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Joe Barbera's unusual beginnings in animation
Those nuns put Joe Barbera to work!
Some cartoonists are born great, some have greatness thrust upon them, and others are pulled out of first-grade math to draw murals on the chalkboards of their school! Oh, wait, that was just Joe Barbera! Before he was creating Tom and Jerry, The Flintstones, and hundreds of other classic cartoons, he was simply a kid with a talent for drawing.
Barbera was enrolled in the first grade at Holy Innocents Catholic School and, like many children, loved to draw. But, unlike other children, Barbera was already very talented and had practiced by tracing and then duplicating illustrations from books. In his autobiography, My Life in Toons, Barbera recalled the reaction of his teachers, "It did not take long for the nuns there to discover that I could draw. Far from wielding a knuckle-rapping ruler to discourage me in this, they put me to work. They planted me up at the blackboard with a big book of Bible illustrations propped up on the ledge."
At first, Barbera was tasked with recreating the illustrations on the chalkboards for lessons, but that expanded to murals. "Once the nuns had discovered I could do this," Barbera wrote, "Drawing Bible pictures became all that I ever did. The nuns would bring visitors to the classroom to watch me work. I never had to study, and I never had homework to do." Getting to draw all day sounds like way more fun than learning about fractions, and considering Barbera eventually became a world-renowned cartoonist, this was great practice for his eventual career.
Eventually, Barbera's mother noticed he was coming home covered in chalk every day and couldn't do math. Barbera recalled, "I was learning absolutely nothing. Reading I had picked up on my own, but I couldn't add, subtract, divide, or multiply - a disability that remains with me to this day." Obviously angry, Mrs. Barbera pulled her son out of Holy Innocents and transferred him to another school. Despite Barbera's lifelong struggles with math, the nuns' encouragement in his drawing may have made all the difference in his eventual career.
