It's Better with Your Shoes Off

Hey, here I am again.
And I'm coming back with Ann Cleveland's most popular book It's Better with Your Shoes Off. I get an issue a while ago in my first and only-to-date trip to NYC. To all of those who are unaware of Cleveland, Mike Lynch dedicated a great post to her on his blog (in there you'll see the same pages I bring to you now). And here's a text by Tom Spurgeon about Cleveland and the standing of cartoonist women in account of a Heidi MacDonald's mini-essay. She died this past February as The Beat reported at the right time. And in there you can read a little bio by her granddaughter, Ursula. Here's the way she explained it:

"My grandmother died in February 2009 (she was born in May 1916, not 1917, so the previous age was wrong). The Oregonian refused to publish a paid obituary with a cartoon instead of a photograph– yeah, I know, my mother is up in arms about it.

Anne had a twin brother, Van (short for Van Buren; I think that was his middle name), and two younger brothers, Stanley and Harlan. Her father had volunteered as a clergyman in WWI; he died of a blood infection contracted during that time period when Anne was a girl (somewhere between ten and thirteen). Her mother supported the family; she worked at Andover as a house mother for a while, and eventually became Dean of Women at Rollins College.

Anne started out at Vassar as a classics major, and soon switched to art history. (There are several family legends about her ability to identify art forgeries.) At some point she taught a few classes at Rollins; during WWII she worked for the WAC, drawing maps. (My mother has some sketches of Anne’s fellow WACs.)

My grandfather’s name is Augustus R. White; to this day, he says that he married Anne because she was the most brilliant woman he’d ever met. Anne and Gus had two children, A. Tobias White and my mother, Susan (now Susan Whitcher). Gus’s family had lived in Shanghai before the War, and maintained business interests in Japan afterwards; that’s why Anne spent time in Japan (where my mother was born).

I understand that in addition to the books, which one can buy on Amazon, Anne published some cartoons in the New Yorker, but I have not yet tracked them down . . .

Anne & Gus divorced c. 1965. After that, Anne spent a couple of years in New York, battling depression, then moved to Ashland, Oregon. She lived in Ashland until the early 1980s, until she moved to Baltimore to be closer to my mother; she moved back to Portland, Oregon with my family in 1992."

I'll bring you the book in full in succecive posts. The scans belongs to a seventeeth printing, year 1967. As always, click on images to enlarge. Enjoy!