Streeter was Ibis, then President of the Lampoon.  “When I was Editor in 1912,” he wrote, “I completely forgot about the fall number of the Lampoon. There wasn’t a line of copy written and everything was due in twenty-four hours. I telephoned Tubby Sizer, later Professor Theodore Sizer, head of the Yale Art School, and asked him to get up to Duxbury, Massachusetts quickly. He agreed to do this if I would have a keg of beer, a bowl of salt, and another bowl to drink from. We stayed up all night and within twenty-four hours produced what I think was one of the best numbers ever brought out by the Lampoon.”

His first literary success came with Dere Mable (1918), a collection of funny letters from an uneducated doughboy to his girlfriend, written in smart, simple American dialect.

Today he’s best remembered for Father of the Bride (1949), a novel he wrote that captured the chaos and financial hemorrhaging while planning his own daughter’s wedding. The book resonated so well that Hollywood came calling, turning it into a 1950 hit film starring Spencer Tracy and Elizabeth Taylor and a remake (1991) by Steve Martin. Apparently, watching a father's wallet and mental health simultaneously implode still makes for great entertainment.

Streeter later found humor in the mundane aspects of middle-class life. Merry Christmas, Mr. Baxter (1956) chronicled the holiday season adventures of a man who just wanted to enjoy his December in peace but instead found himself trapped in a tinsel-covered obstacle course of social obligations.

Perhaps his most relatable work was Chairman of the Bored (1961), which skewered corporate culture. Drawing deeply on his own corporate experience, Streeter painted a portrait of Mr. Graham Crombie, an investment executive putting up with mind-numbing interruptions, office politics, and the peculiar phenomenon of meetings that stretch for hours without anyone saying anything important. Mr. Crombie retires to a country house in Connecticut. Once there, frazzled by the unending headaches of country living and inconveniences, he decides to return to the city and the business life he thought he wanted to escape.

Despite his success as an author, Streeter never quit his day job. He was essentially living a double life: by day, a serious banker discussing serious matters with serious people; by night, a writer mercilessly mocking those same serious people in his manuscripts. He had a particular talent for describing the slow descent into madness that comes with planning large social events or surviving corporate retreats.

In an era when much of American literature was preoccupied with weighty themes and existential crises, the Depression, World Wars I and II, he focused on the smaller battles: man versus wedding planner, man versus office memo, man versus holiday expectations.

Streeter was president of the Coffee House Club in New York (the literary and arts club that famously has no rules) and an active member of the Century Association from 1946 until his death.

The Century has a policy that members should not discuss business in the club. In 1958, Streeter wrote a memo to the chair of the house committee addressing what members may talk about. “The question of what constitutes ‘talking business,’” he wrote, “is not as easy to answer as might appear at first blush. To the artist, art is business – to the writer and the publisher, books are business – to the musician, music is business and to the lawyer, banker and business man, business is business. To each one of these groups, business is the field that they best understand. Defined strictly, therefore, the problem about talking business in the Club might be construed by a proper Centurion as a prohibition against discussing subjects that they know anything about. There is nothing wrong with this. It is, in fact, a policy which I have followed all my life.”

In Streeter’s last novel, Ham Martin, Class of ’17, he shared his views of club life that could well have described his time as one of the first Lampoon classes to occupy the newly built Castle at 44 Bow Street.  He reminisced about a fictional club that “stood like a rock on which the increasingly heavy seas of a new world left no mark. No House Committee would ever paint its varnished woodwork, change the location of the long coatroom or modernize its spacious washroom. Its architects had planned well and the aging building met the requirements of the passing generations with an easy grace while time added a patina which was recognized and valued by its younger as well as its older members.”

In the last year of the Great War, Sherwood shipped out to northern France with the Canadian Black Watch, where he toiled at night with a trench digging unit. Sent to No Man’s Land on August 7th, 1918, and carrying a seventy-pound pack, Sherwood was hit with German mustard gas and tumbled into a pit of sharp stakes and barbed wire.

After a lengthy convalescence, Sherwood returned to New York, where he landed a menial job at Vanity Fair. His old Lampoon pal Robert Benchley helped him get a few writing assignments, and introduced him to another contributor, Dorothy Parker.

At the Algonquin Round Table, Sherwood stood out. He was freakishly tall for a Manhattan wit: Six foot six, the same as Michael Jordan. Parker recalled that a troupe of little people performing at the Hippodrome Theater would torment Sherwood on the street, jeering at him and pretending to bite his knees.

