To mark my 20th year of being a cartoonist in Mississippi, I thought I’d dig out 20 tales from the past two decades. Some are funny. Some are serious. All tell the story of how I came to fall in love with this sometimes frustrating but always fascinating state we live in.
For 15 of my 20 years here, I didn’t have an office, but I did have a huge window right in front of my drawing board. My view? The Capitol Towers parking garage. The editorial department was tucked behind the sports department, far from the newsroom. And for fifteen years, I watched the world go by as I drew.
Here’s a sample of what I saw:
1. For the first two weeks, I thought the door to the building was the door to the Christian Science Reading Room (which is now a donut shop). One day, I saw about 20 people come out of it, and I thought, “Damn, they have some good stuff in there.”
2. I saw one of the car wreck lawyers hand a wad of cash to a man on the sidewalk. Who knows what that was about.
3. A JPD Parking Meter officer was writing a ticket and a person came out and started giving her crap. Before you can say “stupid idea,” she had his ornery butt on the ground and in handcuffs. I contend that if she were in charge of fighting drugs in this city, there would be no drugs. I know I’m not messing with her.
4. After the Bert Case incident, Governor Fordice, with pistol on his hip, walked his dog Lance past our office. He also had a guard (which I guess was to protect the world from a very pissed-off Governor Fordice.) For fun, I put a sign in my window that read, “Marshall Ramsey’s office” with an arrow pointing toward my boss’ office’s window.
5. A guy parked with a dead deer in the back of his pickup truck. Except the deer wasn’t really dead, or was Lazarus, because he came back to life. Wildlife and Fisheries came and dispatched Bambi to the great beyond.
6. I would watch the same people walk from the Electric Building to their cars. I started making up lives for them. I also watched several pregnancies come to term. I see the walkers (not zombies) now and feel like I know them — but don’t say anything. That would be creepy.
7. During Hurricane Katrina, the metal siding on Capitol Towers squealed like bad breaks — except it was much, much louder. Construction barrels and debris also blew down the street. That’s when we knew it was getting really bad.
8. One day, the sky turned green. Soon afterward, we were in the hallway for a tornado warning. I saw many storms blow through. When the street lights turned on during the day, you knew it was time to step back away from the glass.
9. At night, I was like a fish in the bowl. If someone was really mad at my cartoon, they could have shot me then and there. Thankfully they never did.
10. After 9/11, I had a printed American Flag in my window. That seems like that was a million years ago.