The Baltimore Sun from Baltimore, Maryland • 49

THE SUN, Sunday, September 30, 1979 The National Challenge But I didn't see the movie' IU J. IIAXTKK one another and give one another awards. "The comics pages, after all, are virtually the only ones in the newspaper where we can, without compromising our own or our newspaper's integrity, give the reader precisely what he or she wants," Tom Wark of the Philadelphia Inquirer said in remarks before the Newspaper Comics Council last spring. "Our job as editors is to find out as certainly as our resources-permit what the readers do want." Accordingly, at the newspapers' level, the science of "comic strip management" has supplanted the old-fashioned seat-of-the-pants strip buying habits editors indulged themselves in when newsprint was cheap. Three distinct "reader clusters" are identified.

One group, chiefly older readers, gravitates to dramatic serials such as "Brenda Starr" or "Rex Morgan, A second group likes the "sophisticated" humor strips of "Doonesbury" or "B.C."; a third prefers "light" humor, those one-shot chuckles that one digests, passes over and forgets in a few seconds. Reader surveys and data-processing techniques are employed to help editors select a proportionate number of features for each group. Adjustments are made for this and that factor. If "Tank McNamara," for exam- The editor who cannot buy "Beetle Bailey" or "Hagar. The Horrible," either because he cannot afford it or becaiisean-other area paper holds territoriaexclu-sivity, can buy "Boner's Ark" or "Sam and Silo." also products of the prolific Mort Walker-Dik Browne shop and done in the same gentle style.

The editor who cannot buy "B.C." can buy "Crock." If "Peanuts" is no't'1avail-able, "Fred Basset" certainly is, assuming the editor thinks "Peanuts" is about dog who talks to himself. "It's all essentially the same product," observes the aggrieved Gil Kane. "You have to adhere to acceptable formulas or you don't sell your material." So it is that in this technocratic day the artist has little or nothing to do with a unique American art form. enough, the readers the reasons, bne would think, the form exists to begijTpith are only peripherally involved. "Well, you know," says Mr.

Kane, romantic naif in the jungles of thewprjd, "the best work done is the standard-you have to judge the form by. And people are worth 50,000 peoplc-who don't care. J'V "It is possible for newspaper strips to be individual and intelligent and provoca- Continued from Page I 1970's the newsprint-crunched newspapers began to demand that smaller strips be provided. Smaller strips meant the syndicates had to go to their cartoonists and demand fewer panels, less background detail, larger dialogue balloons with fewer words in them. Those conditions effectively limited the cartoonist's ability to build a gag or to construct a cogent dramatic narrative.

Today, editors complain to syndicate executives that the comics somehow don't seem to be as good as they used to be. Daily strips have already been reduced in size about as much as they can possibly be, but resourceful new methods of reducing Sunday comics seem to be devised every week; running five or six features per page is no longer uncommon. Form dictates substance: Virtually across the board, cartoonists are obliged to incorporate throw-away panels into their Sunday strips so that a paper can throw as much as half of the feature away if that's what it cares to do. "The customer is always right," sighs Bill Yates, comics editor at King Features Syndicate. "You can't sell cornflakes and tell people how to eat them." ii 1 Hi World of funnies.

No laughing matters Your challenge this week is to come up with a capsule summary of a well-known movie, based on ignorance of the movie. Examples: "Harry and The Lone Ranger is unmasked and bums around the country with his sidekick. "Save the A gripping tale of a little boy who saves his last animal cracker for his starving sister. "Butterfield A historical account of the Watergate whistle-blower and his seven loyal aides. "Around the World in 80 An elderly couple on a fixed income take a cruise aboard a tramp steamer.

First Prize: A National Challenge tote bag. Second Prize: A National Challenge T-shirt. Send your entry (one a person) on a "postcard to: National Challenge No. 144, care of the Baltimore Sunday Sun, GPO Box 2340. New York, Y.

10001. Your name and address must appear neatly on the same side of the postcard as your entry. Entries must be received by Monday, October 8. Decisions by the editor are final and all entries become the property of the National Challenge. Here are the results of National Challenge No.

137, in which you were to provide a creative headquarters for any well-known organization. Sioux City, Iowa, was this week's big city, followed by every little burg in America. As always with many duplicates, honorable mentions go to the earliest postmarks. FIRST PRIZE: The Red Cross East Berlin. Herman R.

