In 1951, Fred Neher packed up his family, his furniture, and a growing mound of cartoon originals and set off for Boulder, Colorado, sight unseen. At the suggestion of his brother, Neher decided it was time for a change in scenery, from crowded New York and Connecticut to a mesa looking out on the Rocky Mountains. He and his family built a house on what became 1 Neher Lane, then outside, now inside city limits, and that's where he stayed for the rest of his long life, drawing his long-running comic panel, Life's Like That, and teaching cartooning at the University of Colorado. By the time he had retired in 1977, Neher had amassed more than 23,000 drawings in his more than forty years as a cartoonist. Surviving into his nineties, Neher later claimed that if he had known he would live so long, he wouldn't have retired so soon. One of several cartoonists who hailed from Nappanee, Indiana, Fred Neher died on September 22, 2001, just one week short of his ninety-eighth birthday.
Neher is featured this week in an article posted on the website of the Boulder Daily Camera. The article is by Carol Taylor, the Camera History Columnist, and is dated June 21, 2011. You'll find the article here. In case you don't recognize his name or art, just look at the background of this blog (and below). What you'll see is a copy of the original art from a Sunday page of Fred Neher's Life's Like That.
Copyright 2011 Terence E. Hanley
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