In 1920, Sherwood moved to Life Magazine, where he became its movie reviewer. He has been called the first serious film critic in the world. (In 1923 Sherwood claimed he saw every movie that was released, some 2.5 million feet of film.) Some of his favorites were Charlie Chaplin’s comedy Shoulder Arms, the documentary Nanook of the North, and the Raoul Walsh-directed comedy-drama What Price Glory?

Soon Sherwood was banging out film scripts himself. He co-wrote the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock’s first Hollywood film, Rebecca, and his script for The Best Years of Our Lives grabbed the Academy Award in 1947. The restrained but powerful drama about veterans coming home from W.W. II yielded two Oscars for handless actor Harold Russell. Other screenwriting credits include the 1923 Hunchback of Notre Dame, starring Lon Chaney; Sherwood was paid a whopping $2,500 to rewrite subtitles for the silent classic. He also wrote The Petrified Forest, based on his play, which helped launch Humphrey Bogart to stardom.

Sherwood snatched four Pulitzers as well, three for his plays Idiot’s Delight, Abe Lincoln in Illinois, and There Shall Be No Night. Idiot’s Delight, an edgy anti-war romp featuring strippers, a Nazi arms dealer, and British honeymooners, earned kudos for its “exuberance and genial skulduggery.”The New York Times also praised “his romantic flair for character, and his relish of the incongruous and ridiculous.”

Sherwood’s fourth Pulitzer was for the biography Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History. The book drew on his experiences as a wartime speechwriter for FDR.

Sherwood once remarked, “We all come from our own little planets. That’s why we’re all different. That’s what makes life interesting.” He died in 1955, at age 59.

He also had a clever wit. In other words, he wasn’t merely funny. He understood the essence of what was amusing about anecdotes and people.

Like a good Poonie, he loved pranks. He once wore a piece of Japanese armor that used to – or perhaps still does – hang in the Lampoon Castle when playing in a baseball game against the Harvard Crimson.

He also pulled with Farwell Smith the prank of sneaking into the Boston Marathon right near the end, while wearing Harvard Lampoon shirts, and trying to catch the leader at the finish.

He liked recalling the fake Harvard-Yale game program they published in which he wrote a story about “Why Harvard Will Not go to the Rose Bowl This Year.” One of the reasons, he noted, was that “California was in some kind of a time zone.”

Later, that Lampoon style was reflected in Not the New York Times, an edition that Plimpton and friends put together in his apartment, published, and distributed during the 1978 newspaper strike. The lead story – done by Plimpton, Carl Bernstein, and Tony Hendra – read like a Lampoon parody of the Crimson. The headline read: “Pope Dies Yet Again; Reign is Briefest Ever. Cardinals Return from Airport.” It was about a pope from Liverpool named John Paul John Paul who served 19 minutes. Amazingly, three weeks later. a new pope was actually elected and took the name John Paul II.

Like a proper Poonie, Plimpton loved spectacle, hence his lifelong love of fireworks. He worked with Kurt Andersen on the fireworks for the 1976 Lampoon Centennial, when he shot off the largest firework ever – known as Fat Man III – over the Charles.

He was also a masterful birdwatcher, and he applied that talent to people as well. It was a joy to see him spot someone interesting, charm them, and add them to his life list. Henceforth they would be found at his parties on 541 East 72nd, arrayed in his billiard room in their glory the way an lepidopterist might display a collection of butterfiles.

When I was an undergraduate, Plimpton was very much in evidence after big football games, making his rounds to his various clubs. He instantly infused wherever he went with his sparkling mix of clubbiness and celebrity.

I ran into him once at the Yale game. He didn’t know who I was, but I invited him to come to the party we were having afterwards at the Signet, where he had been a member. He arrived with Gore Vidal in tow, and also William Styron, and a couple of other minor literary lights and Kennedy cousins. After a few drinks, his entire entourage, with me now tagging along, swept over to the Lampoon for more revelry.

A few years later, when I had just started working for Time, I shared a summer house in the Hamptons and, on July 4, I was told that we were all going to the end of Town Line Road to George Plimpton’s fireworks party. I protested that we hadn’t been invited, but I was informed that our gang of softball players and junior journalists traditionally snuck into the lawn and if anyone asked we were supposed to say we were friends of Wilfrid Sheed or something.

