Gwen Ifill remembers him as “an eccentric old guy shuffling around The Post newsroom in a ratty sweater.” And she remembers how surprised she was when he introduced himself to her. He was a four-time Pulitzer Prize winner. She was a “lowly” Metro reporter.
“I was in awe of him,” says Ifill, now a nationally known correspondent at PBS.
Herb Block — or Herblock, as he signed the cartoons he drew for The Washington Post for 55 years — wasn’t just being polite, either. He wanted the young reporter’s feedback on the sheaf of sketches under his arm. Ifill still marvels at his saying: “ ‘I don’t want to bother you.’ He actually wanted to know what you thought.”
Bob Woodward remembers Herblock as “the genius down the hall.” During the Watergate investigation, Block wandered into the newsroom in search of inspiration.
“What’s coming?” he’d ask Woodward and Carl Bernstein.
Then he’d repair to his office and skewer then-President Richard Nixon and his men — again.
Donald E. Graham remembers visiting Herblock in the hospital in August 2001. Block was 91 and still drawing five cartoons a week. The publisher gently suggested that the cartoonist, hired by Graham’s grandfather Eugene Meyer in 1946, might want to ease off a little. Block, who had a cartoon in the paper every day when he was in his prime, hated the idea.
“Cutting back on his output just wasn’t in Herb’s nature,” Graham says. “To me, Herblock was the greatest cartoonist who ever lived.”
Mr. B. and the Blockettes
Herblock died 10 years ago this month. His friends and colleagues have been sharing memories of him this year as part of the Herblock Oral History Project being conducted by the Library of Congress.
Along with such luminaries as Ifill and Woodward, the library has interviewed six women who refer to themselves as the Blockettes and to Herblock as Mr. B. The Blockettes were Herblock’s personal assistants, paid by him rather than by the paper. Even now, 10 years on, they get teary-eyed when they talk about him.
For his part, Block, a lifelong bachelor, grew so dependent on these women — especially Jean Rickard, the first and longest-serving of the Blockettes — that he joked he should wear a sign: “If lost, please return to Jean Rickard c/o Washington Post.”
The Blockettes’ duties ranged from clipping photos of pigs shot from every possible angle should Mr. B ever need to draw one, to discreetly purging his fridge of old food. Mr. B. apparently had trouble throwing things away. “Okay, I’m a pack rat,” he confessed in one of his 11 books. Once, he caught Sarah Alex, the last Blockette, trying to dispose of some old yogurt. “Put it back,” he commanded. “Yogurt doesn’t go bad.”
Block didn’t take kindly to any of his stuff being moved — and he always noticed. He would explain why the item in question needed to be right where he had left it. Blockette Jill Stanley describes his office as “an organized disaster.” He wasn’t a slob, she says. He was “an information hoarder.”
The Library of Congress interviews are crammed with examples of his generosity, gentleness and goofiness.
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