Kevin Riordan: Soon, back to the drawing board
A New Yorker cartoonist has enjoyed "real life" as a Shore lifeguard for 41 years.
This resume is no joke: John O'Brien is a longtime cartoonist for the New Yorker magazine.
He's also a senior lieutenant in the North Wildwood Beach Patrol, an illustrator of dozens of children's books, and a banjo/concertina player specializing in Celtic and Dixieland tunes.
On this particular day he (literally) wears his NWBP hat as he expertly navigates the hot sand in a four-wheel-drive truck.
"This is my 41st year on the beach," says O'Brien, exhibiting another gift - gab. "I've been here forever."
A garden of beach umbrellas is blooming, and people with burnished skin are swarming the water's edge along South Beach. The sun, the surf, and the sea breeze make a late August afternoon as glorious as it can be.
"I love it," says O'Brien, a 56-year-old Delran resident, whose family ran motels in Wildwood when he was growing up. "I've been a lifeguard since I was 16. I don't know what else I would do in the summertime."
I suspect he'd figure out something - although without the beach, it might be harder to come up with cartoons.
More about his creative process in a moment.
O'Brien began working as a lifeguard in the late '60s, about the time he started playing in garage bands. His commercial art career got started a few years later.
He was a student at what's now the University of the Arts in Philadelphia when he made his first-ever sale of a drawing - a St. Patrick's Day-themed piece purchased by the Evening Bulletin.
And after knocking on doors in Manhattan with his portfolio for several years, O'Brien got his first cartoon into the New Yorker in 1976.
He's since freelanced nearly 400 cartoons, covers, and drawings to the magazine, which is surely one of the most celebrated showcases of such material in the world.
Meanwhile, he estimates that "somewhere between 80 and 100" children's books contain his illustrations. Work on volumes about Jackie Robinson, Ben Franklin, and an Italian mathematician nicknamed Blockhead is under way.
Whether in magazines or books, his signature images are sly and wry ("I like sight gags") and rendered in a style that seems both old-fashioned and postmodern. The work deftly blends whimsy, irony, and a bit of cheek.
Emperors with no clothes walk a fashion show runway, customers at an amusement park's airplane ride march through metal detectors, and "good" and "bad" cops describe their healthful and unhealthful lunch menus.
Musicians and musical instruments are a frequent theme, as is baseball. (In one cartoon, a giant windshield wiper dries the field.) But aside from an occasional beach setting - as in the one where a sunbathing cop has cordoned off a precious piece of sand - the impact of lifeguarding on O'Brien's art is mostly indirect.
"This job is public safety, the total opposite of drawing," he notes. "One is fantasy, and this is real life down here."
With six stands between 19th and 25th Avenues under his supervision, O'Brien doesn't have time to sketch at the beach. But he's always jotting down ideas in a small spiral notebook.
"You don't get stale, working on the beach in the summertime," he says. "You get a lot of stimulation.
"I like humor, and there's a lot of humor down here."
Two strains of his professional life blend beautifully during the annual Around the Island Row, sponsored by the NWBP. O'Brien designs the T-shirts.
"A lot of people down here know me as the guy who does the T-shirts," he says. "But to the lifeguards on the beach, whatever else I do, I'm their lieutenant."
Summer may be drawing to a close, but O'Brien sees no end to his eclectic career.
"Twenty years ago, I thought I'd be a lifeguard only for 20 more years," he says. "If I physically couldn't do it, I wouldn't do it."
As for the cartooning, "if I can't come up with any new ideas," O'Brien says, "I've got plenty of stuff to recycle."