Top Drawer for the 'D'

STEVE KELLEY '81 is not a man to waste time. When he arrived on the Hanover Plain nine months ago, Kelley never even read a daily newspaper. Now, the tall polevaulter from Richmond, Virginia, peruses the New York Times, the Boston Globe, his hometown papers, and "clippings my grandfather sends me" - daily.

Why the sudden interest in keeping current? Kelley, who has been drawing and drafting since high-school days, has become chief cartoonist for The Dartmouth. In the six short months since beginning these labors, he has also had his political cartoons published in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, the largest paper in his home town, and the National Review. And, "while people aren't exactly stopping me on the street," he says, Kelley has become a popular campus figure through the drawings that appear almost daily on page four and occasionally elsewhere in The Dartmouth.

True, Steve Kelley doesn't - time. But then again, he doesn't have much time to waste. A native Virginian, Kelley first considered Dartmouth "when the track coach wrote me a letter during my senior year of high school." Track brought him to the College, and track still takes up at least two hours of every day. Course work is a time-consumer as well.

So how does this first-year student find time to cram in courses, cartoons, and the pole vault? "I pretty much have to balance one against the others," he explains. Though his interest in drawing goes back to high school, where "all my notebooks looked like sketchbooks," Kelley did not start cartooning until January of this year. An ankle injury temporarily shelved his track career and gave him time to experiment with political cartoons. By the time he recuperated - to begin jumping again in the spring, he "had the routine and the rhythm of doing cartoons down well enough to be able to do both."

All balancing acts aside, Kelley leads an action-packed life. A day for him begins early, with breakfast and the daily papers. He tries "to get through them early in the day, so I can start thinking of cartoon ideas." Not all of his cartoons are based on national or international political issues. "Dartmouth politics provides me with as many ideas as any other source," he says, so he follows issues like the fraternity constitution and Trustee decisions through the written matter in The Dartmouth. Kelley also tries to keep up on the work of some of the cartoonists he admires, such as Jeff Mac Nelly of the Richmond News-Leader. Kelley's classes fall mostly in the morning to accommodate track practice in the afternoon. By the time he's had dinner and is ready to sit down to an evening of cartooning, "I've got the design pretty well visualized in my head."

Kelley's drafting procedure begins with a pencil sketch of the graphic on special cartoonists' board, which The Dartmouth supplies him along with many of his other materials (at an annual cost of approximately $100). It takes up to three hours to sketch the outlines of his figures. Like most cartoonists, he keeps a file of pictures and magazine clippings showing different objects he may want to sketch into a cartoon: buildings, machines, "things it would be difficult to draw out of your head," he says. The three hours may include several false starts: "I need to improve my draftsman's skills," he explains. A cartoonist such as Mac Nelly might take only an hour or two to work up a cartoon "simply because his draftsman's skills are better - he's had more practice."

Once the outlines are drawn, Kelley adds shading by painting directly on the board with special fluids - one type brings out a light shading, another a more pronounced one. He uses black India ink for special touches and lettering. By then it is close to 11 p.m., and the cartoon is ready to be delivered to the newspaper's production plant in the basement of College Hall. The finished drawing measures approximately two feet by one and a half, so it must be reduced to size on a large production camera. Lately Kelley has been doing that work himself, spending up to an hour to get the print right.

Keliey's cartoon messages go for the "subtle punch," he says, rather than the "viciousness" of Washington cartoonists Oliphant of the Star and Herblock of the Post. His style of humor and drawing are, in fact, uncannily like that of MacNelly. The coincidence is not accidental. Kelley not only claims a slightly conservative political leaning, as does MacNelly, but Kelley even names MacNelly as his favorite cartoonist and has received advice from him on how to break into the business. But, according to Kelley, that's where the connection ends. "I see a hundred differences," he says, "in his style and my own. And - for the moment - he's better."

There is at least one other similarity between the two: Kelley, like MacNelly, hears very little from the figures he lampoons in his cartoons. Kelley tries to be careful in caricaturing College officials, and his digs are often very offhand: the cover of the Freshman Parents Weekend issue, for example, carried in an unprominent place a picture of Dean of the College Ralph Manuel with a dart through his head. "I haven't heard anything from him, though," Kelley says. "I don't expect .to hear much from Jimmy Carter, either."

If other cartoonists like MacNelly are better "for the moment," the moment doesn't promise to last long. Kelley is already taking steps toward his goal of "stepping into a newspaper job" after graduation. He has been in touch with the Times-Dispatch since January and hopes to intern there this summer and during other leave-terms, "doing some paltry job . just to be around." He plans to major in some combination of government and art, ' as well as take general courses to "get a very broad liberal arts education - as a political cartoonist you need to know a little bit of everything." And, following the most important piece of advice he's received, Kelley will just "continue to produce cartoons and get them published." "I'm trying now to work up to a cartoon a day," he says, "and I'm sending them out at random to see if I can get them published. I have a whole stack of very polite 'ding' letters now, but as long as I'm getting published in the D, it's enough incentive for me."

But Steve Kelley has other things going for him besides a talent and interest in cartooning. He's a B student, dabbles in oil portraits, and entertains thoughts of being a commercial artist if cartooning doesn't work out. "I reckon I can color in lines where people tell me to as well as anyone else," he says, betraying his lack of enthusiasm for that route. But, if Steve Kelley finds in four years that he isn't cut out to cartoon, he's not going to waste any time. "I'll be able to tell if I've improved significantly enough to make it a career," he says. "If I haven't, I'll just do something else."

There's always the pole vault.

Everybody here sees Kelley, aiming darts at the deanery or the rocky road to peace.