Thursday, February 04, 1999
Enquirer family mourns
Lynn Goodwin Borgman
BY BEN L. KAUFMAN and JOHN KIESEWETTER
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Ms. Borgman
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Lynn Goodwin Borgman, a talented editor and entrepreneur whose fate it was to be lovingly caricatured in husband Jim Borgman's Enquirer editorial cartoons and “Zits” comic strip, died Wednesday.
Ms. Borgman, of Hartwell, was 44.
Mr. Borgman said his wife had surgery Tuesday to ease chronic pain in her shoulder and neck. Two hours after he brought her home Wednesday, she was stricken by what appeared to be a heart attack. She was taken to Jewish Hospital, where efforts to revive her were unsuccessful.
Lynn Goodwin was a senior theology major at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, in 1976 when she met Mr. Borgman at a party celebrating his new job as Enquirer cartoonist.
They carried on a long-distance relationship for a year, while she went on to graduate work at the University of Chicago divinity school.
They married in August 1977.
“It was so strange to meet,” Ms. Borgman recalled in 1991. “He already had his future mapped out ... and so did I, and it wasn't going to Cincinnati.”
She came, stayed and, as Mr. Borgman said late Wednesday, she became a “publisher, quilter, writer, mother and best friend.”
Central to his publishing successes, “She delivered every book we ever did from the trunk of her van,” Mr. Borgman recalled. “On the first one, she was eight months pregnant with Dylan.”
Jerry Scott, who collaborates on “Zits,” confirmed that Ms. Borgman was the model for the wise and witty mother of the central teen-age character.
She was a natural as the real-life mother of Dylan, 16, and his sister, Chelsea, 9.
“I always thought that Lynn and Jim were ideal parents for a kid that age to have,” Mr. Scott said. “She always talked so much to her children.”
Ms. Borgman's tongue could be tart, sweetened by her smile and good humor.
The Rev. Lorentho Wooden knew her wit. He came to Cincinnati in the mid-1970s as community development officer for the Episcopal Diocese of Southern Ohio.
Father Wooden said Ms. Borgman never ignored even an unintentionally sexist remark at diocesan headquarters, where she edited the newspaper, Interchange.
“She was very important, helping me to be conscious of language, and that was a good thing,” Father Wooden said with fond understatement. Her admonishments on gender stung, he said, but “you could accept it from Lynn.”
When Mr. Borgman won the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning, his wife said, “I'm so happy for Jim. I really think he deserves it ... and I'm one of his toughest critics. But he worked so hard for this.”
Harry M. Whipple, president and publisher of The Cincinnati Enquirer, recalled how Mr. Borgman joined the paper after graduation “and has been part of the Enquirer family ever since. The tragic surprise of Lynn's death has struck the hearts of many people at the paper and in the broader community.”
Mr. Whipple said that broad support would be available to Mr. Borgman, Dylan and Chelsea, and Mr. Borgman's mother, Marian, a welcome, familiar face at the Enquirer, where she helped her son cope with his national cartoon syndication.
Rick Green, suburban bureau chief of the Enquirer, said Mr. Borgman once told him that Lynn “was the reason for his success, that she was a partner in all of his accomplishments. Somehow in his work — either in "Zits' or his editorial page offerings — you could sense the husband-and-wife tandem that appeared was Jim and Lynn. I always thought he used their conversations, life's encounters and love for each other as fodder for his work.”
The Borgmans were a perfect team. He was the creative one, while she provided a strong business sense, designing and publishing compilations of his Enquirer cartoons.
“Jim is kind of a romantic, and Lynn had this excellent head for business. She was really a genius at that,” said Thom Gephardt, retired Enquirer associate editor who hired Mr. Borgman in 1976.
“Lynn's open-mindedness to new things, and her supportiveness, were integral in getting "Zits' launched (in 1997),” cartoonist colleague Mr. Scott said. “She gave Jim so much confidence, and she was involved in every decision about content.”
It went beyond that. When a local store ran short of the latest Borgman collection and a book signing was imminent, Ms. Borgman was the “schlep” who used a dolly to retrieve extra copies from her husband's Enquirer office. She laughed when a friend held the door and commented that he knew she'd changed her long-familiar haircut ... from “Zits.”
Others praised Ms. Borgman as a loving parent actively involved in her children's lives.
“Even though Jim had celebrity status, they were particularly focused on their family life,” said Barbara Gray, assistant director of The New School, a Montessori program in North Avondale where Dylan and Chelsea attended. “That was pretty sacred to them. They were a very close family.”
Their teamwork in 1995 raised thousands of dollars to construct The Growing Room, a gym-theater-lunchroom at The New School, by organizing an auction of more than 100 original cartoon art pieces by Mr. Borgman and such illustrators as Charles Schulz (“Peanuts”), Garry Trudeau (“Doonesbury”), Mort Walker (“Beetle Bailey”) and Jim Davis (“Garfield”).
In addition to sharing leadership of that “Cartoon Cafe” fund-raiser, Ms. Borgman was a longtime board member at the school.
Mr. Borgman said another of his wife's passions was Women Writing for (a) Change in Madisonville, where she was helping organize a radio show based at the writing center.
“She was a beautiful and thoughtful writer,” said Mrs. Gray, also an assistant director at Women Writing for (a) Change.
Ms. Borgman also was a quilter.
Mr. Scott, the cartoonist, recalled seeing her latest work when he visited in October. “It was really an art piece,” he said. “She liked to call herself a "fabric artist.'”
Ms. Borgman shared that talent with students at The New School when kindergartner Chelsea and her classmates designed a “peace quilt” that their teacher and Ms. Borgman assembled.
Ms. Borgman also is survived by her mother, Elizabeth Goodwin of Pittsburgh, and brothers James Goodwin of Naples, Fla., and Jeffrey Goodwin of Pittsburgh.
Memorials can be made to The New School Scholarship Fund, 3 Burton Woods Lane, Cincinnati 45229.