Weber, Pasadena, Texas Council on Wage and Price Stability Fantasy Island. Luke Branchan, Joliet, 111. SECOND PRIZE: The Mayo Clinic Rye, N.Y. Mordechai Itzkowitz, Baltimore Weight Watchers Calcutta. Albina Paulman, Reston, Va.

Avis Rent-a-Car El Segundo, Calif. John Van Canneyt, Roseville, Mich. HONORABLE MENTIONS: Corleone Olive Oil Importers Horse-heads. N.Y David E. Lee, Arlington, Va.

Upjohn Pharmaceuticals Downers Grove, 111. Jill Miller, Kenmore, N.Y. Slinky Toy Company Palm Springs, Calif. Jackie Shane, Chicago Playboy, Inc. Round Bottom, Ohio.

Janet Olson Fort Wayne, Ind. Simoniz Lackawaxen, Pa. Bob Rotz, Newville, Robin Weiss, Dayton, Ohio The American Kennel Club Paw Paw, Mich. Laura Williams, Belleville, Mich. Internal Revenue Service Buzzards Bay, Mass.

Jodi Covert, Perrysburg, N.Y. Nine Lives Morristown, Tenn. Bertha Berg, Okeechobee, Fla. The Moonies The Moon. Louis Porter, Bellwood, George Wagner, Chicago National Basketball Association Big Sur.

Calif. Earl Goldberger, Silver Spring, Md. U.S. Office of Economic Management -Little Hope, Wis. Matthew L.

Kelly, Madison, Wis. Playtex Cleveland, Ohio (branch Office in Sag Harbor, N.Y.). Mrs. D. J.

Kiah, Tantallon, Md. Johnson Johnson Wounded Knee, S.D. John W. Goldsberry, Kirkwood, Mo. La-Z-Boy Reston, Va.

Toni Vollmers, Reston, Va. Bell Telephone Caldwell, N.J. Syd "El Cid" Goldfield, Pikesville Disneyland Washington, D.C. Marianne Pitts, Hay ward, Calif. Republican Nominating Committee Piccadilly, Canada Priscilla Walker, Hydes, Md.

American Psychiatric Association Nut-ley. N.J. Joyanna Silberg, Baltimore AMA Mesick, Mich. Patricia J. Davis, Aberdeen, Md.

Witness Protection Program New Haven, Conn. Bob Sloan. Williamsville, N.Y.; Ray Scott, St. Louis Xerox Corp. New York, New York Mary Jo Lodge, Owings Mills Readers Digest NY, NY Jennifer Creasy, Winchester, Va.

NORML Point Pleasant, W.Va. Laurie Levinson, Greenbelt, Md. Chrysler Corp. Santa Claus, Ind. Lou and Katie Cook, Alexandria, Earle Harvey, Aberdeen, Md.

Warner Undergarments South Bend. Ind. Florence E. Flint, Chicago Jack Daniels Distillery Beltsville, Md. Bern Saxe, Fairfax, Va.

United Auto Workers Strykersville, N.Y. Nancy Nicholson, Edgewater, Md. OPEC Shaft, Pa. Carol "Pat" Smith, Arlington Heights, Anthony R. Mendenhall, Springfield, Ohio Ford Motor Co.

Chevy Chase, Md. June Dunnick, Rockville; Susan Lantz, New Carrollton, Md. out tive and still be very, very popular if there are editors who want that sort of material and recognize it and promote it. Editors get what they ask for. "Most businesses look for new ways.

They have creative heads, they have all sorts of things to keep from standardizing their product. When they're too standardized and refuse to be competitive they end up like Chrysler. I mean, European cars have their own damned market and they deserve it." Mr. Kane likes to cite the example of "Doonesbury," a brash rule-breaker of a strip that was widely perceived as a bad risk when the then-fledgling Universal released it nine years ago. "Look, I think you have to be motivated by profit," he says.

