Manhasset story - the
one about a boy who loved to draw and play music who was raised in a Village
built by an art museum where giving your neighbor a hand up set the tone for
the generations who followed.
*Atiyeh, Phillip. “A History of Munsey Park.” http://www.munseypark.org/village-history
*from 2011 interview for Manhasset Stories, Vol. 2
