Profiting From the Art of Perfect Penmanship

Ernest Charrow spent a lifetime selling printing to tiny businesses and huge corporations throughout Los Angeles. Cards, stationery, brochures, pamphlets, you name it--on the road, selling, selling, selling. He’d come west from Brooklyn, N.Y., to do it. That was 47 years ago. Retirement was 20 years ago.

“Then the wife,” he says of Berdie Charrow, to whom he has been married for 65 years, “well, she saw this ad in the paper in 1981. We were living in Thousand Oaks. The ad was for calligraphy courses at the senior center. I thought: ‘Right. Never. No way.’ But I was sitting around, retired and 78.”

Once a printer, always a printer--something about ink in the veins.

“The teacher threw me out of the class within a week,” says Charrow. “I knew too much.”

The teacher may have solved one problem by creating another. Within two weeks, Charrow was teaching his own classes in calligraphy.

He would do that for most of the 1980s, in senior centers in Thousand Oaks and Ventura. Whereupon people of all stations and ability levels would come to know the sometimes wry, sometimes affable, sometimes irascible, always energetic Ernest Charrow.

“Oh, come on!” he says, throwing both hands up to the sky. “Are you kidding? You have half a brain, I’ll teach you in half an hour.”

*

He’s not in it for the teaching, it must be said. Charrow, who turns 91 next month, is in it for diversion and pocket money. And he’s awfully good at it.

His office in a tidy mobile home here is lined with his best pieces. The entire text of Lincoln’s Gettysburg address in Old English type, each character a matrix of painstaking strokes that run from fat and bold to razor-thin and delicate. The text of Mark Twain’s essay, published in Harper’s in 1898, on Jewish identity, in multiple typefaces. A placemat-ready compendium of American states in Roman type and their capital cities in italics.

The defining mark of calligraphy, whatever the font, is its sheer elegance. It’s an elegance, too, that can camouflage mischief. In a piece titled “Old Age Is Hell,” Charrow lends visual beauty to blunt street comedy: “The body goes stiff . . . you get corns on your feet big as hens’ eggs . . . you’ll take Ex-Lax at night and then you’re not sure . . . liquor is out, you can’t take the chance.”

He spends up to three or four hours a day at calligraphy. He finds it relaxing and energizing at the same time.

Still, ever the salesman, Charrow takes it to the marketplace.

“If I were in New York,” he says, “I believe I’d make a fortune with this stuff. Ad agencies, when they use this kind of thing, pay $500 to $1,000 a shot for it. Out here, the market’s dead. I’m hoping to break it, but people don’t really think of paying for this stuff.”

Computers may have something to do with that fact, though Charrow’s work is evidence enough that real calligraphy, like any real art, bears the texture, the micro-jitter, the imprint of the hand that moves the pen. That’s a sentiment best expressed in another of Charrow’s pieces: “Calligraphy, the Orphan of Artistry.”

Rep. Elton Gallegly knows from the real thing. His office called Charrow recently and invited him to do 150 nameplates for a fancy dinner. Charrow was excited at the prospect until compensation, or the lack of it, was discussed.

Charrow suggested that the two-day job was not part of his civic duty.

“What, I work for nothing?” he asks in amazement. “Maybe him, with the $130,000 salary, he should work for nothing.”

*

Ernest Charrow is certainly a guy who has never worked for nothing. He may have left the sales routes of Southern California, but in retirement he has retooled for another life of commerce and activity.

“How else do you keep going?” he asks.

It would seem Charrow himself might answer that, as his fitness and vitality are as striking as his calligraphy. He attributes this to luck and, negating all poetic testimony about old-age abstinence, laughingly notes that he has a double shot of vodka before dinner every night. “Yeah, and I have another before bed,” he adds.

Somehow, Charrow is getting away with something, and even he knows it.

If art reveals the man--and perhaps contains his mysteries, as well--Charrow will be on full display this November at Oxnard’s Carnegie Museum. There, the best of his work will be shown. “And available for $5 a copy,” he notes, winking.

Anyone doubting Charrow’s ability and tenacity had best seek out the adage he committed to paper in 1994: “Beneath the rule of men entirely great, the pen is mightier than the sword.”