Patience - The power to wait calmly with a happy spirit, avoiding extremes.

Crockett Johnson’s birthday is on October 20th.

Cartoonist and illustrator Crockett Johnson (1906-1975) was born David Johnson Leisk in New York City, but grew up on semi-rural Long Island, where he went to high school and enjoyed such pursuits as sailing and sports. After studying art at Cooper Union and New York University, he worked in a number of jobs, including advertising sales and professional football, before becoming an artist full-time. He adopted his pen name based on his childhood nickname and middle name—and because, he said, “Leisk was too hard to pronounce.”

Crockett started his artistic career as a cartoonist, and for many years was best-known for his 1940’s comic strip, “Barnaby,” about an adventurous little boy and his bumbling Fairy Godfather. “Barnaby” became wildly successful, and attracted such admirers as jazz great Duke Ellington and famous writer Dorothy Parker. The latter wrote, “I think … that Barnaby and his friends and oppressors are the most important additions to American Arts and Letters in Lord knows how many years.”

Crockett illustrated his first children’s book in 1943, and soon went to work on Ruth Krauss’s 1945 book The Carrot Seed. By that time, Crockett and Ruth had also married, and they continued to collaborate throughout their married lives. Both had successful careers separately as well. Crockett’s most famous book was the classic Harold and the Purple Crayon (1955), about an inimitable four-year-old who discovers that he has the power to create a world of his own through drawing.

Crockett continued to illustrate children’s books until the mid-1960s, when he took up a late-life career as a painter of subjects relating to mathematics and mathematical physics. (About eighty of his paintings are now housed in the National Museum of American History, part of the Smithsonian Institution.) Although he died at age 68 in 1975, he lives on in his art.