Mr. Goldberg at Mr. Morgan's

The art study of Cartoonist Reuben Lucius ("Rube") Goldberg ended in 1895 when his teacher, a San Francisco sign painter, fell off a scaffold. But when Rube Goldberg held his first one-man show in Manhattan last week, hundreds rushed to pay him homage.

An especially screwy achievement of Mr. Goldberg was that his exhibition should be held in a midtown brownstone house owned by Banker John Pierpont Morgan. Mr. Goldberg had covered an entire Morgan wall with a mural entitled: Automatic Hitler-Kicking Machine.

On hand are many samples of Goldberg's recent serious side: political cartoons he has drawn for the New York Sun since 1938. But though some are effective, Goldberg fans spent the most time with such famed Goldbergiana as the Boob McNutt series, Lala Palooza, and Professor Lucifer Gorgonzola Butts, who demonstrates his Simple Bookmark, operated by the lifting of reading glasses, which releases a flock of moths who eat a woolen sock which drops a tear-gas bomb, etc.

Cheerful, modest Rube Goldberg, 59, was born in San Francisco, studied mining engineering at the University of California, where "big machines impressed me with their futility," designed sewers and water mains for San Francisco. His career as sewer designer ended in 1906 when the city's great earthquake destroyed its (and his) sewage system.

Rube went to New York, got a job illustrating sports for the Evening Mail. One day he filled out his space with Foolish Question No. 1, showing a man who had fallen from the Flatiron Building being asked by a bystander if he were hurt. (Answer: "No, I jump off this building every day to limber up for business.")

Foolish Questions started Goldberg toward a 1915 salary of $25,000 a year. The Hearst syndicate immediately offered him $50,000. The Mail beat this bid and during the next 15 years, from the Mail and from syndication, Goldberg earned more than $1,500,000.

Goldberg's ambition has always been to write, to become the "H. G. Wells of this country." But he was "tickled to death to break the continuity" when the New York Sun hired him in 1938 as its first political cartoonist in 18 years. Said Rube: "I never wanted to be the fellow who got the medal for being the Oldest Employe." Today his hobbies consist of "standing, sitting, breathing." Of his first exhibition he says simply: "Very dignified and well done."

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