WOODLAND HILLS : Artist Celebrates His 100th Birthday

Maurice Greenberg has lived 100 years, but time hasn’t passed him by. It has passed instead through the tip of his paintbrush and emerged on the pages of the yellowed sketchbooks in his closet.

The former Disney illustrator celebrated his 100th birthday Tuesday by spending the day resting at home in Woodland Hills from a week of dinner and brunch parties held in his honor.

Several dozen nieces, nephews, great-nieces and great-nephews flew in to town for the occasion--an unprecedented event for a man who has always shied away from being the center of attention, said one niece, Phyllis Sachs. After all, Greenberg said, from the time he was a small boy, when he used to cover his schoolbooks with caricatures of his teachers, he has been a consummate people-watcher.

His sketchbooks contain the evidence of years of surreptitious hovering on the edge of crowds, on street corners and beaches. The pages are covered with cartoon-like renderings of women in bathing suits with flapper haircuts and men in derby hats.

“I use to stop at any station where people congregated,” he said. “They were always posing for me, wherever I looked they were posing.”

Born in Milwaukee, Greenberg left school in the eighth grade to seek his fortune in the burgeoning Chicago art market in 1908. His trade took him from the advertising agencies of Chicago to the camouflage department of the U. S. Army, where he and other artists labored to reproduce the shadows of rocks and tree trunks for the uniforms of World War I soldiers. Finally, he came to Los Angeles, where he drew backdrops for Walt Disney cartoons throughout the ‘50s and ‘60s.

But the art that means the most to Greenberg is the work he did on his off hours, the abstract paintings and cartoons he completed for his enjoyment. He recently donated 14 abstract paintings to City of Hope Medical Center in Duarte, and he has kept in an album every one of the anniversary cards he made over the years for his wife, who died five years ago.

His one complaint about his age is failing eyesight, which in recent years has forced him to put away the sketchbooks he carried through most of his life.

“I do miss it,” he said. “There’s so many new things out there I could be drawing.”