We sat in a dark recess of his great beachfront lawn and I watched him from afar as he readied the fireworks and wandered around with an aura that Gatsby would have envied. Then, to my horror, he wandered over to our group. I was about to stammer something about being a guest of the Sheeds when he said, “Hi, Walter, how are things at the Lampoon?”

He remembered everybody, and was always gracious. But there’s something even more telling about this anecdote. It shows me trying to emulate Plimpton. He was the master of the anecdote that gave the pretense of being self-deprecating yet was also a bit namedropping and self-inflating.

A good example was an event here at Harvard where he was an after-dinner speaker, one of the many roles in life he mastered. He told of being invited to Camp David by the elder George Bush for a weekend. On the last afternoon, they were playing tennis and Plimpton recalled marveling that, with all the things going on in the world, the phone had never rung to interrupt the president. Then, suddenly, the phone at courtside rings. The president walks over, picks it up, nods, and then turns to Plimpton. “It’s for you,” he says. Plimpton told the tale with such self-effacing charm that only later did it sink in what a deft example of name and place dropping it was.

This style formed the basis for his signature books, the participatory journalism sports books, the most famous being Paper Lion, in which he tried out and briefly played for the Detroit Lions at age 36. “I wore my helmet throughout the game, even though I spent most of it on the bench, because I had trouble getting it on and off,” reported the real-life Walter Mitty with the deft self-deprecating ironic cadences of Mitty’s own creator James Thurber.

His charm was that he knew how to share his Walter Mitty fantasies, which included not only being a Paper Lion but also being the character George Plimpton, which he played to the hilt.

My favorite tale of this involves Jerry Spinelli, who used most of his savings account, $425, to bid during a Philadelphia PBS station auction for a night on the town with Plimpton. When they arrive in New York, Spinelli’s wife confides that her husband wants to be a writer. Plimpton’s heart sinks. But he decides to cancel plans to see a play and eat at a midtown steakhouse, and instead takes the couple to Elaine’s, where he knew his writer and publishing friends would be hanging out. He walks through the restaurant introducing all of his friends to “Jerry Spinelli, the writer from Phildelphia.” There’s Kurt Vonnegut and Jill Krementz at the first table with a bearded older man – Plimpton introduces him as James T. Farrell (a novelist), and the older man looks a bit bewildered. They go through the restaurant repeating this at each table, filled with the likes of Gay Talese, Irwin Shaw, Willie Morris. Finally they get to Woody Allen’s table, where everyone knows you should never stop or intrude. But Plimpton, fulfilling his Mitty fantasy tour duty, interrupts to say: “Woody, forgive me, this is Jerry Spinelli, the writer from Philadelphia.” Allen looks up slowly, stares a moment, and mysteriously replies, “Yes, I know.” A few moments later, Spinelli’s wife whispers to Plimpton, “He’s going to be unbearable from now on.” But what Plimpton understood -- and was gracious enough to enable -- was that people would love to share the name-and-place dropping participatory fantasies that he could weave.

I think that’s why he had so many parties and invited so many random people to them.

His secret to success was that he conducted all aspects of his life as if he were playing the role of editor of the Harvard Lampoon. Clubbable, puckish, witty, prankster, often serious but never earnest.

And his feel for fantasy, combined with his eye for people, and ear for anecdotes made him a very, very good writer.

By taking Walter Mitty to a new level, and writing about the adventures so deftly, Plimpton came close to being a Thurber.

Close. But not quite.

And since we are here reminiscing, perhaps I can be permitted to add a the dash of bitters that Plimpton sometimes liked in his cocktails.

Near the end of his life, he began to seem a bit wistful and rueful.

Pay attention, current Poonies, this may happen to you.

He had been offered a hefty advance to write a big book, a memoir of his life and times that – done right – could have, and should have, and maybe would have put him up there with James Thurber, perhaps even Henry Adams.

It brought home the questions that his friends sometimes asked: if he cut back a bit on the evenings at the Brook Club and dinners at Elaine’s and the book parties and even some of the Paris Review work – had he been willing to look like he was trying hard, rather than floating merrily through life – might he be able to ascend into the literary Pantheon?

Or, as he sometimes self-deprecatingly put it: “I could have been a contender, right?”

I once ran into him at the Milan airport (how’s that for Plimptonian name and place dropping?) and he graced me with the quasi-intimacy he could bestow in his clubbable manner by asking whether I thought he could instead get away with writing a book about his ancestor Adelbert Ames, the youngest Union general during the civil war, who became the governor of Mississippi during reconstruction.

