The move to New York City

Hardie and Doppy (my mother's nickname since childhood, given her by her older sister, Hellen, who later said that the name sounded like a wet dishrag, but I’ve never heard of another person with the nickname Doppy) continued working, painting and saving so they could go to New York City. At that time – and inspired by Pruett Carter’s descriptions of life there -- New York City was the Mecca for all illustrators. When Hardie's six-year Disney contract was up in 1936 (he was making a good salary of $150 a week during the Depression, an amount that was the equivalent of an annual salary of $100,000 plus in today’s market), my parents had $3,000 saved up. In June, 1936, they made the break. After a drive across the country, they found an apartment to sublet for a few months. Hardie was determined to see if he could make it on his own, so he left two letters of recommendation from Walt Disney tucked away in a trunk.

Life in New York was invigorating and challenging. The $3,000 they had saved seemed like a fortune, but it went fast when they didn't have much coming in. In the apartment, my parents had separate little drawing tables, and they would get one job here and another there. By January, 1937, things started looking up when Hardie got an assignment from Fortune magazine as a pictorial reporter to cover the Mississippi flood ("Expenses paid!!!" Hardie wrote in his diary), and then Doppy showed King Features her drawings and they sent her along as well. Hardie would talk to people and get one letter of introduction after another that permitted them to get into the flooded areas to paint. My father, always the optimist, wrote about it for the March 1947 American Artist magazine:

"I remember how cold it was even for the South. Outside of Paducah, I stood in water up to my waist painting with my board on a floating barrel. It was fun. I even had to break the ice to dip my brush in the water.”

In December of that year, my father found a studio loft down in the Wall Street area (on the seventh floor of 130 Pearl Street) with "a grand view and lots of room," all for only $15 a month! My mother recalled:

"There was a young, unsophisticated boy who managed the building. Every time we would get a letter from the West Coast, this kid would run up the stairs shouting, 'You've got an airmail letter from California!' He probably had never been out of New York ... The studio was perfect - except for the outside smells. On one side was a cigar factory and on the other was a manufacturer of cheap perfume. It was too much. But at least we got the smell of fresh coffee from a shop down the street."