- Bland L.
- Tuesday, October 10, 2023
Jak Smyrl (1923–2007) delighted readers of The State newspaper with his illustrations for more than thirty-seven years. His reputation was such that the South Carolina State Legislature passed a resolution honoring him in what turned out to be the last year of his life.
Oscar Jackson Smyrl, Jr. (he was known from birth as Jack but adopted the irregular spelling Jak around the time he started working for The State) was born in Camden. Nothing in his family life and background would have suggested a career in commercial art. His interest was sparked when, as a first grader, he began drawing to pass the time while recovering from the measles. He kept up the habit, drawing cartoons and caricatures for family and school friends, and in his early teens he persuaded his parents to let him take a correspondence course in art.
Smyrl eventually attracted the notice of a high school English teacher, who encouraged him to contribute to the Camden High newspaper and yearbook. After graduation he decided to attend Auburn (then Alabama Polytechnic) because, as he later commented, “It was the best military college I could find that offered art.” By this time America was already at war, and midway through his studies at Auburn, Smyrl, noting that many of his male relatives had already entered military service, decided to enlist in the Marines.
Later, deployed as a corporal with a quartermaster battalion to the Solomon Islands and then taking part in the invasion of Okinawa, Smyrl found his artistic skills in demand during the rare opportunities for down time, with friends requesting sketch portraits and a captain suggesting that he submit work to the Marine magazine, Leatherneck. At war’s end, posted to the Chinese port city of Tientsien (Tianjin), he had more time to devote to drawing. The popularity of his artwork led to the offer of a staff artist position with the North China Marine newspaper, and it was in this capacity that he finished out his military commitment.
Back home in Kershaw County in early 1946, Smyrl decided to enroll at the University of South Carolina, which he could attend with benefits provided under the GI Bill. The previous year, the university had recruited Edmund Yaghjian, already well known in the New York art world, to come south and serve as the first chair of the art department. Smyrl became one of Yaghjian’s earliest students and began contributing work to various student publications. Even at this stage Smyrl’s chief concern, as he later recalled, was with “how to make a living as an artist.” Yaghjian suggested following an art-education path, but Smyrl was lukewarm about the prospect of a teaching career and, deciding that he needed a more solid grounding in commercial art, enrolled at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh.
Smyrl’s year of training in Pittsburgh was productive, but he had to work several jobs to pay living expenses, which ate into his study time. He toyed with an improbable-sounding scheme for establishing an artists’ colony on Holden Beach, NC, where he had previously vacationed with his family (and to which he developed a lifelong attachment, later owning several properties there). Finally, he returned to Columbia to re-enroll at the University of South Carolina.
In one of the many cases throughout his life of fortuitous encounters with relatives or past acquaintances, Smyrl attended a church event (the draw was the offer of free food) and ran into a high school friend who was now working for The State. She mentioned that the newspaper was looking to hire its first-ever staff artist and urged him to apply. Thus it was that, in November 1948, Smyrl began his association with the paper, which would last until 1986.
The newspaper’s offices, then located on Main Street just a block from the State House, were grimy and overcrowded. A colleague recalled how inky soot would drift down into their office space from the press machinery one floor above. At this time Smyrl was living in a ramshackle basement apartment near the university campus with a revolving cast of eccentric roommates. An easy few blocks’ walk from the State offices, his place, dubbed “the Mole Hole,” became a regular hangout for friends and newspaper colleagues.
Smyrl’s growing reputation soon led to freelance work illustrating books on South Carolina and its natural history, posters for the USDA, and other projects. Perhaps the most notable of these was providing illustrations for South Carolina Wildlife magazine, a project of the Department of Natural Resources that launched in 1954.
Smyrl also became a regular contributor to Sandlapper magazine upon its debut in 1968. For its third issue he created a comical map of Berkeley County’s Hellhole Swamp, filled with intricate details and embellishments. This was to be the first of his legendary “caricature maps,” which he also self-published and sold on his own. Later maps depicted the state of South Carolina, Holden Beach, and the Grand Strand.
The range of Smyrl’s artwork makes him difficult to categorize. Although he was capable of pointed political barbs in his drawings, he was not really a political cartoonist. Even in his illustrations for serious publications, Smyrl’s offbeat humor was a hallmark. Most of his contemporaries stress the humanity and gentleness that underlay the humor in his art, traits that by all accounts characterized the artist himself.
To learn more about this remarkable Midlands native, check out The World of Jak Smyrl: South Carolina Artist, Journalist, Cartoonist, by Smyrl’s niece Joan A. Inabinet and her husband, L. Glen Inabinet, a superb biography that was the source for the information in this post.