SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
A staple of these Yellowknifer pages met his end last week. Norm Muffitt, better known to readers as Bush, died Friday morning. He was 69.
Muffitt's cartoons have been generating chuckles, guffaws, and sometimes fits of blood-boiling rage for nearly 40 years, ever since a chance encounter at a stationery store in 1972 between himself and Jack "Sig" Sigvaldason, publisher of the newly christened newspaper. That led to a tentative offer of employment, providing editors could keep his identity under wraps.
For Muffitt was not just a burgeoning illustrator and satirist, he was also an RCMP officer - a member of the elite Air Services Branch, which he joined in 1966. As an RCMP pilot, Muffitt traversed the sparsely populated North, picking up prisoners, flying around dignitaries, shuttling officers between detachments, taking part in search and rescue missions, and bringing relief to starving Northern communities.
"While with the RCMP in the North, the identity of Norm was a closely guarded secret, although he had the approval of his officer in command subject to not being identified," says Sigvaldason.
"Only NNSL editors were privy to his true identity."
Muffitt's first cartoon - showing two men staring at the RCMP detachment building and wondering where its missing logo had disappeared - appeared on page 18 in the Nov. 8, 1972 edition of Yellowknifer, sandwiched between news of Yellowknife singer Ted Wesley's rising success and questions over what it meant to have NDPer Wally Firth represent the NWT in the House of Commons. Firth had won the seat in the federal election the week before.
That year cartoonists with Yellowknifer came and went. Yellow Connivers, a cartoon by Paul Andrews, appeared once or twice, as did a strip called the Adventures of Gus Gunge, fishing intellectual of Old Town, but Bush continued on, and as Northern News Services grew, so did Muffitt's workload.
Up until mid-May, when he was diagnosed with brain and lung cancer, Muffitt was penning six cartoons a week for NNSL: one for each Wednesday and Friday Yellowknifer, and weekly for News/North, Nunavut News, Inuvik Drum, and the Deh Cho Drum. He also composed cartoons for the Fort Saskatchewan Record and Sherwood Park News in Alberta, even bi-weekly for a German language newspaper.
"He put in three or four hours every night," says his daughter Jen Jones. "He sometimes worked until one in the morning."
Familiar themes developed over time. In Yellowknifer there was the raven and the mouse, which began appearing exclusively in Wednesday's paper after NNSL began publishing a weekend edition on Fridays too. According to legend, Muffitt began drawing the mouse after getting a tip from co-publisher Jack Adderley that such a creature had been observed running loose around city hall, and had frightened a secretary. The raven? Well, that should be obvious.
His night skies were filled with saucer-shaped moons, landscapes criss-crossed with drum-beaters in parkas; there were grouchy polar bears and sarcastic one-liners delivered by cud-chewing caribou; and politicians - lots of Northern politicians to praise and ridicule, but usually the latter. Muffitt's favourites seemed to be mayors - all of them with tiny, dinky crowns adorning their oversized heads and addressed as "Hizoner."
"I still have the first one," says Yellowknife Mayor Gord Van Tighem, whom Muffitt has characterized dozens of times since first getting elected in 2000.
"It was the one where Dave Lovell (his predecessor) was handing over a sack marked 'city problems' to me."
Former Western Arctic MP Ethel Blondin-Andrew enjoyed the cartoon he penned after she defeated Conservative incumbent David Nickerson in 1988 for the first of five straight election wins. The Liberal victor was wearing boxing gloves.
"Bush didn't have much on me because I'm my own biggest critic," says Blondin-Andrew.
"I can pretty much laugh at myself so I can appreciate his stuff. I love a good cartoonist anyways."
Van Tighem called Muffitt's cartoon topics "timely and topical. He had a devious way that always seemed to follow him around and help him out."
Jones doesn't recall any hate mail delivered to her father, although there was the time in the early 1990s when the British alternative rock band "Bush" tried to bully him out of his pen name.
"They tried to say that dad infringed upon their band name but dad had the name years before them," says Jones.
Muffitt chose this name to acknowledge his secret identity as a bush pilot for the RCMP, says Jones, but it was also a tipped hat to Northerners who spent way too much time in camp, and hence were "bushed."
It was no accident that Muffitt, who was born in Brandon, Man., on June 5, 1942, and grew up in Peterborough, Ont., was both an RCMP officer and a pilot. His father, Edward Earl Muffitt, who died during the Second World War when Norm was just baby, was both as well.
It was only late in life - just a few years ago - that Muffitt discovered the true nature of his death. Declassified government documents revealed his father had been a test pilot working on a secret wartime project off the coast of Ireland.
"He was a test pilot and he was testing depth charges for submarines, and one blew his plane up and his crew into smithereens," says Jones. "Because they were testing new technology they couldn't tell the family."
Muffitt retired as a staff sergeant with the RCMP in 1986 after 26 years on the force, and moved over to the Department of Transportation as the chief regulatory officer for the western region. He retired from that job in 2002.
He lived out his later years with Peggy, his wife of 45 years who was also his manager, in Edmonton where he compiled cartoons at a feverish pace until his cancer diagnosis on May 13.
"He never missed any publication dates," says Jones, his only child, and like Muffitt has followed in her father's footsteps. She is a police officer in Hamilton, Ont., and an accomplished artist and cartoonist herself.
"The only break in publication was a few months ago when he just wasn't able to do this anymore because of the illness."
Muffitt is survived by his wife, daughter, son-in-law Stewart, two grandchildren Gill and Ryan, and great grandson Max. He also has a surviving sister, Monda.
A celebration of his life will be held at the Alberta Aviation Museum in Edmonton on Thursday, Sept. 1, beginning at 1 p.m.
