THE OREGONIAN

April 3, 1997
by Julia Wotipka
 
Barbara Saltzman promised her son, David, that a book he wrote and drew as a senior project at Yale would be published and that it would be made available free to children with cancer and other serious diseases.

"The Jester Has Lost His Jingle," today a best-selling children's book, became David's bittersweet legacy. On March 2, 1990, David Saltzman died of Hodgkin's disease, a cancer of the lymph nodes. He was 11 days shy of his 23rd birthday.

Although her son wrote in extremely difficult circumstances, "Jester" is a joyous story, says Barbara Saltzman, who is in Portland this week for a series of book readings and signings. She also will distribute books to hospitalized and special-education children and visit the national convention of the American Association of School Librarians.

Early on, David worked out a plot: A jester is banished because he fails to make the king laugh. So he and his pal, Pharley, go off to figure out where all the laughter is hiding. After many misfortunes and escapades, they find it when they try to cheer up a little girl who is hospitalized with a tumor.

"Hello, little girl," the jester says. "My, how do you do? I wonder if you can tell me how come laughter's not with you?"

The little girl looks up, her eyes open wide. Turning slowly toward the jester, she replies quietly: "Here I lie, I have a tumor. And you ask me where's my sense of humor?" Before long the Jester and Pharley put it all together and solve the mystery of missing laughter.

David, his book plotted, got the bleak news in October of his senior year: A fist-sized, inoperable tumor had invaded his lungs.

"The Hodgkin's never changed him," his mother says. "It propelled him; the philosophy of the book was so deeply imbedded in him."

Yes, she says, Hodgkin's forced her son to look more seriously at mortality, "but David's positive attitude shines through the book."

David wrote the rhymes and painted most of the book's watercolors at his dorm-room desk in Yale's Trumbull Hall. He had a corner room with two stained-glass windows and loved the way the light streamed in.

Though sick from radiation treatments and chemotherapy, he earned straight A's, penned cartoons for two campus newspapers and worked nonstop on his book.

The art and English major had wanted to write children's books since 1985, when he met Maurice Sendak, author of "Where the Wild Things Are."

"David was a natural craftsman and storyteller," Sendak wrote in the afterword to "Jester."

"His passionate picture book is issued out of a passionate heart."

Toward the end, doctors tried a last chance bone marrow transplant. It didn't take. David completed his last painting for the book in the garage/studio of the family's Palos Verdes, Calif., home overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

Barbara, a former entertainment editor with the Los Angeles Times, and her husband, Joe, a journalism professor at the University of Southern California, shopped for a publisher after their son's death. They were told that the book was too long, that producing the quality the Saltzmans insisted on was too expensive and that nobody bought rhyme anymore.

So the Saltzmans secured a $250,000 line of credit against their house, borrowed more money from other sources and published the book themselves. "Jester," which came out in 1995, was just as David had envisioned it; he decided every detail.

The family formed the Jester Co. to market the book and the Jester & Pharley doll they recently introduced. Orders for both can be placed at 1-800-953-7837.

To date, the Saltzmans have printed more than 180,000 copies of "Jester," at $20, the book is a self-publishing phenomenon. They've donated more than 25,000 books to children with cancer.

"I think he would be proud of us," Barbara Saltzman says of her son. We told him we would see that the book was published, and he should not worry about it. We would see to it that the world would share it and fall in love with it."

In anticipation of his death, David wrote in his journal: "The best we can do is live life, enjoy it and know it is meant to be enjoyed - know how important and special every time…moment…and person is. And at the end of they day say, 'I have enjoyed it. I have really lived the moment.' That is all."