S.F.-born Rube Goldberg recalled at museum.
S.F.-born cartoonist celebrated with show at Jewish Museum
An exhibition of the art of Rube Goldberg, a San Franciscan who became one of the most famous cartoonists in the world, opened this week at the city’s Contemporary Jewish Museum.
Goldberg was a man of thousands of ideas and hundreds of mad inventions that made simple things complicated. He was a celebrity, a star in the Golden Age of newspapering. His name was listed as an adjective in the dictionary, defined as “accomplishing by complex means what seemingly could be done simply.”
Goldberg produced more than 50,000 drawings, thousands of color comic strips, and 24 short silent films. In 1922 he was paid the princely sum of $200,000 a year by the McNaught syndicate. In today’s money that is just over $2.84 million.
He got his first job as a cartoonist at The Chronicle, but quit when he couldn’t get along with his editor. He then went to work for the San Fran-
cisco Bulletin for $10 a week.
But New York was the center of the world in those days — “The front row,” Goldberg called it — so he took a train east and pounded the pavement for weeks before the old New York Evening Mail hired him at $50 a week.
He drew single cartoons and strips, developed goofy characters like Mike and Ike, two dopey identical twins, and Boob McNutt. He also had a series called “Foolish Questions,” and in 1912 drew his first cartoon featuring an impossibly complicated invention, “The Simple Mosquito Exterminator.”
Another of his early works was a device designed to fish an olive out of a jar, a normally simple task that Goldberg turned into 12 complicated steps.
His aim, of course, was to show that machines had made everything complex for everyone. And that idea — the famous Rube Goldberg machines — made him famous.
“He had a big presence, and a big ego,” said Jennifer George, his granddaughter. “People recognized him on the street and he always got the best table at restaurants. It was always, ‘Right this way, Mr. Goldberg.’
“He was famous, but he was a wonderful grandfather,” she said. “His favorite bedtime story was about the San Francisco earthquake, how his bed rocked and how the city burned.”
The exhibition at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, George said, “is bringing him home.”
A grandson, John George, said Goldberg loved New York, “but he never forgot San Francisco.”
Rueben Garrett Lucius Goldberg was born to a Jewish family in San Francisco on the Fourth of July, 1883. He went to Lowell High School and studied engineering at UC Berkeley. His only art training was from a sign painter, who taught him the basics.
He loved to draw — in grammar school; for the Lowell, his high school paper; for the Pelican humor magazine; and for the yearbook at Cal. Goldberg had no taste for engineering. “I can’t stand it,” he told his father just before he quit an engineering job to draw pictures for a living at The Chronicle.
Some people from the Bay Area came with him on his road to fame as drawings. They included cigar-smoking San Francisco politicians with big mustaches and paunches, skinny Berkeley professors who lectured on impossibly complex subjects, and fussy old ladies he met at his family home.
Two of Goldberg’s drawings bookend the exhibit. One is of a violin player he drew when he was 12. He won first place for it at John Swett grammar school in San Francisco. The other is a political cartoon that ran in the New York Sun in 1947, showing the atomic bomb teetering on a precipice between peace and world destruction. That one won a Pulitzer Prize.