GARY GROTH: Did you tell me your father was a blacksmith?

CREIG FLESSEL: Yes, he had the last blacksmith shop in town. And I spent a lot of time in the blacksmith shop. Never working. The only work I did was when they would put the damn tire -- metal tire -- on a wheel. I would put the wheel down flat and heat up the iron, the metal wheel, and put it on. My job was to go around with a watering can and keep the work from burning when the wheel was being put on a trunk.

GROTH: Tell me what a blacksmith does.

FLESSEL: Well, see, if you were born in 1912 you were born about the time of the Model T Ford and horse-and-buggy days. We had a livery stable. If you came into town and wanted to take a ride out in the country, instead of hiring a taxi, you would hire one of my brother's horse and buggies. I remember a celebration in 1918 in the middle of town, they burned an effigy of a Kaiser at the police station -- stop-and-go station at the middle of the town. My father was in a top hat driving the supervisor of the town up and down the street. I remember horses and cows and I think my father walked the mile to the blacksmith shop before they had a car. Eventually we had a car and eventually we had indoor plumbing. We had outdoor toilets until I was about 13. So, you were taking a bath in a big tub behind the kitchen stove. Very primitive. You figure somebody like Al Hirschfeld is 100 years old. Imagine what he's seen.

[Creig's wife Marie enters the room]

FLESSEL: That's my wife Marie. We've been married for how many years? Sixty-five?

MARIE: Sixty-four years. Not 65.

GROTH: It just seems like 65.

FLESSEL: It just seems like 65. [Laughter] November 20th, it will be 65 years. She's kept me on the straight and narrow --

MARIE: ...trying my best.

FLESSEL: ...65 years.

[Resuming the interview]

FLESSEL: I thought my son was going to be a cartoonist or artist. When he was young he could draw like crazy, but then when he saw what they had to do to make a living and to express himself, he wanted no part of it. Tell a story...

FLESSEL: We had the little five-acre farm in which we had pigs and cows and chickens, which we learned to hate because they were always making a mess and you have to clean it up and you learn what manure is.

GROTH: Do you eat pigs? Was that their function?

FLESSEL: Pigs. I always have the picture of a November, October morning. Waking up there always seemed to be -- at five -- we lived in a little valley and this man came with a black hat and a droopy mustache and a cigar and a cape and he was like something out of a comic book. And he would sit at a wheel where he'd sharpen his knife and you could see the sparks when the stone, the grindstone, when he was chopping them up and they would bring the pigs out and he was the man who was going to kill the pigs. Killing the pigs once a year, that was kind of exciting. If you've heard the phrase squealing like a stuck pig, if you've never heard that...

GROTH: That's an accurate expression?

FLESSEL: That's an accurate expression. And then you hand them up and then you dip them in the hot water and clean the air off them, and clean out the insides and cut 'em up and...

GROTH: How would you kill a pig?

FLESSEL: Well, I say, you hang them up by their feet...

GROTH: Oh my god...

FLESSEL: ...and put them over this big hot floating vat...

GROTH: Uh huh.

FLESSEL: ...and then you cut them and bleed them...

GROTH: Ah! I didn't know you cut them while they were alive. I thought you put a bullet in their head or something...

FLESSEL: No. With a steer you can shoot the steer or hit 'im in the head. You can shoot them, but pigs are stuck like a stuck pig because you take them -- you take the intestines and you use it for the sausage and the entrails. You use the whole pig. Pig's knuckles, you know. Of course, you have your smoked cows and you smoke them to make the bacon and you eat 'em.

I remember the chicken. Did you ever kill a chicken?

GROTH: No.

FLESSEL: Well, there are several ways of killing a chicken, but we used to do it with an axe and I remember that I was as -- well, maybe about as old as your son [eight years old], maybe a little younger, but the axe always seemed to be so big, you know. And my grandmother lived with us at the time and we had to kill a chicken for dinner and she didn't want to kill the chicken and so we got the chicken and the chicken cooperated. I held his legs and he just laid his head right on the old chopping block and I took the ax and I closed my eyes -- I could've cut my foot right off -- and I swung and I cut the chicken's head half off. I can still hear my grandmother saying, "Hit 'em again, Creig! Hit 'im again!" In the meantime, the chicken is -- you've heard the expression 'running around like a chicken with his head cut off?' This is a chicken going around with his head half off. Maybe that's why I became a cartoonist. Anything after that is funny. Killing pigs and killing chickens. Of course, McKessin and Robbins used to ride by and occasionally they would run over our chickens, but we never ate road kill.