He preferred the ironic detachment of a Lampoon editor to the reflection and introspection and private sweat of a literary memoirist.

Like many very clubbable folks, I think he never wanted to be seen trying too hard. He was cut from the Lampoon cloth, and I think it suited him just fine.

And thus he settled for being charming, and amusing, and at times brilliant and dazzling.

He gave lie to Socrates’ maxim that the unexamined life is not worth living.

He lit up the night, turned his world into a Lampoon party. And if his literary work might seem, when compared to that of an Updike, a bit ephemeral, like some especially lovely fireworks blossoming in the night sky, that was for him a worthwhile combination of art and joy.

Indeed, perhaps the best final words in a eulogy about Plimpton are the final words of a eulogy  he gave for a friend named Jimmy Grucci, a Long Island fireworks manufacturer who was killed when his factory in Bellport exploded.

“Artists” – Plimpton said – “are perhaps fortunate in that they leave evidence of their greatness after they have gone – books, concertos, paintings, ballets. Who here in this church will not remember Jimmy Grucci when they see an especially lovely firework blossom in the night sky?”

His great-grandmother left the Havemeyer collection of Old Masters, Impressionist painting, Renaissance sculpture, and Asian art to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1929. His grandmother single-handedly conceived, created, and built the Shelburne Museum in Vermont as a singular collection of American folk art. By the time she was finished, the museum had become a unique village of 37 transplanted vernacular New England buildings curated around ideas of preserving America’s past beauty in utility.

Though John Wilmerding grew up with “art in his DNA,” as he told the journal American Art, “’The great irony is, with all my family’s collecting history, for all my proximity to New York, [growing up on Long Island,] I was never taken to the Metropolitan Museum…’”

Fine Arts 13, then known to undergraduates as “Darkness at Noon,” prompted his switch of intended major from literature or history to fine arts. Elected to the literary board of the Lampoon and active on the Advocate, he began looking for his thesis topic early. A sailor himself, his interest in American marine art, and a sailing introduction, led him to the then-sleepy Cape Ann Historical Association in Gloucester, Mass. Its collection of paintings and drawings by Fitz Hugh Lane [later determined to be named “Fitz Henry Lane” — don’t judge] was barely known. He soon received a key to the front door and unlimited access to it all.

While still an undergraduate he bought his first painting by Lane, “Stage Rocks and Western Shore of Gloucester Outer Harbor,” for what the New York Times estimated would have been $38,000 today. His reworked undergraduate thesis, Fitz Hugh Lane, 1804-1865, American Marine Painter, published by the Essex Institute in 1964, was the first of his more than 20 books. His determination to focus on American art seemed risky for an aspiring young professor. Happily, after receiving his Harvard Ph.D. in fine arts in 1965, Dartmouth offered unusual flexibility that would have been unavailable in a larger university,

With his purchase of two other important 19th-century American paintings, “The Mississippi Boatman” by George Caleb Bingham in 1965 and Martin Johnson Heade's “Sunlight and Shadow: The Newbury Marshes” in 1967, he realized he had become a collector as well as a a scholar and a teacher. So he began his lifelong joy of working with people who would further a collective vision of illuminating American art: Throughout his teaching career, he engaged with students, Ph.D. advisees, other academics, museum curators, gallerists, and collectors, and encouraged their interests and enthusiasms similar or adjacent to his.

In 1977 he came to Washington as the first-ever curator of American art at the National Gallery of Art. The brilliant and enormously popular 1980 exhibition there “American Light: The Luminist Movement, 1850-1875” confirmed to every corner of the art world that scholarship in American art could no longer be ignored. In 1982, he became the NGA’s deputy director.

His exhibitions brought new voices and fresh points of view to the National Gallery’s scholarly catalogs. Throughout his career he wrote monographs, articles, and essays on painters he found central to understanding the narrative arc of American art and culture in the 19th and 20th centuries. A nowhere-near exhaustive list includes George Caleb Bingham, Frederic Edwin Church, Thomas Eakins, Martin Johnson Heade, Fitz Henry Lane, John F. Peto, and Winslow Homer from the mid-1800s to the early 1900s. His interests— and scholarship—in 20th century work ranged from pop artists Robert Indiana, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and Tom Wesselman to realists Edward Hopper, Richard Estes, and Andrew Wyeth.