"That's the only thing. But since every syndicate in the world is using a single standard and competing for a single market, look how intelligent it was for Universal to set up a separate standard and immediately supersede all the other syndicates. "The point," he says, "is that if originality and an individualized point of view will make money, then I say that it is viable to be original." Knigh! News Service pie, rates low with the overall readership, it may be a candidate for early cancellation unless it happens to rate fairly well with some specific demographic group the newspaper has targeted, in which case it 'will probably stay. What goes and something surely will, if an editor plans to pick up a new feature for which he has decided he otherwise has no room will be that strip 'whose disappearance will infuriate the 'fewest number of targeted readers. Theoretically all this makes everyone happy, i The system is workable enough when the issue is deciding what existing strip to 'drop, but patently useless when the issue is deciding which new one to take on.

Some newspapers query their readers about what new strips they'd like to see, a practice that is well-intentioned but fatally flawed: The readers, of course, have no idea what features are available. What will sell At the syndicates' level, in turn, the name of the game is developing material that is not necessarily what anyone thinks the public might enjoy, but what is most likely to be bought by an editor concerned with managing his reader clusters. The new "Doonesbury" contract marks the first modern-times occasion that anyone has ever told the customer how he must eat his cornflakes. It's a measure of the syndicate business's prevailing timid-'ity that Garry Trudeau's action to preserve the integrity of his creative product is universally viewed as dangerous. It's dangerous, of course, because it might work and then other cartoonists might make the same demand.

Mr Yates, as it happens, is a former working cartoonist himself and old sympathies run deep despite the temperance expected of a syndicate editor. In an unguarded moment he allows himself to say out loud what everyone really thinks. "Sometimes when I read the newspaper and I see the comics reduced down to such postage-stamp size and I hear that they don't have the space, I look through that paper and I see all sorts of garbage, fillers, little factual tidbits that nobody gives a damn about, stories about something that happened in Bangor, Maine, or something. I can't see how they make such a fuss about a comic strip." Editors, actually, love to fuss with their comic strips. Editors commission surveys and attend seminars and address Merrill Lynch Bull Run, Va.

Marlon Holland, Chevy Chase, Corky Schwartz, Deerfield, 111. FOCUS DRY STfCXS OVER MY PEAP BOPY" "YOU SET OFF THE SMOKE ALARMS NEXT POOR TOO." "I SEE A PUCKER OF FUME, WOULP YOU LIKE ME TO CALL THE PHOTOGRAPHERS Jackson Mitchell, and two of the finalists are from the medical world. A single person in emergency services, Lt. Violet Hill Whyte, a 1915 Douglass high grad and the city's first black policewoman (in 1937!) is represented. The fire department struck out.

Other life roles with a single representative included Robert Embry, in government service; Spiro Malas in opera; William Boucher 3d in planning; Louis Fabian Bachrach in photography; Stuart Symington as a United States senator; Gen. Hiram D. Ives in the military; Virginia Kiah Jackson in art and museum affairs, and Katherine Mahool Fowke in advertising. Amazingly, in sports-crazed Baltimore, only a single sports finalist emerged from the city high school system, the Detroit Tigers great Al Kaline, a 1953 graduate of Southern high. Yet a thumping eight finalists ended up as judges, a list headed by Justice Thurgood Marshall of the the Supreme Court.

How did various high schools and the ancient City-Poly feud fare in the lists? We count one great each for Patterson, Southern and Dunbar, followed by a Niagara of folk from larger and older units. Eastern (seven) and Western (nine) graduates are fairly evenly matched. The Forest Park greats number six, including its well-known entertainment dynasty, plus two judges. In the City-Poly rivalry, it is City all the way, with 14 greats, versus a mere 9 for Baltimore Polytechnic. Our last ramble was in search of a "vintage year" for public high school grads.

Fabian Bachrach and H. L. Mencken were a class apart at Poly in the 1890's, as is well known. Lida Lee Tall, Towson State president from 1920 to 1938, and Anita Rose Williams, a pioneer social worker, both were 1891 grads. There was a steady trickle of greats through the "nineteen oughts," then several undeniably vintage years in the World War I era: three greats for 1915.

then a stunning turnout for 1918, one of the great years of the century, including Dr. J. Harold Lampe at Poly; Joseph Meyerhoff, Judge R. Dorsey Watkins and Stuart Symington at City, and stage and screen star Mildred Dunnock at Western. The 1950 and 1960's were especially strong in furnishing greats to the entertainment world, but nothing recent equals the last of the great vintage years, 1927, with four entries: actor Avon Long, civil rights attorney Juanita Jackson Mitchell and two pioneering lady scientists who literally hitched their wagons to a star, as tronomer Emma Ruth Hedeman and Harvard College Observatory associate Margaret N.

