SYNDICATED CARTOONIST Robb Armstrong is a Philly guy. I met him years ago at a going away party for Bob Greenberg, who was as old school a newspaperman as you'd ever want to meet, and who was the Philadelphia Inquirer features editor who took a chance on the young cartoonist by signing the Inquirer up for a daily comic strip about a middle class two-income -- dad's a cop, mom's a nurse -- black family in Philadelphia.
The strip has always been filled with brotherly love and the issue of race, while always present, is hardly ever an issue. The strip is about family and home and it just so happens that the comic strip family's home town is our home town. And in the Inquirer's Sunday funnies the Jumpstart family (even the curmudgeonly unibrow partner Crunchy) celebrated the Phillies victory the way we all did. In fact, I took some pictures of Philadelphia cops looking a lot like these guys on Broad Street after the Game Five clincher on Oct. 29.
Interestingly, I spoke to the son of a Philly cop who was stationed on Broad Street that night who said that his father told him that he was never as scared as a police officer as he was that night. Probably because he realized that the crowd was so huge that it couldn't have been controlled by a thousand cops if the night had turned nasty.
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