GROTH: No?

FLESSEL: No. We were high-class people.

FLESSEL: I worked on a boat job for a couple of years calling boats and painting boats. Again, there was no money. But at the same time, I was going in once a week to take that class at school with Harvey Dunn, driving in or going in by train and coming back -- the midnight train would get out in Huntington at two o'clock and, in the period that I had no car, I would hitchhike. Generally, there would be no one so I'd walk home, two or three miles from Greenland to Centerport.

Coming out of the snowstorm of the century, jumping off the lower left of New York at midnight, at 2 o'clock and at 5 o'clock, 6 o'clock getting off at Greenland, jumping off the train up to my waist in snow. Everything was snowed in, so stumbling two miles back home in the snow -- no cars, nothing out -- and my father and the family -- it was just 8 o'clock [a.m.] when I got home -- and the family was just getting up. My father says, "Where the hell you been?" I say, "Trying to get home." He says, "Well get your boots on. I got you a job. I'm the foreman. We've got to shovel out the whole community" because we had no snow removal. So I worked for a whole week shoveling snow. The whole community because there was four feet and six feet of snowdrift. Of course, the town went broke because they had to pay. And I finally got back to school. The lady who ran the school said, "Where the heck have you been?" I tried to tell her but she said that that didn't make sense. But anyhow...

GROTH: By the way, where is your computer?

FLESSEL: I have no computer. I never had one -- you know, Stan Drake had all fancy things to work with. He used to call his big machine Gork.

GROTH: He always had projectors, that sort of thing?

FLESSEL: Oh yeah.

FLESSEL: Do you know what a matte service is?

GROTH: No.

FLESSEL: Well, there. You're next generation. They would send out the mattes and you would have to pull the -- the mattes were a material, a cardboard material -- and you would have the line cuts made into this matte and then you would make your own matte. But you should do some research into the matte service. They were the biggest matte service in the world. They had a whole six-story building in Chicago with artists doing drawings, including McClellan Barkley and John Striebel, Hoffman.

GROTH: They would just do generic drawings and send them out?

FLESSEL: Yeah. Drawings of everything. Drawings of an automobile, people pointing, "We Want You!" Everything. You pick up an old newspaper and here were these little ads that had been dropped by a matte service.

GROTH: And they would sell them to each paper?

FLESSEL: Sell them to all the newspapers across the country. They couldn't afford to get their own fashion artists and get line prints made so they would -- this matte service is complete. It's like the DVD's, how people would talk about that 100 years from now. What I'm telling you is something that went on the turn of the century -- first World War. Afterwards each paper had its own woodcuts and made its own line cuts. Why they had this business with this matte service. Look it up. I tell you, you've got this so-called Internet thing that knows everything. Tell me how to plug in matte service what --

FLESSEL: Freddie Guardineer kept a meticulous book, a record, of everything he did, every drawing, when he did it, the date and when he got paid. And we were sitting there a couple years ago --Vince Sullivan, myself and Freddie -- out at my house and Charlie Roberts started taping it and Freddie is going through the book and he said, "My God! I didn't get paid for that one!" This is 50 years later!

GROTH: You weren't quite that meticulous, even with your double entry bookkeeping training.

FLESSEL: No. My double entry bookkeeping training, you know...

GROTH: You were the only artist working in the office and you chose to work in the office because it gave you greater leverage to be paid.

FLESSEL: Well, basically...

FLESSEL: The business of creation, you are always writing a story. Even out here. It's a funny situation. Even with the people out here in wheelchairs and one step away from the grave, they're a lot of fun. Funny as a broken crutch, they say. And meeting people like you.

GROTH: Yes, that's what it's all about. Well, I think we got ourselves an interview.

FLESSEL: Well, we talked a lot.

[Trimmed from The Comics Journal #245.]

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