Introduction

Throughout his life, Chuck Jones wrote letters to friends, family,
heroes and fools.  Many of his letters were typed (with three or four
fingers) on a manual typewriter, and a carbon copy stayed in his
files.

In the fall of 1952, at the age of 15, I departed for
boarding school in Arizona and started receiving weekly letters from my
father.

Sadly, letters from my mother did not survive the
intervening years. Most of my letters home, saved by a doting mother,
did survive and are, by and large, unnecessarily dramatic and
adolescent.  Please forgive me, as I was, in fact, an adolescent.
Nevertheless, most of my letters are similar in tone and content to any
teen-age girl’s rants, and few are important to record for posterity.

Chuck’s
letters, however, as is true of so many of his writings, deserve a
public outing, and I have decided to share passages here, for those who
might wish to get a glimpse of the 40-year-old mind of the man who was,
at the time, directing some of the most memorable cartoons ever made:
Feed the Kitty; Rabbit Seasoning;  Don’t Give Up the Sheep; Duck
Amuck;  Much Ado About Nutting; Duck Dodgers in the 24 ½ Century; Bully
for Bugs; Duck, Rabbit, Duck!; Claws for Alarm; From A to Z-Z-Z-Z; My
Little Duckaroo; Beanstalk Bunny; Jumpin’ Jupiter; and One Froggy
Evening… to name just a few.

In the next posting we’ll start with September 19, 1952…the day I left home.