To Make Them Laugh

At 55, an age that sets many men to looking wistfully ahead toward retirement, Reuben Lucius Goldberg embarked on a new career. Into limbo he chucked Boob McNutt, Mike and Ike --They Look Alike, and Professor Lucifer Gorgonzola Butts, the not-so-mad inventor who gave the world such useful devices as the stamp-licking machine. In the next 26 years, Rube Goldberg produced some 5,000 editorial cartoons. But his heart was never really in his work. And last week, at 80 -- an age that sets most men to peering wistfully back toward their youth -- Goldberg embarked on a new career.

"Now I'm a sculptor. Isn't it silly?" he said, but he didn't mean it. To him, his style of sculpturing is unalloyed joy, and all around Rube Goldberg's studio the happy evidence is beginning to pile up. There is a balloon-breasted Lady Godiva in plasteline -- being leered at by her horse. Under a sign reading PLASTIC SURGERY sit three miniature patients in desperate cosmetic need: a man and wife with Jimmy Durante schnozzles and a hopeful-looking toucan. They all look very much like comic-strip characters in three dimensions. Which is just what they are.

Back in Town? The new bend in the road describes a full circle, taking Rube Goldberg back to where he started 59 years ago, when the comic pages, Rube's natural habitat, were still good for a thousand laughs. They did not amuse Papa Max Goldberg, though. He had read about an engineer who made $1,500,000, and he thought that his son should do the same. Rube tried. He got a degree in mining engineering and for a few months listlessly designed sewer pipes for the city of San Francisco.

A few months was all he could stand. He quit to doodle in the art departments of both the Chronicle and the Bulletin. Later he moved to the Evening Mail in New York. There one day, after finishing a cartoon for the sports page, he found a little space left over and filled it with FOOLISH QUESTION No. 1, showing a man who had fallen from the Flatiron Building being asked by a bystander if he was hurt. (Answer: "No, I jump off this building every day to limber up for business.")

That was his passport to the comic strips, and no man ever stayed longer or showed more zany inventiveness. The Rube Goldberg machines, a byproduct of his engineering background, made him rich and world-famous. All his designs were models of ludicrous ingenuity. In his automatic stamp-licker, a dwarf robot overturned a can of ants onto a page of postage stamps, gum side up; then they were licked up by an anteater that had been starved for three days.

Maybe Better. In the early '30s, the comics themselves began to turn serious, and Goldberg's Lala Palooza, Boob McNutt and company fell out of favor. In 1938, with some reluctance, their creator turned editorial cartoonist for the old New York Sun and, ultimately, for Hearst's New York Journal-American. The assignment did not suit him, although he showed occasional flashes of style. One of his best cartoons, done in 1950 after the Russians had accused the U.S. of starting the Korean war, was deliberately run upside down. It was a portrait of Stalin exhibiting a scroll of poetry:

TOP IS BOTTOM,

BLACK IS WHITE,

FAR IS NEAR

AND DAY IS NIGHT

"I hate to say it," says Goldberg, "but political cartooning was kind of an interlude, and I'm relieved that it's over. I can't stay mad. I got a little tired of standing on a pedestal and preaching." This decision to move on was expedited by visits to Manhattan art galleries with his elder son, Thomas Reuben, 45, an abstract painter. Goldberg recalls the sculpture he saw there with undiminished astonishment. "Some of it was literally junk--old car parts, old tires. I said to myself, 'Maybe I can do better.'

"I don't know how long this is going to last; but while I've got my marbles, I want to do what I want to do. And what I want to do is make people laugh."

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