After a junior-year pole-vaulting mishap landed him in Dick's House, Steve Kelley '81 used the downtime during his recovery to reevaluate his work and his future prospects. The conclusion: Writing student life cartoons for The Dartmouth couldn't net him a real career. So he decided to branch into political cartooning, a growing field at the time.
Decades later, Kelley, a humorist and political cartoonist for the Times-Picayune, is back at the College as a Montgomory Fellow for Winter term. The Montgomory Fellows program brings leaders in fields from academics to politics to the College to meet with students, teach or speak.
During his week-long stay at the College, Kelley will meet with students interested in art, writing and comedy, and give a talk Tuesday night entitled "Art Irritates Life: Politics and Stuff People Actually Care About."
While a student at Dartmouth, Kelley was one of the founding members of the Dartmouth Review, a position that put him in constant battle with the administration, he said. When he was contacted about the Montgomery Fellowship, he was shocked.
"Are you sure you've got the right Steve Kelley?" he remembers asking.
As part of his tour of the College, Kelley met with a small group of students interested in writing to discuss careers and applying for jobs after college.
In an interview with The Dartmouth, Kelley recounted his own experiences, describing his senior year at Dartmouth, when he received two job offers to draw political cartoons, one in Omaha, Neb. and one in San Diego, Calif. He could not decide between them, so he decided to flip a coin. It came up Nebraska.
"So I flipped it again," Kelly said. "San Diego won best out of seven."
During a discussion with students on Monday, he emphasized the importance of writing in any career, saying to his audience that they would be judged in an interview based on their writing skills.
"If you can write you're just ahead of the game," Kelley said.
He also said that it is important to always pay attention and offer insights into the surrounding world.
"You don't see a whole lot of novels by 18- and 19-year-olds; there's a reason for that," Kelley said. "You have half the experience of a 38-year-old. I'm 49, I have two and a half times your life experience."
Kelley got his start as a political cartoonist by drawing student life shorts for The Dartmouth. He recalled one of his early cartoons -- a dump-truck pulling up to food-court with a worker asking if it was pick-up or delivery.
"I'm a huge fan of low-brow," Kelley said.
Kelley advised students in the midst of choosing careers to follow their passions, but to be realistic about holding a job. There is dignity in a job, he said, even when it becomes a grind.
"Every job sucks. There's no job where you go and you're like 'man, this job's fun,' and someone walks in and says 'Here's your paycheck. Go take the rest of the week off,'" Kelley said.
His own job, he added, has become much easier in the current political climate, which he described as "really, really good for cartooning," though he noted it had been better before Giuliani dropped out.
He also said the Clinton years had been the best of his career as a satirist, due to what he described as Clinton's larger-than-life manner, love of attention, and hypocrisy.
"It's really hypocrisy on which a cartoonist feeds the best," Kelley said.
Kelley said political cartooning seemed to be the best choice he could make for his life:
"I'm uniquely unequipped really, to do anything else here on planet Earth."
