My life in 'toons

by Joseph Barbera

No other studio, not Disney, not Warner's, has created more familiar and beloved - or just plain more - cartoon characters than Hanna-Barbera, and just about all of them started life in the mind of Joe Barbera. He was born on Manhattan's Lower East Side and was raised in Flatbush, Brooklyn, by a doting mother and a father who made a bundle as a popular barber, only to gamble most of it away before finally bowing out on his family altogether. Fresh out of high school, young Joe spent six years chained to a desk in a Wall Street bank filling out income tax forms. There he discovered he couldn't add, but he knew he could draw, and after he saw Walt Disney's pioneering "Skeleton Dance" at a Roxy Theatre Matinee, he knew he wanted to draw animated cartoons. This is Joe Barbera's story. Of coming up through New York's sweatshop studios during the early days of animation. Of trekking to Hollywood, where, with Bill Hanna, he created America's favorite cat and mouse, Tom and Jerry, and transfor