Charlie McGill leaves an indelible legacy in the world of North Jersey sports | Mike Kelly

We called him “Charlie.”

Simple.

Familiar.

Friendly.

This was the essence of Charlie McGill, the longtime cartoonist for NorthJersey.com and The Record, who is best known for his pen-and-ink drawings of nearly 4,000 high school Athletes of the Week .

His first was published on Oct. 20, 1954.

His last appeared this summer.

Yep, that’s nearly 70 years.

This week, McGill will pass his pencil to another artist, Bob Rebach, who will take up the task of drawing portraits of northern New Jersey’s best high school athletes.

Some people work 20 or 25 years at a particular job and then call it a career, slipping into the ether of retirement or finding another line of work. McGill, who turns 91 on Christmas Day, has lapped the field and then some.

When McGill sketched his first star high school athlete — Seymour “Sy” Schwartz, a football running back for Hasbrouck Heights High School who scored five touchdowns in a game against Westwood and whose helmet did not have a protective face mask — Dwight Eisenhower was only midway through his first term in the White House. The Korean War had just ended. JFK and his political “Camelot” was still six years away. Donald Trump was just 8 years old. Kamala Harris wasn’t born yet.

Such is the arc of time that McGill spans across the sports landscape of northern New Jersey.

More significantly perhaps is how McGill captured a corner of humanity. While the craft of journalism was inevitably and understandably focused on the natural disasters, tragedies, crimes and political screwups that are often categorized as “news,” McGill became a chronicler of joy and success.

Athletic success chronicled across decades

At The Record’s former headquarters on River Street in Hackensack, his tilted drawing board — about the size of a kitchen table — occupied a corner of what was known as the “art department” in the acre-sized newsroom on the fourth floor. Behind him, light cascaded through a window, illuminating his drawings.

McGill’s task was as simple as it was complicated — to draw portraits of stellar high school athletes. But those athletes had to be notable at a particular moment in time.

And so, McGill’s drawings captured basketball players who scored a record number of points one game. Or swimmers and track sprinters who set a record at a particular event. Or a baseball pitcher who threw a perfect game.

And so on.

Attention Athletes of the Week: With Charlie McGill retiring, we want to hear your Athlete of the Week memories

McGill rarely met his subjects. Often, he was simply handed a black-and-white photograph — usually a bland headshot portrait of an athlete — and a short sports story. And then, with the photo propped on his drawing board, McGill studied the eyes, the wave of the hair, the cheekbones — maybe a confident smirk or a hint of a shy smile. Something ordinary in an athlete’s face that McGill found to be extraordinary and evocative.

He sharpened a pencil — in a motorized sharpener or sometimes with just a knife — and sketched, usually finding a piece of an athlete’s personality in those ordinary facial tweaks that so many of us take for granted.

And he did this on deadline — fast.

“I would start around 8 in the morning,” he told me one day recently when I visited him at his split-level home in Closter, New Jersey, where he drew his portraits for the last 15 years. “I could usually finish by 2:30 in the afternoon.”

His subjects included the actor Ed Harris, a football star at Tenafly High School, and Anne Donovan, the Paramus Catholic High School basketball star who went on to win two Olympic gold medals.

But mostly, McGill’s subjects were ordinary folks, sometimes across generations.  McGill’s career lasted long enough for him to draw the sons, daughters and even grandchildren of some of his subjects who also became top athletes.

And he did this while raising a family that included two sons and two daughters — and amid the sadness of family life. McGill’s wife, Mary Ellen, died in 2008 after a long illness.

Officially, McGill’s work was classified as a “cartoon.” But it was artistry — a one-of-a-kind peek into humanity. Even if you did not follow high school sports or knew of a particular athlete who was featured, you wanted to spend a few minutes studying McGill’s creativity.

In a sense, it was the same artistic magnetism that might cause people to study an Ansel Adams photograph or a Rembrandt portrait. Simply put: Even if you did not care about the sport or the high school, you were attracted by McGill’s creativity.

