Attempted Bloggery: Was a Hitchhiking Cartoon by Charles Saxon Killed by a Fact-Check?

Sunday, October 13, 2019

Was a Hitchhiking Cartoon by Charles Saxon Killed by a Fact-Check?

Last week Michael Maslin's Ink Spill published a photograph of an original Charles Saxon cartoon hanging on the wall of the Red Lion Inn in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. The drawing shows a couple seated in a car approaching a nattily-dressed hitchhiker eager to be driven toward Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra located in Lenox and Stockbridge.The drawing gives every appearance of having been created for the New Yorker, but there is no evidence it was published in the magazine.

"Couldn't we break our rule about hitchhikers just this once?"
Charles Saxon
Unpublished?

Photo by Bruce Crocker

https://michaelmaslin.com/livenew-yorker-cartoonson-late-night-with-seth-meyers-and-david-remnick-a-saxon-in-stockbridge-mon-tues-wed-s-daily-cartoonists-cartoons/

I have a thought, just a speculation really, that this cartoon may have been readied for publication in the New Yorker and then subjected to a routine fact-check. Such scrutiny would have revealed an earlier gag cartoon by Syd Hoff from 1959, a different yet related hitchhiking scenario with a strikingly similar caption. Could the discovery of this similarity effectively have killed the Saxon drawing, rendering it unsuitable for publication in the New Yorker?