John Fischetti was my great-great uncle and a first-generation Italian American. As a teenager during the Great Depression, he worked various jobs to help his struggling family make ends meet. At 19, he began studying commercial art at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he developed the skills that shaped his future career. After completing his studies, he moved to California and worked for Walt Disney Studios before pursuing editorial cartooning. In 1941, he joined the Chicago Sun as an editorial cartoonist. During World War II, he served as a radio operator and Army sergeant. In 1945, he became a wartime artist for Stars & Stripes alongside other military cartoonists. After the war, he worked as a syndicated cartoonist for the Newspaper Enterprise Association and later returned to Chicago to work for the Chicago Daily News. When the paper closed in 1978, he joined Bill Mauldin at the Chicago Sun-Times. Fischetti became widely respected for his political and social commentary. In 1969, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning and received the National Cartoonists Society’s Editorial Cartoon Award four years in a row from 1962 to 1965. In 1973, he published Zinga Zinga Za!, a collection of his cartoons and immigrant story. His legacy remains so influential that the John Fischetti Award is presented annually to cartoonists whose work addresses important social and political issues. 

– Ava Fischetti

Relationship:  unknown unknown