What might surprise many of McGill’s fans, however, is that he came to cartoons by accident.

More: Charlie McGill to receive Lifetime Achievement Award at 2024 North Jersey HS Sports Awards

How did Charlie McGill find his talent?

As a junior at Dwight Morrow High School in Englewood, New Jersey, he was told he needed to take an elective course. His choices: industrial shop or art.

McGill knew the art teacher — Elizabeth Patton. And he feared her. A few years earlier, in junior high, McGill was such a cutup in her art class that she flunked him, making a point of marking his report card in red ink so his parents would notice.

McGill had always drawn sketches, he said — mostly World War II airplanes.

But Patton’s high school art class stirred something deeper. And by the end of the semester, McGill remembers his teacher asking him the question that dominates his professional career: “Have you ever considered a career in art?”

Patton promised to write a recommendation if McGill applied to study at an art school. And so, he chose what was known at the time as the Cartoonists and Illustrators School in New York City, now known as the School of Visual Arts.

McGill found his nirvana. The school attracted plenty of would-be painters — what McGill calls “budding Michelangelos.” But McGill loved the world of cartoons, especially the craft of sports cartooning in which an artist would chronicle an athletic achievement with a series of sketches.

And then McGill discovered something else about himself.

“I leaned into cartooning but I leaned into realistic work too,” he said. “I could always draw heads. I could always catch likenesses. I don’t know why.”

After three years of study, McGill graduated and looked for a job. And as he applied to magazines and news outlets in New York and New Jersey, he opted for a job with the Bergen County Mosquito Control Commission. His task: to spray anti-bug poison in creeks and other low-lying sections of Bergen County.

It was not exactly an inspiration for cartoons. McGill never chronicled his mosquito spraying in his art.

McGill phoned the legendary sports editor and columnist for four decades at The Record, Al Del Greco.  McGill noticed that The Record featured a high school “player of the week” but only with a black-and-white photo.

McGill told Del Greco that he would create a cartoon portrait of each player.

Del Greco liked McGill’s portfolio and his idea to draw cartoons of athletes. But with a tight budget, Del Greco only had an opening for a newsroom “office boy.”

McGill took the “office boy” job — but with the additional suggestion from Del Greco that “you can draw anything you want as long as the athlete lives in New Jersey.”

So began a life’s work.

On a recent weekday, with light from a golden September sun cascading into his home drawing studio on the winterized porch of his home in Closter, McGill showed me his drawing board.

His last year has been difficult, he said. Doctors found a cancerous tumor in his lungs. But after weeks of chemotherapy, the tumor disappeared.

After that, McGill completed his final series of drawings of star high school athletes.

He keeps another drawing desk in the basement of his home, in a room filled with the kind of random memorabilia that artists tend to collect.

Ten baseball gloves are stacked on a bookcase. A dozen baseball hats sit on a shelf. Pencils are scattered next to his drawing board near that old electric pencil sharpener. And on a nearby bookshelf, McGill keeps a sign to remind him of his life’s work.

“If the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body, only lefties are in their right mind,” the sign says.

McGill is left-handed. In case you wondered.

He headed upstairs to his other drawing board on the porch.

He gazed for a moment at the board and the pencils.

“I’m never stopping,” he says. “I’ll always draw.”

Mike Kelly is an award-winning columnist for NorthJersey.com, part of the USA TODAY Network, as well as the author of three critically acclaimed nonfiction books and a podcast and documentary film producer. A paperback edition with an updated epilogue of his 1995 book, "Color Lines," which chronicles race relations in a small New Jersey town after a police shooting and was called "American journalism at its best" by the Washington Post, was released last year. To get unlimited access to his insightful thoughts on how we live life in the Northeast, please subscribe or activate your digital account today.

Email: kellym@northjersey.com

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Charlie McGill leaves an indelible legacy in the world of North Jersey sports | Mike Kelly