Cartoonist Soldier

David Breger is a round-faced, snub-nosed, chunky man who is cramming two successful careers into his nearly 35 years. As a cartoonist, he has a profitable contract with King Features Syndicate, Inc.; his drawings appear in some 50 U.S. and Canadian papers, and actually run frequently in the great Manchester Guardian, which prints the cartoon masterworks of Britain's famed political artist, David Low. As a soldier, Dave Breger started out a buck private in 1941, by last week had become a second lieutenant.

Breger was born in Chicago a few weeks after his parents reached the U.S. from the Ukraine. He studied abnormal psychology at Northwestern University, graduated in depression-ridden 1931, found jobs scarce. A man able to face facts, he forthwith entered his father's sausage business in Chicago. As office manager, his chief contribution was a slogan: "Our Wurst Is The Best!"

Classy Doodler. In 1937 Breger got $30 for a cartoon from the Saturday Evening Post. Almost immediately he retired from sausages to become a professional cartoonist. His free-lance products sold fairly regularly to such magazines as the Post, Collier's, Parade, This Week, Esquire, Click, The New Yorker. Career No. 1 seemed assured, when he was drafted.

Sent to Camp Livingston, La., to nurse a fleet of trucks, he continued to draw at nights, squatting in a truck with netting over his head to keep bugs at bay.

When the Army awakened to Private Breger's talent, he was transferred to the Special Services Division and sent first to New York (where he married), then to England in June 1942, to do odd jobs of art for the Army and to serve as photographer-artist for the Army's weekly, Yank. For Yank he turned out occasional comic strips called "G.I. Joe" until he got his lieutenancy (commissioned officers cannot be members of Yank's staff). But Dave Breger's best-known creation is the daily panel called Private Breger.

Confused Soldier. "Private Breger'' is a wide-eyed, overspectacled, freckled little soldier, clumsy, meek, confused but undismayed. Cartoonist Breger likes to think of "Private Breger" as typical of all the nation's millions of little men, to whom soldiering is alien, but who cheerfully acquiesced when war came. Through Private Breger, Cartoonist Breger translates Army life into civilian terms. One cartoon showed a squad of soldiers being stopped by a game warden, who demanded to see their hunting licenses. Like all artists, Breger has small idiosyncrasies which trade-mark his drawings. He always draws officers with jutting jaws, privates with rounded chins.

Recently in London Breger was introduced to Captain Bruce Bairnsfather, British cartoonist, whose Breger-like sense of simple humor made "Old Bill," a fat, walrus-mustached old British soldier, the most popular comic character of the last war.* Joked Breger to Bairnsfather: "I always wanted to be known as the Bairnsfather of this war. Now I hope you'll be known as the Breger of the last one."

* Most famed Bairnsfather cartoon: Old Bill, peering from a shell-hole crater in No Man's Land, tells his grumbling companion: "Well, if yer knows a better 'ole, go to it."

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