Tom Engelhardt 1930-2024

From The Daily Cartoonist. 

Long time St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial cartoonist Tom Engelhardt has passed away.

Born in St. Louis on December 29, 1930, Tom attended the University of Denver, the Ruskin School of Art at Oxford University as well as the New York School of Visual Arts. 

He freelanced in New York City from 1957 to 1960 before landing a job as an editorial cartoonist at Newspaper Enterprise Association in Cleveland, Ohio, before joining the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1962 where he worked until his retirement on Dec. 31, 1997.

For 35 years, Tom Engelhardt drew five cartoons a week for a total os some 8,000 in all.

His extraordinary work attacked the status quo and the social injustices of the time, and he was seen as a champion of equality. 

With artistic precision and often biting satire he chronicled the last four decades of the tumultuous 20th century – the civil rights movement, busing, the Vietnam War, poverty, crime, big business, international relations, censorship, Watergate and politics in all of its forms.

A story about one of those cartoons published in the St. Louis Journalism Review in 2008 illustrates the influence editorial cartoonists can have on an election. 

In a 1960s election in St. Louis for president of the board of alderman, the Republican candidate unexpectedly won the race. 

When a reporter looked into this unusual occurrence, many pointed to an Engelhardt cartoon that depicted the Democratic candidate tiptoeing up city hall steps, shoes in hand, toward a dark city hall, a darker cloud hovering above. 

The caption read: “Coming into the home stretch.”