How did you make the career move from editorial cartoonist to childrens book illustrator?
A GRACIOUS PLENTY is a wonderful tribute to your Aunt May. It shows the loving relationship between children and childless adults. Since this was based on a real person, has the response to the book by children been even more endearing? May was a wise and wonderful woman. She never talked down to us kids. She had a Masters Degree in Educational Psychology, and taught for many years at the University of Georgia before retiring to Orangeburg, my hometown–and hers–when I was young. The thing that students seem to enjoy most when I do school talks, is learning that May was a real person, and that the children in the book are my sister and me. I even show slides of the old black-and-white photos of May, my sisters, and me from the fifties–(since I fictionalized the story, I felt free to leave my youngest sister, Margaret, out of the book–due to laziness on my part–I thought it would be too much work to draw THREE little girls on every page! Margarets still mad about it. My young audien
