GOLDBERG, RUBE

GOLDBERG, RUBE (1883–1970), U.S. cartoonist. Reuben Lucius Goldberg, satirist of American folkways and creator of improbable and outlandish devices and inventions, was born in San Francisco, Calif. His father insisted he go to college to become an engineer. After graduating from the University of California at Berkeley, Goldberg went to work for the San Francisco Water and Sewers Department. After six months, Goldberg joined the sports department of a San Francisco newspaper and kept submitting drawings and cartoons to its editor, until he was finally published. He moved to New York, drawing daily cartoons for The Evening Mail. At first he was a sports cartoonist and sportswriter, but one day, with a little space left over from his cartoon, he filled it with "Foolish Question No. 1," which showed a man who had fallen from the Flatiron Building being asked if he was hurt. "No, I jump off this building every day to limber up for business," he replied. The Foolish Question caught on, and Goldberg wound up doing thousands of them. Many of his ideas came from readers, fascinated with the nearly probable. As comic strips grew in popularity, Goldberg conceived the character Boob McNutt, a simple-looking fellow who was in love with a beautiful girl named Pearl. Their blunder-filled courtship went on from 1916 to 1933. Goldberg also created the strip Lala Palooza, about a woman of ample girth. His most enduring creation was Professor Lucifer Gorgonzola Butts, the inventor of marvelously complicated contraptions designed to accomplish fairly simple ends. An exhibition of these nonexistent and zany gadgets opened at the National Museum of History and Technology of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington in 1970. The Goldbergs of yesterday were catalogued under the show title "Do It the Hard Way: Rube Goldberg and Modern Times." There were cartoons, comic strips, and oddly ingenious doodads that might have been invented by Goldberg himself. The cartoonist's ludicrous inventions became so widely known that Webster's Third International Dictionary listed the adjective "rube goldberg" and defined it as "accomplishing by extremely complex roundabout means what actually or seemingly could be done simply." In the middle 1930s, comic strips declined in popularity and at the age of 55 Goldberg embarked on a career as an editorial cartoonist for The New York Sun and later the New York Journal-American, for which he drew 5,000 cartoons. One of his cartoons, "Peace Today," warning of the perils of atomic weapons, which appeared in The Sun, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1948. (Stewart Kampel (2nd ed.)