About 250 original drawings by editorial cartoonist Doug MacGregor of Fort Myers are housed in the archives of Florida Gulf Coast University where the pen and ink renderings that are often humorous but also poignant focus on issues facing Southwest Florida.
"It's important to preserve the cartoons first of all, in their original format and their original condition,” MacGregor said. “And then to be able to share them … with students who will benefit by looking at them seeing the message that I was trying to get across at the time. Is it still relevant today? Yes, some of them are. And make sure that they understand that these issues are their issues. They may have been drawn 15, 20, 30 years ago, but they are now their issues. How are they going to tackle those problems themselves?”
What’s not as relevant at the moment — say, cartoons about a past hurricane, for instance — is available to students who want to delve into Southwest Florida history.
Under MacGregor’s pen, the issues go back to 1980, when he started editorial cartooning for a small paper in Connecticut, and then The News-Press. Today, his editorial cartoons appear once a week in The Naples Press. Most of the collection now in FGCU archives deals with ways to preserve the environment amid rampant modern development.
“So a lot of these cartoons pertain to water, and then backyard. And loss of habitat is a big part of it, the species that still exist and try to survive, like panthers and manatees and those burrowing owls over in Cape Coral, and development has taken its toll on these species and continues to do so.”
It’s said a picture is worth a thousand words; MacGregor believes his most effective cartoons have no words at all.
“Sometimes humor was important to that message, and sometimes it was just a straightforward, very stark, very poignant blast of graphics just to get that point across,” MacGregor said.
Archives Coordinator Emily Murray has arranged MacGregor’s cartoons by date and all are available in the archives and have been digitized online. Looking through them is a walk through Southwest Florida history.
Classes are free to use them as source material, but you need not be affiliated with the university to see them.
“Faculty and staff can come in and talk to us about kind of incorporating the archives in their classes" said Murray. "We do get requests to … show different kinds of primary sources so that we can teach primary source literacy.”
MacGregor’s cartoons are also available to peruse at the Cape Coral Historical Museum. Collections are also at The Ohio State and Syracuse universities. His next goal is to get them into presidential libraries, as his work goes back to the administration of Jimmy Carter.
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