Interview With Peter Key - Part Four & Five: "Remembering Ted Key"

By popular request I am repeating my recent interviews with Peter Key, son of Ted Key (creator of "Hazel"). Yesterday I reprinted Part One, Two, & Three. Today I offer Part Four & Five.

*AN INTERVIEW WITH PETER KEY: "REMEMBERING TED KEY"

(Part Four)
 

*ALL RIGHTS RESERVED BY Jim Manago & Peter Key. Copyright 2010.

Ted Key's son Peter answered three more of my questions...

 

Jim Manago: Did you or your brothers/sisters have much time with your Dad, or was he very involved in his work?

Peter Key: Both. My father worked at home and considered drawing a mechanical function, so he could talk and/or listen to the radio while doing it. As a result, even though he worked a lot, and we couldn’t disturb him while he was thinking up gags or writing books or movie treatments, we got to spend a good deal of time with him.

Jim Manago: What was it like having a prominently known person as a father? Did he/you downplay or avoid the attention his work brought him? 

Peter Key: My father was well known, but his appearance wasn’t. So no one recognized him in public unless he had reason to give his name. 

He wasn’t stuck on himself in the least, but he was proud of his accomplishments, so he didn’t downplay what he did, but he didn’t think it made him better than anyone else.

At school, my teachers and classmates knew who my father was, but I can only think of one instance in which someone made me feel uncomfortable about what fame he had. Generally, everyone thought what he did was interesting or cool, as did my brothers and I.

Jim Manago: What made your dad special to you or your family and friends? 

Peter Key: All the characteristics I listed when I described what kind of person he was. He was impossible to dislike and a creative force and that’s a pretty amazing combination. 

He also made "Hazel" part of all of our lives. He often signed birthday cards and notes with little "Hazel" drawings and gave us full-sized watercolor drawings of "Hazel" for special occasions, such as graduating from college.

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*AN INTERVIEW WITH PETER KEY: "REMEMBERING TED KEY ON HIS BIRTHDAY"

(Part Five)

*ALL RIGHTS RESERVED BY Jim Manago & Peter Key. Copyright 2010.

Ted Key's son Peter answered one more question....Today he offers a summary of his father's major accomplishments. Thanks again to Peter for agreeing to these blog interviews!

Jim Manago: In those final years and days of his long life, do you feel that he was satisfied with his accomplishments? What was his philosophy on life in general?

Peter Key: My father believed in treating people the way he wanted them to treat him, being honest, working hard and enjoying life, including what you do for a living. 

In the spring of 2007, he and I talked about his life while sitting in the kitchen of the house in Valley Forge, Pa., where I grew up and where he lived until his death.

He said that looking back, he couldn’t figure out how he found the time to do all the things he did. I told him not to ask me, because I couldn’t figure it out either.

The sheer volume of things he created is staggering. 

For most of his career, my father’s best-known creation was Hazel, which debuted in The Saturday Evening Post in 1943. The Post published one new Hazel cartoon each week from then through 1969, and for each finished cartoon it published, my father wrote and drew six to 12 rough versions of cartoons for Post editors to choose from. 

During most of that time, my father was also drawing 10 to 15 other roughs of non-Hazel cartoons and submitting them to the Post and other magazines and newspapers. 

When Curtis Publishing went into bankruptcy, my father obtained the rights to Hazel from it and worked out a deal under which he wrote and drew six Hazel cartoons a week for King Features Syndicate, which syndicated them to newspapers across the country. My father hired cartoonist Stan Fine to ink his drawings and I wrote gags for him for an eight-year period, but he still turned out six new Hazel cartoons a week until he retired in 1993. King Features still syndicates Hazel to newspapers, but the cartoons are ones that appeared before.

My father’s best-known creations today are probably Peabody and Sherman, the time-traveling dog scientist and his boy. My father created them for Jay Ward, a childhood friend of his brother, Leonard, and Ward initially used them in the animated TV show Rocky and His Friends, which debuted in 1959. 

My father also sold the Walt Disney Co. the ideas for three 1970s movies, The Million Dollar Duck, Gus, and The Cat from Outer Space, additionally writing the screenplay for Cat and turning it into a novel that was published in the United States, Great Britain, France and Japan. 

A 1973 British movie, Digby, the Biggest Dog in the World, was based on a children’s book my father wrote and illustrated for E.P. Dutton & Co., The Biggest Dog in the World. My father also wrote two other children’s books for Dutton — So’M I, which was about a knock-kneed, bow-legged colt, and Phyllis, which was about a sparrow that built a nest in the outfield of Connie Mack Stadium, then the home of the Philadelphia Phillies baseball team. The latter two books were illustrated by other cartoonists. 

My father’s most lucrative venture was a series of motivational posters he and a neighbor, Milton Fox-Martin, created for the Economics Press. Called Positive Attitude Posters, they featured a sentence or two about how to behave and a cartoon featuring children that humorously illustrated the copy. Economics Press published them biweekly from the 1960s into the early 1990s. 

The idea for Positive Attitude Posters came from an earlier creation of my father’s and Mr. Fox-Martin’s — Sales Bullets, a series of motivational pamphlets for sales people that the Economics Press published from the late 1950s into the 1980s. I think those were biweekly, but they might have been monthly. 

My father’s work for The Economics Press wasn’t his only foray into the business world. From the late 1940s through the 1970s, he provided cartoons for individual advertisements and public-service and ad campaigns, including one for the long-gone Pure Oil Co., which featured newspaper ads and billboards with a blue-clad, red-haired service-station attendant. 

My father also created Diz and Liz, a multi-panel cartoon about a brother and sister that ran for 11 years starting in 1961 in Jack and Jill, a monthly children's magazine that, like Hazel’s original home, The Saturday Evening Post, was published by Curtis Publishing Co. Diz and Liz were featured in three books, two of which my father illustrated. 

On top of all that, my father freelanced cartoons to a variety of newspapers and magazines from the mid 1930s through the early 1970s, and wrote for radio in the late 1930s and early 1940s. One of my father’s plays, "The Clinic," was included in a volume of best radio plays for 1939. 

My father also wrote about a dozen movie and TV treatments that he was unable to sell, co-wrote a Hazel movie that never got made and wrote a script for a Broadway play about Hazel that was to feature music by composer/actress Micki Grant but never got made because the person raising money for it passed away.

*ALL RIGHTS RESERVED BY Jim Manago & Peter Key. Copyright 2010.

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For Bill, His Pinup Girl: The Shirley Booth & Bill Baker Story
by Jim Manago
Foreword by Leslie Sodaro
Published December 1, 2010
Further details at: http://shirleybooth.blogspot.com

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Now available on Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0076ZCBM2

Love is the Reason for it All: The Shirley Booth Story
by Jim Manago
Radio Research by Donna Manago
Foreword by Ted Key
BearManor Media, May 2008
http://bearmanormedia.bizland.com