The 1987 exhibition of Wyeth’s Helga paintings, probably the most controversial of Wilmerding’s NGA career, reflected the showmanship of Gallery Director Carter Brown. The controversy grew from disdain in the critical world for Wyeth’s work, combined with his vast mass popularity and the stretching of NGA rules in mounting such a major exhibition of a living artist. The exhibition, though one of the most popular ever at the gallery did nothing to improve its reputation or that of Carter Brown. Wilmerding and Wyeth continued their long friendship unscathed.

Wilmerding returned to teaching in 1988, becoming the first to hold Princeton’s new endowed chair in American art and simultaneously the first professor at any university focused exclusively on the field he had championed.

The National Gallery’s 2004 exhibition, “American Masters from Bingham to Eakins: The John Wilmerding Collection” included 51 oils, watercolors, and drawings by 26 artists that he had collected over his entire career. He donated them all to the National Gallery as a gift to the American people. He gave his collection of Pop Art and 20th-century realist work to the Princeton Museum of Art when he retired in 2007.

Rachael DeLue, his successor as department chair at Princeton remembers her friend and colleague as “open-minded and generous” and an “outsize figure in [this] field, an inimitable teacher, and a lovely person. [He] knew exactly when a bit of drollery or wit would lighten the mood of a faculty meeting or help a junior colleague understand she wasn’t alone in not wanting to take every little thing so seriously. And there really was nothing better than saying something funny enough to make John release his signature laugh, a half giggle and half cackle that resounded through the halls of McCormick.”

David did the most famous Lampoon cover in the history of the magazine: a parody of the Bayeux Tapestry, reimagined as the “Bayeux Travesty.” This drawing and watercolor illuminated the front and back covers of the issue published for the Yale Game in 1966.

The parody brought the triumphalism of the original to Harvard’s tradition of pre-game abuse of Yale, with text like “HIC YALE FUGIT” under drawings of Yale players in Saxon-era football gear fleeing in terror. Years of David’s self-taught medievalism went into the fifteen-by-thirty-inch piece, which was later framed and hung above the couch in the Prexy Office. With his travesty-tapestry David created a true work of art that’s also truly funny--an achievement rarer than a sixty-five-yard field goal.

He was born in Detroit in 1947. His mother, Sally Kiskadden, attended Radcliffe and his father, Bill, known as “Big Bill,” was a New York State record-holder in the quarter mile who went to Williams. They had three children in all. After David came Bill and Thomas, called Tim, both of whom looked up to and adored him. Big Bill traveled all over as a salesman for a cutting-tool manufacturer, and the boys’ mother, grandmother, and great-uncle, Thomas Marker, a watercolorist, taught the boys about books, music, philosophy, paleontology, and art. For high school David went to Western Reserve Academy, an all-boys boarding school in Hudson, Ohio. The art teacher there, William Moos, introduced him to calligraphy, in which he would become so skilled that his only peers were a handful of the great calligraphers of the past.

For his application to Harvard, David submitted a four-page narrative cartoon titled “The Farm,” about his summer job on an alfalfa farm near his family’s house far suburban Detroit. Another teacher at the school, now retired, remembers that on receipt of the cartoon Harvard’s Director of Admissions called the school’s Headmaster and said they were accepting David based on the cartoon alone—no need for transcripts or board scores.

My family lived in Hudson, and my mother directed plays at the school. I first saw David’s work in school publications that she brought home. Later I attended the Academy myself and read his work in issues of the Lampoon that came via the library’s subscription. I remember sprawling in the library’s big leather chairs to read and reread his “Great Goodison Toad Hunt” (another adventure from his Michigan days), or “Inside Straight Nate” (a deconstruction of Harvard’s then-president, Nathan Pusey), or “The Great Game of Absolution and Redemption” (a board game supposedly devised by John Calvin). One afternoon I sat down with a cartoon story featuring Destructo Duck, a recurring character of David’s. Some obstacle has come up in the plot, and Destructo Duck decides to mull it over. He heads for Uranus, because, he says, “I always find it easier to think in an atmosphere of frozen methane.” That moment transfixed me, and I got a sense of the general direction I wanted to go in my life.

David’s brothers, Bill and Tim, have been my lifelong friends. Bill is a composer and musician, Tim a sculptor and jeweler. David helped me to get on the Lampoon in the fall of my freshman year. He was still in Cambridge finishing his degree, living off-campus, and he and I became friends. Hanging out with him was wild ride and an exhilaration.

