Saginaw Historian rediscovers a living local cartoonist Cartoon strip detailing city's settlement ran in 1946

By Gus Burns The Saginaw News SAGINAW, Mich. (AP) -- Nearly forgotten in the storage attic of time, Vincent D. Faletti's smile-inducing cartoons recently reemerged. Saginaw historian Thomas B. Mudd since designated Faletti Saginaw's "most prominent cartoonist." Mudd had been perusing the Saginaw archives at Hoyt Library, 505 Janes, when he came across a comic strip named "Saga of Saginaw" by Faletti. Alongside the nationally syndicated strips, the Saginaw-centric cartoon captured Mudd's attention. Curious about the creator, Mudd began inquiring, and what he learned about Faletti surprised and pleased him. Faletti, 95, is alive and well, living in Saginaw Township with his niece, Nancy V. Kincade. After a meeting, Mudd obtained a clip book of the cartoonist's works, put together by Faletti's sister before her death, and intends to preserve them for posterity in the city's archives at Hoyt Library. "I'm a youngster," Faletti joked recently, after saying he was born on Dec. 29, 1916. A crisply-dressed Faletti, wearing a collared shirt beneath a striped zip-neck sweater, sat in his recliner, smiling while flipping through his cartoons for the first time in years. "That really makes me feel old," he says, eyeing the yellowed "Saga of Saginaw" newspaper clippings and others. "That's a long time ago." "Saga of Saginaw," which intricately tells Saginaw's history from the first pioneers to settlement, ran in the Saginaw News during 1946, a year after the then-30-year-old budding cartoonist returned from World War II, where he'd been stationed in Normandy. There, armed a pen, Faletti engaged his artistic prowess enhancing war maps with troop locations and other information crucial to Ally strategists. Never one to take life too seriously, Faletti cartooned a jovial take on some of war's lighter moments and mailed his work to The Saginaw News for publication. In one cartoon, a GI tells his foxhole mate, "What, live with my mother-in-law? Not me! One war is enough in any man's life!" Faletti became a freelance cartoonist -- he could earn up to $300 per cartoon, he said -- married his wife, Violet Schultz of Saginaw, in 1948 and had works published in The New Yorker, the Saturday Evening Post, Collier's, American Redbook, Ladies Home Journal and Better Homes and Gardens, among others. Faletti's later single-pane productions, many featuring dogs or farm animals, are reminiscent of Gary Larson's "Far Side." Similarly, the joke-grenade-style punchlines aren't always immediately evident and often lack dialogue. Although he never owned a dog, many of Faletti's most popular cartoons contained a reoccurring canine with a propensity to "mark its territory." "I had one where the dog dragged a fire hydrant behind him," Faletti says. Another two-panel cartoon depicts a pompous looking dog walking upright and toward a totem pole. In the second frame, the dog has passed, still smug, and the faces on the totem pole have transformed to disgust. With freelance cartoons, "you had the days where it was very lean," said Faletti, so he accepted a position heading the one-man art department for the Department of Defense in Battle Creek, where for greater than 20 years Faletti created brochures and catalogues. He continued to moonlight as a cartoonist. After retiring, Faletti bought a home in Thomas Township. His wife died of cancer in 1997 and last year Faletti moved in with his niece. Faletti remains quick-witted, but becomes frustrated piecing together the chronology of his long life. "I'm in the Twilight Zone," he says more than once when he can't recall the year something happened. "He's still a cartoon" Kincade says. "We laugh every day." Faletti devotedly watches the soap opera, "As the World Turns," reads news magazines to keep up with current events -- he thinks the "Occupy" movement is probably a fad, "but nowadays it can start out small" and grow, he says -- and takes day trips with Kincade to visit the casinos in Standish or Mount Pleasant, so Faletti says he can "get rid of some of that loot." As a photo is snapped of Faletti holding the leather-bound scrapbook, he quips, "Now remember, I'm not Brad Pitt. When asked from where his sense of humor stems, Faletti says he's "just funny." "If I had been syndicated, I wouldn't be sitting here. I'd be sitting in Florida having a mint julep." Published: Thu, Jan 19, 2012