Preview the book online!

Publisher: Clemson University Digital Press
Year: 2006
Author/Illustrator: Kate Salley Palmer
Reading Level: Adult
ISBN: 097712634X

Some of Kate's more recent cartoons and caricatures are now available on AAEC's website!

Growing Up Cartoonist
in the Baby-Boom South:
A Memoir and Cartoon Retrospective

In Growing Up Cartoonist in the Baby-Boom South, Kate Salley Palmer relates her unique and often funny adventures as a political cartoonist. Her memoir, which took her 20 years to write, was published by Clemson University Digital Press in 2006 and is available in both print and electronic editions. (View the electronic edition on CUDP's website, or order a print copy from our order page.)

Growing up in Orangeburg, SC, in the 1950s and ’60s, Kate was cursed with a short attention span and a tendency to daydream, piddle, and generally goof off. She was always getting called down in class and sent to detention hall—the only girl in a room full of boys—and was a minor scandal to her family. Kate felt at home among the class clowns and back-row snickerers, though; and, strangely enough, these early experiences turned out to be ideal preparation for her future cartooning career.

In the early 1970s, Kate began cartooning uncontrollably, and she started selling a few of the cartoons she couldn’t stop drawing to whatever local newspapers would buy them. In 1975, The Greenville News hired her part-time. She was, it turned out, that paper’s first-ever political cartoonist. By the next year, the News was running her cartoons regularly, making her South Carolina’s first full-time political cartoonist—and, she discovered, one of only two women then employed as full-time political cartoonists in all of North America. She had inadvertently become a trailblazer.

Growing Up Cartoonist in the Baby-Boom South is part funny, bittersweet memoir, part visual romp, with fully half of its pages devoted to reproductions of Kate’s cartoons and drawings—including several recent creations appearing in print for the first time. The cartoons are arranged chronologically by year, making it easy to follow the development of political and social issues over time. Despite the passage of years or even decades, however, Kate’s cartoons still pack a punch.

Growing Up Cartoonist online (Clemson University Digital Press)

Kate's Cartoonist Profile (Association of American Editorial Cartoonists)

Kate Salley Palmer Gallery of Political Cartoons (Strom Thurmond InstituteClemson University)

The Ascerbic Pen: Cartoons from the Collection (South Carolina Political Collections, University of South Carolina)

Born to Cartoon (Cartoon Research Library, Ohio State University)

Rob Vollmar, The Comics Journal, April 2007
For a myriad of reasons, many of which Kate Salley Palmer elucidates in her memoir, [the] once-proud [political cartooning] industry has been reduced to the work of a defiant few facing an uncertain future. By these merits alone, Growing Up Cartoonist in the Baby Boom South is a gripping series of snapshots of an industry undergoing its first death-throes. Palmer’s gift for frank, clear observation extends well beyond her professional work as a cartoonist. She delivers through this autobiography an irreplaceable primary source of detailed information about the mechanics of this slow decay that will be invaluable to students of the future interested in this volatile and, one might assume, terminal period of political cartooning as a vital craft.
     ...The first portion [of the book] is light on illustrations, the space given over mainly to Palmer's formative experiences growing up in South Carolina of the 1950s and '60s....Whatever academic or interpretive value it may offer, this charming glimpse into the life and times of an unconventional Southern girl is nearly compelling enough to carry a book on its own, regardless of the fact that she went on to a public and well-documented career....
     Roughly half of the book is made up of Palmer’s political cartoons, usually accompanied by pithy commentary.  She leads off with a chronological survey of her cartoons of national interest, beginning with the ebbing Ford administration in 1976. Her pieces featuring President Jimmy Carter, no doubt more generous in tone than many of her contemporaries, are powerful reminders of the country’s frustration with his seeming inadequacies as a domestic leader. Not all of her satirical pieces are personality- or event-driven as she regularly uses her platform to comment on the improving but still unequal treatment of women in America as decades pass.  However removed from the dustbins of history her subject may be, the largest portion of this work is still laugh-out-loud funny.

Etta Hulme, Fort Worth Star-Telegram cartoonist
Editorial cartoons, caricature, children's books, and this book...Kate Salley Palmer can do them all—and do them all very, very well. And if you haven't heard Kate sing and seen Kate dance, you ain't seen (or heard) nothin' yet.

George Booth, New Yorker cartoonist
Not only does she know how to draw, she knows how to write.

Herbert J. Hartsook, director, South Carolina Political Collections
This fine memoir and retrospective allows those not familiar with Kate's work to see some of the finest editorial cartoons ever produced and to delve into the unconventional mind of a true artist. Her often biting, always witty cartoons force viewers to think about issues and newsmakers in new ways.