Lewis, the space science physicist. What should the class of 1980 aspire to if they expect to be lauded in a rundown of public school greats in 2024 A.D.? It's perfectly obvious: they must enter politics through the entertainment field, then finish out their years of service as a judge. And, of course, they must hitch their wagon to a star. You asked for it, you got it all wool Our yearnings for a Greek fisherman's cap and the apparent local dearth thereof in denim models (Focus, September 16) have struck a mother lode: "Why worry about finding a Greek fisherman's hat by Levi in denim, yet when you can buy the real thing from us at the Annuniciation Cathedral? We have them in 100 per cent wool, made especially for us in Greece and selling for only $8. And yes, you've seen these for sale elsewhere for from $10.95 to $13.95." This is the happy announcement of Mary B.

Kiladis of the Greek Orthodox Cathedral of the Annunciation on Preston street. She adds that the caps will be buyable at the annual "Athenian Agora" weekend on the church grounds from November 2 to 4. Since the bleariest sort of thin T-shirt has edged its way up towards $5. and since $8 is bargain-priced coverage for the cranium these days, and since wool has just got to be warmer than denim, and since another treat in the form of a Baltimore winter is ahead of us all, we are going ahead and buying at the source. Take that.

Levi Strauss Inc. Now that's quick work any way you look at it We knew everything happened bigger and faster in sunny California, but just how big and fast we failed to comprehend until delving into one of those big, glossy program guides the TV networks disgorge to glorify their wares. Here is the opening of a biography about a CBS soap opera star that borders on the magical: "John McCook was born on June 20 in Ventura, Cal. Excelling in high-school academics, dramatics and government, he went on to attend California State University, Long Beach, where he majored in theater." Some vintage years for wagon hitching Everybody seems to be having an anniversary these days (Union Memorial's 125th, Baltimore's 250th), and as part of its 150th blowout the city school system has put on display its "greatest graduates." This notable listing reflects the lives and achievements of 60 once-young Baltimore scholars who have cleared the public high-school hurdle here since the first high schools opened their doors back in the 1830's. We toured the attractive result, a portrait show hung in the north gallery of City Hall, on opening day, then sat down to analyze the records of Baltimore's 60 greatest grads, with the following result: Fourteen of the greats are black men and women, or something like 22 per cent of the total selection.

More interesting, and perhaps just as significant, was the mix of the professions and walks of life followed over a period of about 120 years since the earliest "great" graduate in 1858. Allowance must be made for people whose careers overlap and who have consciously cultivated two different professions, like Clarence Blount, who has been an important figure in education as well as a state senator. Not surprisingly, the educators of today's high-school students picked a high percentage of "greats" from the ranks of educators no fewer than 11 persons, counting such diverse types as Mabel Fal-vin Coppage, the P-TA prime mover, and Dr. Carl Murphy, educator-publisher. Eight of the greats decorating the City Hall gallery are, or were, politicians, including Mayor Schaefer and comptroller-laureate Hyman Pressman.

The eight po-liticos include one city scholar who slipped over the state line and made it big elsewhere, two-term Delaware Gov. Elbert N. Carvel. You stood an even better chance of making the "great" list, however, if you tried to make it in the entertainment world (Cab Calloway, Garry Moore, Mildred Dunnock, Edward Everett Horton, etc.) rather than at the polls. Entertainment figures equaled those of the educational fraternity with 11 entries.

Seven of the all-time great graduates worked in various civil rights and social work areas, three in science, three in business and industry and three in journalism. The legal profession (other than judgeships) has two all-timer attorneys, both women, Etta Haynie Maddox and Juanita "WHAT ARE YOU AMP THE ALMANAC PREDOM6 FOR NEXT MONTH?" SMOKE BEAR I KNEW YOU'P COME." 11 WHAT A ROMANTIC ATMOSPHERE "THANK HEAVEN, IT'S THE WCORN ANP NOT THE MARSHMALLOWS." A FIREPLACE CREATES. WHAT'S IN THE REFRIGERATOR TO EAT?".