farewell Caspar Weinberger
Mar 28th, 2006 | by Neil Barton | Posted in politics | Comments Off
In his book and collection One Last Little Peek, Berkeley Breathed describes how he won over one of his earliest and most unlikely fans, the then-U.S. Secretary of Defense. In a strip Breathed drew in March of 1983, Opus and Milo Bloom are sitting on grassy hill, and Opus begins to recite some poetry:
How I love to watch the morn with golden sun that shines, up above to nicely warm these frosty toes of mine
The wind doth taste of bittersweet,
Like jasper wine and sugar.
I bet it’s blown through others’ feet,
like those of…(Struggles to think of a rhyme…)
Caspar Weinberger.
At which point Milo, who was enjoying the verse, shouts, “Start over!”
The strip elicited the following response on official stationery from the Department of Defense:
Dear Mr. Breathed,
Many a morn I’ve longed to see
A comic strip be kind to me.
On 30 March, before my eyes
A penguin watched a warm sunrise.
In this land of so much bouty
Could I have that great Bloom County?Sincerely,
Caspar Weinberger.
