SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER
 
November 3, 1996
by Cynthia Robins
 
David Saltzman was 11 days shy of his 23rd birthday when he died from Hodgkin's disease six years ago. His legacy could have been two grieving parents and a saddened older brother. But in David's case, it was more.

In October 1995, Barbara and Joe Saltzman published their son David's Yale senior project, "The Jester Has Lost His Jingle." It is a children's book with an ageless message: "When you're feeling lonely or sad or bad or blue, remember where the laughter's hiding…It's hiding inside of you!"

The Saltzman's colorful booth at the San Francisco Bay Area Book Festival was a favorite spot for parents and children. One little blonde beauty grabbed for a Jester doll and was hard-pressed to give it up. With every $20 book the Saltzmans sold, there was a built-in bonus: a book would be donated to a child with cancer.

Barbara Saltzman, the former editor of the Los Angeles Times Daily Calendar section and the TV Times Magazine, was reluctant to relinquish control of the project and the company it spawned. She and her husband spent thousands of dollars, nights and weekends away from their jobs and published the book themselves.

David Saltzman was a writer and a cartoonist. His work appeared in both of Yale's competing broadsheets. The summer before he found out he was ill, he was inspired to write and illustrate a rhymed tale about a jester who was kicked out of his job because his monarch forgot how to laugh.

The Jester Has Lost His Jingle was born one afternoon when David cracked a joke in a classroom and nobody laughed. So, he started doodling on the blackboard, drawing a sad-faced figure who morphed into the jingle-less jester.

"David was very much that jester," said his mother, who prefers to remember her grinning, blond son as vibrantly alive rather than mourn his death.

The best memorial she and her journalism professor husband Joe could have produced is the book, which has sold more than 100.000 copies. It made the New York Times Best Seller List on March 13, coincidentally, David's birthday, and is being fought over by competing book companies, which totally ignored the Saltzmans when they were first shopping the book around.

"We tried going through regular channels, the agent in New York, the whole thing," said Barbara Saltzman, a vivacious, darkly beautiful woman given to bright colors and stuffing a lot of words into run-on sentences. "We were told that to do a book at 64 pages, in hardback with very high-quality paper and reproduction, was very expensive."

Besides, they told her, "Ryhme isn't selling this year." (One wonders if even Dr. Seuss would ever have been produced in that kind of atmosphere.)

So Barbara Saltzman road-tested the book on her friends' kids.

"They loved it. We knew we had a winner when one 5-year-old girl said the book meant 'that laughter is in your heart.'"

"That phrase is nowhere in this book; that is when I knew what we had," she said. "It had to be a children's classic."

Meanwhile, the Saltzmans were dealing with their son's illness -- taking out a $200,000 equity loan on their Palos Verdes home to finance a bone marrow transplant that their insurance company refused to pay for.

When insurance finally came through, the pair decided to use their house money to self-publish David's book.

"We're in debt for about $600,000. We really did put our money where our mouth is," said USC journalism Professor Joe Saltzman, a compact man with an Amish-style, mustache-less beard.

"I never realized before we went into business for ourselves that the American economic system is based on debt," said Saltzman, laughing.

At the beginning, he said, "I wasn't really behind this. My way of dealing with David's death was to run away, but when Maurice Sendak wrote the 'Afterword' to the book, I started to cry. The turning point was his endorsement. I didn't want this to seem like two parents publishing their dead kid's book."

In the process of turning their lives into The Jester Co., Inc., the couple did a very smart thing: They kept control of their product which, now that the book is a certified best-seller, has become very hot property.

"Yes," laughed Barbara, "we are being 'courted.' And as far as I'm concerned, they are a little late to the party. I might have been tempted with an offer five or six years ago, but then it never would have ended up the way it is or with the donor program we set up."

The Saltzmans figure they've given away 20,000 books to programs for children with cancers and other life-threatening disease.