Jeff MacNelly, editorial cartoonist and `Shoe' creator, dies

CHICAGO - Jeff MacNelly, winner of three Pulitzer Prizes for his editorial cartoons and other awards for his comic strip "Shoe," died yesterday at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, where he had been admitted last Friday for emergency surgery. He was 52.

Mr. MacNelly had been treated for lymphoma as an outpatient at the hospital since late last year.

"Jeff was simply the most brilliant political cartoonist of the time," Chicago Tribune Editor Howard Tyner said.

Mr. MacNelly was born in New York in 1947 and reared in an affluent part of Long Island. He was influenced profoundly by his father, Clarence "Bud," an advertising executive and later publisher of the Saturday Evening Post.

In 1969, he dropped out of the University of North Carolina and took a $120-a-week job as a cartoonist for a weekly newspaper in Chapel Hill. The next year, married to his first wife, Rita, he applied for a job with her hometown paper, the Richmond News Leader in Virginia.

Sixteen months after joining the News Leader, the 24-year-old Mr. MacNelly was awarded the first of his three Pulitzers. (The others would come in 1978 and 1985.)

In 1977, he began the comic strip "Shoe," which featured wisecracking anthropomorphic birds who worked at a newspaper called the Treetops Tattler.

The strip currently runs in almost 1,000 newspapers, including The Seattle Times. It twice won the Reuben award, the National Cartoonist Society's highest honor.

Mr. MacNelly is survived by his second wife, Susan, and two sons, Danny, 25, and Matt, 13. A third son, Jake, died in a 1996 climbing accident near Aspen, Colo.