Choosing just the right gift is one of life’s perennial challenges—especially when the occasion is a once-in-a-lifetime event.
So when Marketing Professor John Montgomery retired from 32 years of teaching retailing and advertising at Ferris State, his three sons, Mitch, Chad and Ben, decided to commission an artist whose work has had an enduring effect on American culture.
No, Montgomery didn’t get his portrait painted by David Hockney…or even Thomas Kinkade—but he did get his caricature drawn by Jack Davis.

Mad About Drawing
Davis is perhaps best known as one of the original Mad magazine artists (he illustrated the lead story in Mad #1). His art has also graced TV Guide and Time magazine covers. In 2001 Davis beat out The Simpsons creator Matt Groening to win the National Cartoonists Society’s coveted Reuben Award, and in 2002 the Society of Illustrators mounted an exhibition of work from his long career at the Museum of American Illustration in New York City.
“I don’t know how my kids did it,” says Montgomery. “I’ve been a fan of Jack Davis ever since grade school when I had to hide Mad magazines from my mother!”
His sons gave him the drawing at a family reunion in Colorado. They presented it to him using one of his own classroom techniques.
“I would take a picture out of a magazine and cut it up into little squares and assign my students to reproduce those, and we’d put them back together when they were done,” Montgomery explains. “So as family members brought up these squares and put them on the wall I knew it was a caricature, but it wasn’t until they got down to the bottom and I said, ‘Those look like Jack Davis shoes,’ that everyone started laughing and they brought out the original.”
Those shoes that taper toward the end are a Davis trademark, a part of his signature style that has been described as being “prone to frenetic, frantic motion.” This is apparent even in his caricature of Montgomery. Although he drew the now-emeriti professor standing still, the background of spilled ink, squeezed-out paint tubes and scattered drawings convey a sense of manic anarchy.
Among the other distinctive elements of the drawing are the baggy pants cinched with an over-sized belt (Montgomery lost 120 pounds to get in shape for enjoying his retirement), and the pennant mis-emblazoned “FFRRIS.”
“Jack offered to fix the spelling,” says Montgomery, “but I think it just makes it that much more special. It’s somehow in that Mad magazine tradition.”

Bulldog to Bulldog
In return, Montgomery drew a caricature of Davis (in a style influenced by the Mad artist), which he sent to the artist at his home on Simmons Island, Georgia.
“I lettered ‘From One Bulldog Fan to Another’ on my drawing, because Davis is a big Georgia Bulldog fan,” Montgomery explains. “I talked to him on the phone a few days after I sent the drawing along with a Ferris Bulldog cap. Our early careers are pretty similar: drawing for our high-school and college yearbooks, illustrating while in the military and then doing commercial work. Then, of course, I started teaching.”
And over the years Montgomery himself has drawn many tributes for people’s retirement parties. “I realize now how much people appreciate what I was able to do for them,” Montgomery says.
Retirement is, after all, the moment when someone finally gets to say, in the immortal words of Mad magazine icon Alfred E. Neuman, “What, me worry?”

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