Autographed Letter Signed
Handwritten note from Herb Block to Washington columnist and colleague Tom Shales. Great content. Written in pencil on brown note paper, Block tells Shales "The Potatolympics (or as Quayle would say Potatoelympics) is wonderful! Count me as an entry. The sketch was just for-fun last week. Herb". On June 15, 1992, Vice President Dan Quayle visited a spelling bee at Munoz Rivera Elementary School in Trenton, New Jersey. When a 12-year-old student correctly spelled "potato," Quayle incorrectly instructed him to add an "e" at the end, resulting in the misspelled word "potatoe". Tom Shales was a frequent, often acerbic commentator on Dan Quayle during the 1988 presidential campaign and his subsequent vice presidency.
Herbert Lawrence Block, commonly known as Herblock was an American editorial cartoonist and author best known for his commentaries on national domestic and foreign policy. During the course of a career stretching into nine decades, he won three Pulitzer Prizes for editorial cartooning (1942, 1954, and 1979), shared a fourth Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for Public Service on Watergate, the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1994), the National Cartoonist Society Editorial Cartoon Award in 1957 and 1960, the Reuben Award in 1956, the Gold Key Award (the National Cartoonists Society Hall of Fame) in 1979, and numerous other honors.
This item is from the collection of Television critic Tom Shales (1944 - 2024). Shales was an incisively funny Washington Post columnist, he earned the nickname Terrible Tom and had the clout to make or break shows. Shales won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1988. During his three-decade career those in the industry considered him both a kingmaker and a high executioner in an era when network television's hold on American culture was at it's peak. Time magazine called him "brilliant, thoughtful, incisive and screamingly funny...also, vicious, infuriating, cruel and unfair". His thrice-weekly Washington Post TV column, 'On the Air,' syndicated in 59 other newspapers. The Tom Shales collection includes letters, cards and correspondence from celebrated television and entertainment legends, newscasters and politicians, including letters from Norman Lear, David Letterman, Johnny Carson, Conan O'Brien, Garry Shandling, Fred Rogers, Carol Burnett, David Brinkley, Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, Edward Kennedy, Nancy Reagan and many more. Please inquire for more information. Binding: Unbound
Language: English
Price: $125.00
Item #337504