Sometimes when we talked he would rev my mind to red-line speeds until I prayed I would be able to slow down. In 1973 he got his degree in Folklore and Mythology. An intrepid journey that he and a friend had made one summer to Patagonia to study culturally islanded immigrant families from Wales resulted in a dissertation that earned him a summa.

After Harvard he moved to New York and began to work for “Sesame Street,” which was a new show then. By his mid-twenties David was fighting against the powerful influence of a bi-polar disorder that sometimes put him in the hospital. Being possessed by genius means that sometimes your mind can wrack and tyrannize you. Even with that burden, he was a kind older brother figure for me in New York, as he’d been in Cambridge. He introduced me at The New Yorker, to which he sometimes contributed. He also wrote for The National Lampoon, Harpers, The Real World, and other magazines, hanging in there as a free-lancer amid onsets of his illness, which he endured bravely without medication.

(As far as I know, the drugs that might have helped or cured him didn’t exist at that time.)

He took his own life in the fall of 1976. By then his disease had partly isolated him, which made him more painfully mourned.

Today his work exists in the archives of the Houghton Library, in back issues of the Lampoon and other magazines, and in the collections of his many fans. Those who knew David McClelland will always remember him with admiration and love.

That voice served George well at Harvard, where he reveled in nonacademic pursuits, chief among them the ’Poon (we met phoolishly, in the spring of freshman year) and fencing. He was as comfortable in black tie as sabre mask or nothing at all, as memorialized in a Harvard Yearbook photo shoot (by TCW '71) of coed skinny dipping in the Adams House pool.

At Cambridge, where George read international and maritime law, we shared a house with two Brits and another Yank. It was there I came to fully appreciate his knack for making lifelong friends in every circle he traveled, and his unstinting hospitality—inviting the lot of them, it seemed, to the Greek island of Skiathos, where his watercolor renderings of an imagined Spyrou compound eventually became an enchanted reality.

George was a dreamer, a charmer and an enthusiast—qualities apparent in his choice of a career at Airship Industries Ltd. in the UK, and then, with his wife Amanda, in founding Airship Management Services. One might call his determination to make a business from his passion for airships hopelessly romantic. But better say, hopefully romantic. Many of his fortunate friends, after jaw-dropping rides, banished the insufficiently exhilarating “blimp” from their vocabularies. They also banished ”quixotic.” You didn't discount the sincerity of George's dreams you envied it.

The devoted father of Peter, Isabella and Nicholas, he succumbed to leukemia, after a year-and-a-half battle, in 2010.

Born the tenth of ten children like a character in some kooky folktale to a Cleveland welder and his homemaker wife, Mark set out early on the path to a life in the arts. Barely out of kindergarten he started churning out his own picture books, written in crayon on stapled-together manila paper. He would add on the back of each new volume “Do you have these OTHER books by Mark O’Donnell?” And he’d list them! His nine siblings were entertained and frequently astonished by their baby brother’s quick wit, often extraordinarily sophisticated. At age ten, his twin brother Steve, just five minutes older, tried dissing Mark with the taunt ”I’m the original and you’re the copy!” Without missing a beat, Mark fired back ”No. You’re the rough draft and I’m the new improved model.” His blue-collar family must have wondered at this seeming changeling in their midst, radiating a kind of White Buffalo magic.

As a kid, Mark spent his paper route money on Broadway show albums, presaging his adult career collaborating with John Waters on such musical hits as Hairspray and Cry-Baby. His incessant doodling led to one of his other careers as a cartoonist, first for The Lampoon and later for publications ranging from The Atlantic to Christopher Street. He once self-deprecatingly suggested a title for a theoretical collection of his cartoons might be ”If Only He Could Draw.” He was equally tireless in his output of humor pieces which found their way to places like Esquire, Rolling Stone, and The New York Times. He wrote a dozen full-length plays, numerous one-acts, and two well-received novels. He was honored with a Guggenheim fellowship and a feather-shaped Drama Desk Award. Yet he never had a cell phone. And he acquired his first and only credit card barely a year before he died in 2012 at age 58.

