May/June 2005
Kelly Freas Lives!
A Portrait of an Artist as a Man
by Michael Jon Khandelwal
When Frank Kelly Freas died on January 2, the world lost a brilliant artist.
He was an illustrator for Mad Magazine beginning in 1957 and became its principal cover artist until late 1962. Although he didn’t invent Mad’s mascot, Alfred E. Newman, Freas gave him his own personality and turned him into an icon.
Known as the “Dean of Science Fiction Artists,” his style mixed vibrant speculation with wrinkled, exacting realism. Freasā art graced the covers of Analog, Weird Tales and Astounding Science Fiction as well as hundreds of books including those by Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke. The World Science Fiction Society’s highest honor is the Hugo Award; Freas won 11, five in consecutive years, and is nominated for a 12th this year.
He designed the official patch for NASA’s Skylab I space station, was an artist for the Apollo-Soyuz mission, and produced a series of posters for the space program in the early 1970s, now in the collection of the Smithsonian. He was the author of four collections of his work: The Astounding 50s; Frank Kelly Freas: The Art of Science Fiction; Frank Kelly Freas: A Separate Star; and Frank Kelly Freas: As He Sees It. In 1977, Freas was honored with an exhibition at the Chrysler Museum.
But when Kelly Freas died this January, I lost a second father. I had known him as a boy and looked up to him, was instructed and corrected by him in the matters of becoming a man. He influenced my life in countless ways. My bereavement is about the man he was, the man most did not know outside his family.
He was born Frank Sylvester Kelly on August 27, 1922, in Hornell, New York. His parents divorced when he was two. “His mother was a piano player in a speakeasy,” says Laura Brodian Freas, his widow. After his mother remarried, he took his stepfather’s last name and became known as Frank Kelly Freas--Kelly to friends and family.
During World War II, Kelly performed aerial photo reconnaissance in the Pacific. During his spare time, he airbrushed cute girls with butterfly wings on dayroom walls and busty women on the noses of bombers. “There’s no photography of the nose art, because a chaplain would follow him with a spray can and cover the pictures,” says Laura.
Before finding his artistic calling, he attended medical school for awhile. His dissection plate illustrations were still being used as guides 25 years later. He graduated at the top of his class at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh.
He married Pauline (Polly) Bussard in 1952; they had two children, Jacqui and Jerry. While living in New York, Kelly would read to his kids every night. Says Jacqui, “He read to us long after we were capable of reading to ourselves.”
Kelly became a 32nd degree Scottish Rite Mason, and he had a passion for music, especially drumming. “Before we were born, he was a sub for Gene Croupa, a very famous drummer,” says Jacqui Baric.
The family often traveled, but Kelly didn’t really like it that much. “Because my mother loved it, we traveled,” says Jacqui. “That’s why we went to Mexico. He was very much a city boy and wasn’t thrilled about being out in the country. My mother had a tan, and he was pallid, an amusing contradiction.”
The Freas family lived in the Blackwater section of Virginia Beach from 1962 to 1987. In their two-story house on Blackwater Road just south of the Pocaty Creek bridge, he made the dining room into his studio.
From Pungo, the family would vacation, often to the outer banks. “Sometimes in the middle of the week my mother would declare a holiday,” says Jacqui. “For him there was a fuzzy line between work and pleasure. He always took his sketch pad, even while sitting at the ocean.”
For Thanksgiving or Christmas, Polly made a rule that Kelly had to take at least a half-day off. “He would come to dinner and then go back to the drawing board,” says Jacqui. “To have family time, he would work until four a.m.”
Polly was his time manager. Jacqui notes, “Shortly after they were married, it was income tax time, and he had taken all his deductions and added them to what he owed. Mom quickly took over the finances.”
Kelly was an impeccable dresser who drove both Polly and Laura crazy because he would ruin good clothes while painting. “Dressing up was not for other people, but for his family,” says Jacqui. “He always said, ’if you couldn’t be polite to your family, why would you bother with strangers?’"
A romantic, Kelly often wrote Polly love letters. “I found them tucked into her books,” says Jacqui. “He continued that with Laura.”
But he was extremely shy and uncomfortable in crowds. “That’s one of the reasons he did sketches at conventions,” says Jacqui. “It gave him a way of focusing on one person and not everyone else, a way of interacting that helped him with his shyness.”
"He became more social after we got him the right hearing aids, though,” says Laura. “It might have been that he just couldn’t hear people, more than being shy.”
Kelly had a wicked sense of humor. He would perform sleeper tricks, once putting a fake rose in the garden, then waiting months for someone to pick it. “He shaved off his mustache, then waited to see when we noticed,” says Jacqui. “His hair was jet black, but his mustache was flaming copper red. He always wore his hair in the same ducktail style. He never fully pulled out of the ’50s.”
He instilled in his children a positive way to handle anger and rebellion. “He taught me how to depersonalize anger, step away from it,” says Jacqui. “He’d have me chop wood or weed the garden.”
He was a good father, but a lousy cook. Once, when Polly went away for a trip, the kids and Kelly took turns cooking.
For the rest of this story, you can order the May/June 2005 issue of Hampton Roads Magazine.
