Back to Normalcy (1945), Berryman's holiday breakdown

Back to Normalcy is a Jim Berryman cartoon for the Washington Evening Star, dated 3 September 1945. A dazed father sits by a car with a flat tire and a leaking radiator while his family's day out goes wrong around him. It is held in the Senate's Berryman collection at the National Archives (NAID 5743135).

The scene

A father sits beside the family car looking stunned. One tire is flat and the radiator is leaking. Around him the day keeps going wrong. In the archive's description, a woman holds a bottle of sunburn lotion, a boy pokes at a hornets' nest, and a girl is crying. Two roadside billboards add their own jokes.

STOP!.... 200 YDS. AHEAD The GREASY SKILLET

Smoke Kayoes THE CIGARETTE THAT PICKS YOU UP.... AND DROPS YOU IN A CORNER!

SUNBURN LOTION

Jim Berryman

Why it is in a propaganda archive

This is a newspaper joke, and the archive treats it lightly. It files the cartoon under card stacking and calls that a weak fit: the drawing shows only the mishaps of a family drive and none of the pleasures. That is how gag cartoons work, and it would be odd to call it deception. The page is useful for a different reason. It shows a working political cartoonist on a day when he chose not to draw a politician, and it shows a private newspaper, not a government office, deciding what readers saw.

The Smoke Kayoes billboard is the sharpest line. A cigarette that "picks you up" also "drops you in a corner," so the ad's own promise becomes the joke. Berryman was mocking advertising copy, the commercial kind of persuasion, in a cartoon about ordinary life.

Where it sits

The cartoon is one of the Berryman drawings held in the Senate's collection at the National Archives. Other Berryman pages on this site are The Sower on the WPA in 1938, the polio vaccine cartoon of 1955, and his 1958 cartoon on Faubus. A later drawing from the same series, On Soviet Scales, turns from road trips to the Soviet Union.