The look-alike aspect of his twin-ness was enjoyed in his youth with classic class-switching capers and the general hornswoggling of grownups. As undergrads, the scholarship students Mark and Steve were exploited by The Lampoon for comic purposes. The 1973 Sports Illustrated parody included a feature about a set of Siamese twins who, despite the boneless skin bridge that joined them, played football for different colleges. When Linda Lovelace, the porno star who appeared in Deep Throat, was honored by the Lampoon as ”America’s Sweetheart,” Mark and Steve served as her escorts, clad in matching white tie and top hats, serenading her on the Castle steps with the Depression-era song ”When Did You Leave Heaven?” in their matching Irish tenors.(See below.) Mark served as Ibis during the magazine’s centennial. He also wrote the Class Ode and gave the Class Day Oration in June. Mark was a sort of colorful mascot to the class of ’76.

Mark had a wise and hilarious way with words. He once described pornography as ”a world of implausible hospitality.” Brother Steve was at his side when they saw Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling for the first time. Mark made a small hand wave and muttered ”Eh. Kinda busy.” When an out-of-towner approached Mark in Greenwich Village and asked where he could find Bleecker, Mark responded “Between bleak and bleakest.”

As an undergrad, Mark wrote three Hasty Pudding shows. (A record number!) His friend Mike McCarthy recalled ”Easily the most prolific humorist on campus, he consciously resisted the ambient impulse toward clumsy burlesque and low innuendo of the Theatricals and easy sarcasm of the Lampoon.” His poetry teacher, the renowned Elizabeth Bishop, described Mark as ”angelic.”

Since his passing, an annual Mark O’Donnell Prize has been given to promising young playwrights. There is a Mark O’Donnell Theater in Brooklyn. And a Mark O’Donnell Award for Comedy Excellence has been created by his former students. (At Yale, of all places.) His fellow Clevelander and Poonie Tom Feran ’75 was quoted in the Plain Dealer about Mark, ”If you knew him, you didn’t just like him; you treasured him.”

Silly. Serious. Thrifty. Modest. Childlike. Yet always masterful and astounding in his writing. A sweet oddball in the mold of Hans Christian Anderson, Lewis Carroll or Eugene Ionesco. Maybe not a literary lion. Maybe more of a literary otter—off cavorting in his quirky corner of the creative woods.

(Ed. note: ”The O’Donnells were not the Lampoon’s first identical twin members; they were the improved models,” with posthumous love and admiration from Owen and Patrick McGowan ’66).

Some thought “Fingo” was a frequent denizen of the Castle, others said he never left. But he did. At least as far as Adams House and his Pudding and a cappella Krokodiloes rehearsals and performances. His “Woman of the Year 2011” celebration, a flamboyant queen-bee-themed yellow dress, antennae wig, with generously creative makeup, exemplified one aspect of his artistic style. He also loved whimsical, exaggerated caricatures paired with muted, Victorian-inspired colors set against absurdist backgrounds.

Post-graduation, he moved to Los Angeles for an MFA and an internship at Nickelodeon on “SpongeBob SquarePants. He dropped the MFA program and throughout his 20s he became an integral part of the creative teams behind American Dad!, Big Mouth, and Human Resources. His artistic storyboard style, honed across all his work on the Lampoon, was a perfect edgy match for these satirical animated productions.

He received the highest score ever on the animation test for “American Dad!” An innovator in a new genre of “hyper-exaggerated emotional realism,” as a character designer and artist there, he helped bring its eccentric ensemble of characters to life.

TV animation was never quite enough. As at the Lampoon, he simultaneously juggled design and execution of comic strips, posters, logos and inordinately clever t-shirts.

One hopes that these sample pages will remain posted forever on the Interwebs. Some deserve to be resurrected as Lampoon merch.

Finn-Gamiño died suddenly, to the great distress of friends and colleagues, at 32, less than 10 years after his graduation. Episode 9, Season 17, of American Dad! (9/5/22) was dedicated to his memory. Also, the finale of another satirical animated series, Mulligan (Season 1, Episode 10, 5/12/23) included a dedication honoring his many contributions to the industry. The Krokodiloes performed “Loch Lomond,” their signature song, at his memorial service.

Classmates at his tenth reunion remained awed by the quality of his work, which always aspired to be thoughtful and visually engaging art, and usually succeeded. They also remembered him spending days preparing for a Lampoon cocktail party at the Castle, building an intricate maze for 40 mice “that completely circled theNarthex.” According to classmates, “he made sure all 40 mice were humanely released into the Harvard Crimson.”