Charles grew up down the street from a cemetery in Westfield, New Jersey. He passed it on the way to school and back every day as a young boy. Sometimes, rather macabrely, Charles would journey into the graveyard and lie down on one of the graves and wonder what it would be like to be dead. With that background in your head, perhaps you’d be surprised to learn that Charles grew up to become a famous cartoonist who brought laughter and joy to millions.
His dad was a company executive and a descendant of several of America’s founding families. The father was always the largest presence in the room, and he encouraged his son to look at life in a different way. His much more calm but still loving mother took him to the Presbyterian church on Sundays and took care of him and his dad during the rest of the week. Charles got into a spot of trouble growing up, too, it seems. An old, large, and abandoned mansion in the neighborhood attracted the boy, and he was caught by police breaking into the old house out of a typical kid’s curiosity. When he was old enough, the bright young man went to first to Colgate and then to the University of Pennsylvania, but, at the prompting of his father, Charles dropped out of Penn after a couple of years and attended art school in New York City.
Charles’s classmates described his art style as quirky with a wry sense of humor–“a little different from everyone else’s” one said specifically. It was quirky enough to attract the attention of the New Yorker, which published Charles’s first paid artwork for them in 1932. They ran his artwork off and on for the rest of the decade where he came to the attention of a national audience who, like his old classmates, appreciated his unusual take on the world.
But then, Charles hit on the idea of creating not cartoons that bore no relation to each other, but, rather, a series based on a group of characters. And that’s when Charles’s cartoon career began to take off. And what made it so popular, so successful so, well, relatable in one sense is that Charles used his old hometown of Westfield as sort of an inspiration, a locale where he placed his group of misfits and castoffs who somehow formed a family.
And the cartoon is still being appreciated today. Books, films, TV series, and even cartoons are still being produced based on the series even though Charles died in 1988. At the time, his contemporaries eulogized him as “a hell of a nice guy,” and a man who was “easygoing and calm,” but those descriptions ran counter to the cartoon world he created. You see, those descriptors don’t really help us to understand the cartoons Charles Addams created about his creepy and kooky family.
The Rest of the Story 