NEWSDAY: Bunny Hoest: Life On and Off the Funny Pages

08/02/2008

Newsday

The Lockhorns' Bunny Hoest:  On and off the funny pages with The Lockhorns

August 2, 2008

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Even among a throng of some 100 people crammed under a rain-soaked backyard tent, it's easy to spot the party host, Bunny Hoest.

On this recent sticky afternoon in Lloyd Neck, she's sporting a hot-pink polka-dot top that screams summer. A deep, mocha tan sets off her shoulder-length white hair, which matches her crisp white pants.

But none of this is why Hoest stands out among the masses. Rather, it's her remarkably sunny demeanor. And as she flits and floats among her guests, beaming radiantly from one to another, it's almost inconceivable that this vivacious woman is 75 years old. Or that she suffered a tragic, life-altering personal and professional loss at midlife.

She explains her positive outlook this way: "Everybody has some kind of setback. Life happens to you, and all you can control is how you carry yourself through disasters."

Born in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, as Madeline Mezz, she says: "My mother and father called me 'Bunny' from day one. They said I was little and cute and had dark eyes like a little bunny." The only child of a doctor and an opera singer, she married Ted Jungreis at 19, and the couple moved to Huntington, where they settled to raise a family. Eventually armed with a master's degree in secondary education from C.W. Post, she taught English as a second language long before the Huntington school district had an official ESL program in place, she says.

Passionate about the arts, Hoest joined community theater, often singing, dancing, directing and even composing original scores for several musical comedies. (To this day, the mother of three is a member of the Huntington Choral Society.)

But after 21 years of marriage, the couple separated, and soon thereafter a spiffy job offer came her way: Long Island greeting card illustrator and cartoonist Bill Hoest, creator in 1968 of the sparring couple "The Lockhorns of Levittown" (which ran in Newsday and later became syndicated), needed help compiling his works into a book.

"I was 40 years old. My kids were 20, 18 and 15," she recalls, while Hoest, who had six children of his own, was also newly divorced. Working side by side, they fell in love and just a year later, in 1973, tied the knot. She said it was a happy union, one which also launched a hugely fruitful creative collaboration.


Wife and work partner

Still, after raising three children and dissolving an unhappy marriage, starting over on a new path with a new husband was tricky. "Marrying Bill meant taking on a whole different kind of life, a new direction with much responsibility. He needed a working partner as well as a marriage partner. It was scary and challenging," she says. But with typical resolve, she adds, "I thought, what the hell, I'll give it a shot."

So once married to Bill, in addition to helping him run the business end, Bunny Hoest also began writing captions for "The Lockhorns," which she said came naturally to her. "He concentrated on the drawing. He was a master of design - brilliant," she says.

"He was a very talented guy," agrees Joe D'Angelo, who from 1965 to 2000 served as president, CEO and then chairman of King Features Syndicate, which has syndicated the Hoests' comics, including "Agatha Crumm," "What a Guy!" and "The Lockhorns."

The Lockhorns, probably the best known, satirizes a universal theme: friction within matrimony, but specifically, the discord between the haplessly ball-and-chained Loretta and Leroy Lockhorn. Their humorous marital woes are played out in a single panel rather than a strip, so each caption (or gag) must be succinct and snappy, explains Bunny Hoest. Often a Huntington restaurant or other local establishment is featured in the panel. But there's nothing else real about "The Lockhorns," which was never based on the Hoests' marriage.

"The minute we started working together, something clicked and 'The Lockhorns' took off!" Hoest says. The Levittown reference was dropped, and the panel would end up syndicated worldwide in more than 500 newspapers. So the two developed other winning comics together - among them, "Bumper Snickers" in 1974, "Agatha Crumm" in 1977, "Laugh Parade" for Parade magazine in 1980, "Howard Huge" in 1981 and "What a Guy!" in 1986. "The Lockhorns" and "Howard Huge" are still going.

But it was also in 1986, at the peak of the Hoests' success, when calamity struck: Bill was diagnosed with lymphoma. He was 60, Bunny 54.

