[BluesDuke]

Hickley was also wrong about Willard Mullin's Bum "losing work" after the Dodgers went west. When the Mets came around, Mullin did indeed revive the Bum to represent the Dodgers, complete with sunglasses every once in awhile. One of his best cartoons in that era was a two-parter, in which the little Met was depicted hiding under the bed, peeking out from the darkness beneath the blanker, with the Bum lifting the blanket saying, almost comfortingly, "I know some people aren't afeared of me..."; then, in part two, Mullin writes, "The Mets had lost...and then what did they do? They went out and walked all over the league-leading Dodgers..in L.A....at night!" Beneath that, the Bum is flat on his back with the little Met sleepwalking over his front.

Mullin also drew an unforgettable front-page cartoon for Newsday, after the Miracle Mets won the 1969 World Series: the little Met is swinging madly and knocking all the other Mullin team symbols all over the place - including the Bum, flipping over with his legs in the air and his fat can bottom-down - saying, "Y'mean this is all there was to it all along?" An interesting image, especially considering the Mets' surreal Series win was as much a product of their stellar pitching and their acrobatic defencive work as their hitting...

[NYCVirago]

I am not surprised to find out that David Hinckley was wrong at least twice in that article. He did one of those "big town character" articles about Tony Manero of "Saturday Night Fever," and said that the movie was released in the summer of 1978 (it was released in the winter of 1977; the reason I remember that is because it came out a good six months before "Grease," another John Travolta hit movie.) Hinkcley also said that Manero lived in Bensonhurst, when his neighborhood was Bay Ridge, the Brooklyn neighborhood closest to the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge (if you remember, the bridge played an important part in the movie.)