Funny Business
And Wee Pals is history, we said.
“What happened,” says Nicole Hollander, “is one day I woke up and someone called me and said, you’re out of the paper. I mean a friend, not the Sun-Times, which is their style–they did it before. So [later that day] I got a call from the Tribune and they said, what’s happening? I said, I believe I have been dumped.”
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“So I had a contract for two months’ notice on either side,” Hollander told us, “and I called them and said, since you dumped me perhaps you could let me go early. But they refused to do that.”
How many did come in? we asked Duke. “I got 30-something phone calls the first day, 20-some the second day, in the low teens the third day. They trickled off real fast to a grand total of a hundred and a quarter phone calls and a score of letters or so. The people who wrote were very passionate about their interest, very articulate about why they liked it. But in the larger scheme of things they weren’t a large number.”
“Another mistake is historical. We forgot that Pogo was never hugely popular. In the 50s there was a time when it was very popular on college campuses, but otherwise it was a strip that appealed to a small number of people and it was always being canceled. [Then] newspaper editors would have to bring it back because those readers would crawl out of the woodwork.”
Trial by Georgie