The couple realized they'd need help illustrating the comics as Bill tended to his illness, so they recruited local artist John Reiner, who had been highly recommended by Mort Drucker of Mad magazine. Over the following two years, Reiner was carefully trained to emulate Bill Hoest's particular illustration style.

A shocking surprise

"Then in April 1988, he suddenly took a turn for the worse," Reiner says. Bill Hoest died that November.

"Bill's death was crippling," Bunny Hoest flatly states. "We never thought he was going to die. It was such a surprise. ... We were a success as a team, and suddenly I was a widow. It was unbelievable."

Unprepared for her husband's death, Hoest was left in charge of everything, including the couple's impressive English country-style stone house that Bill had designed and built for them but which he lived and worked in for only six years. His ashes were scattered on the back lawn overlooking the Long Island Sound. "I delivered the eulogy for Bill. There were five, six hundred people here. ... " recalls D'Angelo.

At 56, Bunny was also left to care for Bill's elderly mother, who had been living with them. And she was left with a thriving creative business.

"There were a million questions, and one of them was, Would the business continue without Bill?," recalls family friend and puppeteer Steve Widerman of Huntington.

Hoest says it was an easy decision; because of her responsibilities, she had to keep going. Bills had to be paid, family members were counting on her for financial support, and she had a house to maintain.

But there was more to it than that, Widerman suggests. "It was almost as a tribute to Bill, to continue with the business. That's what he would have wanted."

So despite the grief, "I had an awareness that I just had to do my job" and keep going, Hoest says. "This is a humor business. I had to feel funny, but I realized that it was a job. I didn't have to be inspired."

Full-time illustrator

She did need help and recruited Reiner full-time to take over all of the illustrations. In fact, Hoest credits Reiner's immeasurable talent for the transition, one which she said was unnoticeable to readers.

A night owl, Reiner, 51, works on the panels after hours, meticulously drawing each one by hand. In addition to writing all the captions, Hoest today runs the entire operation, getting to work at 6 every morning. This January she renewed a five-year contract with King Features.

"'The Lockhorns' long ago reached an echelon of incredible success and sustained it over the years," says King Features Syndicate comics editor Brendan Burford. "Readers love it, and we have no reason to not want to continue this relationship in the foreseeable future."

That's not the only ongoing relationship: Hoest has been happily married again for the past 12 years to Dr. Walter Carpenter, 96, known to locals as "Doc." Friends while both still had their spouses, the two became inseparable upon losing their loved ones. Eventually, their friendship morphed into something greater, Hoest says, but a medical emergency prompted their union. "We got married in the intensive care unit," when Doc experienced a life-threatening illness that required surgery and a family member to make rapid decisions on his behalf.

They now live together in his sprawling Huntington home, but Hoest and Reiner continue working at the Lloyd Neck house. In between caring for Doc, who is in ill health, answering fan mail, attending to daily functions of the business and writing captions, Hoest finds time to sing in the Huntington Choral Society, play tennis and attend social events. Once a year she hosts a gathering in her home for her many friends and colleagues, most of them members of the National Cartoonist Society and its local chapter, The Berndt Toast Gang (named after the late Walter Berndt).

Ever the optimist, even on a rainy and sticky June afternoon where guests are gathered outdoors, Bunny just "keeps bouncing back," Widerman says admirably. "She's unbelievably resilient."

Crying alone, focusing on others

Handling adversity does not come easily for everyone, and it didn't for Bunny Hoest. She says her philosophy helped her through the catastrophic death of her second husband. She said these were her approaches:

Going against the current grain about expressing one's grief and sorrow, Hoest got through her husband's death by mourning in private. "I think when you cry you cry alone and when you laugh the world laughs with you," she says.

Instead of focusing on yourself during trying times, consider everyone around you who is also affected by the situation.

And, "You can't control these things, but you can control how you respond and react and carry on and help others." - Claudia Gryvatz Copquin