March 29, 2024

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Charles Preston – WSJ

Seventy years ago a Columbia undergraduate named Charles Preston pitched a daily cartoon feature focusing on business themes to Journal editors, hoping to spruce up the paper’s columns of gray newsprint. He got the assignment, and his first cartoon ran on the editorial page on June 6, 1950. The editors used a headline from 1915, “Pepper … and Salt,” and slapped it above the cartoon.

Preston, who died Friday at age 98, once observed that “I’ve looked at more cartoons than anyone in the history of mankind.” To fill the Journal’s daily slots, he sorted through hundreds of submissions a month from dozens of cartoonists. He was looking for those, he said, that help us “laugh with others in order to laugh at ourselves.”

Charles Preston in The Wall Street Journal

He would sometimes send one back to the cartoonist, asking him to draw smiles on the faces. His comic sensibility belonged to an older age. The humor in the cartoons he chose was always gentle and good-natured, never sarcastic or snarky, which may explain why “Pepper … and Salt” remains popular with readers in our own darker age. (See a sampling nearby.)

The cartoons provide a chronicle of business history and American cultural attitudes since World War II. Lemonade-stand jokes were a staple, depicting kids musing on the perils of entrepreneurship. New technology, advances by women in business, casual Fridays—all provided new avenues for humor. “Pepper … and Salt” cartoons have been collected in 14 books, including “Portfolio of Business Cartoons,” a 50th anniversary compilation published by the Journal. Preston’s personal cartoon collection found a perfect home at Harvard Business School’s Baker Library.

Over the years Preston also contributed articles on skiing and sailing to the Journal. He edited crossword puzzles and quote acrostics, which appeared in hundreds of newspapers, including USA Today, where he was the puzzle editor for 15 years. His taste for outdoor adventure extended to sailing across the Atlantic and the annual spring ski down Mount Washington’s steep Tuckerman Ravine, which he accomplished into his 70s.

Three generations of Journal readers have benefited from Charles’s sense of humor, and we hope to continue the cartoon tradition, curated by his wife, Linda Wolf.


Pepper…and Salt: 70 Years of Seasoning

Remembering editor Charles Preston with a sampler of classic cartoons.

The first Pepper…and Salt cartoon published in the Journal, June 6, 1950.

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Appeared in the October 6, 2020, print edition.

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