Cartooning not his only line

A matron of some considerable bearing is standing at a complaints window, confronting a hapless clerk.

"Don't get polite with me," she imperiously commands, in a cartoon that ran decades ago in Collier's, the now-defunct weekly magazine.

It might have been cartoonist John M. Price's favorite, because when he self-published a collection of his work, the catchy title was

Don't Get Polite With Me

.

On Jan. 19, Mr. Price, 90, a cartoonist for magazines such as Collier's and the Saturday Evening Post, died of pulmonary hypertension at his home in Radnor.

In the 1940s and the 1950s, his niece Bunny Michener said, Mr. Price's work appeared also in Country Gentleman, Esquire and the New Yorker.

Mr. Price had three careers, his niece said: as a cartoonist, then as art director for a public-relations firm, then as a maker of promotional films.

A 1935 graduate of the George School in Newtown, Bucks County, he earned his bachelor's degree in 1939 from Pennsylvania State University, where he was the art editor of Froth, the school magazine.

In a 2007 Inquirer interview, Mr. Price recalled that one of his teachers at the George School was the 28-year-old James Michener.

Mr. Price said that a decade before Michener wrote his memories of military service - the basis for the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical

South Pacific

- the teacher was writing plays for marionette shows at the school.

And for a few months after he graduated from George, his niece said, Mr. Price and Michener toured summer camps in the Catskills, staging such shows.

Though old enough to serve in World War II, Mr. Price had suffered rheumatic fever as a child, and a resulting heart-valve problem kept him out of the military.

After his cartooning days, Mr. Price was a TV art director with the Philadelphia advertising agency N.W. Ayer & Son from 1954 to 1962, first in New York City, then in Philadelphia.

Then he set up John M. Price Films at his Radnor home, producing promotional films for the likes of Lufthansa, General Electric and Longwood Gardens. He retired in 1987.

For the next 20 years, Mr. Price painted watercolors based on landscapes that he had visited in Costa Rica and Hawaii and at the McKaig Nature Education Center in Upper Merion.

He showed his work in recent years at the ArtsScene in West Chester, the Plymouth Meeting Historical Society, the Wayne Art Center, and the Woodmere Art Museum.

Earlier he had won, among other honors, the Silver Screen Award of the U.S. Industrial Film Festival and the International Broadcasting Award of the Hollywood Advertising Club. Besides Bunny Michener - no relation to the writer - Mr. Price is survived by two other nieces and three nephews. His wife, Elizabeth, died last year.

A private memorial is to be held May 3.