Arnold Roth’s work is instantly recognizable. A trip to the newsstand turns into a one-man exhibition: Esquire, Golf Digest, New Woman, TIME, New Yorker, and many more.

In an interview with NJ Jewish News, Roth, a Princeton resident from 1963-84, discussed a career that has produced thousands of cartoons over more than a half-century.

Growing up in Philadelphia in the 1930s, Roth “followed all of the major sports and some of the minor ones.” He was a fan of the Phillies as well as the Athletics, who won consecutive world championships in 1929-30. “It’s a team that’s not given much credit,” he said. Pinned down to choose the athlete he admired most, Roth selected Jackie Robinson, who broke baseball’s color line in 1947, “for what he had to put up with.” He still follows the game — although not as closely as he did in his youth — “just in case the Phillies offer me a tryout.”

Roth has won international acclaim for his work, including the National Cartoonist Society’s Reuben Award, presented to the year’s top, and the organization’s Gold Key Award for lifetime achievement; a collection, Arnold Roth: Free Lance, A Fifty Year Retrospective, was published in 2001.

“The best editors are the ones that leave me alone,” he said, recalling one memorable bit of direction that came from Sports Illustrated, one of his regular outlets. “I did a huge double-page drawing for them. The art director liked it, but the head editor asked if I could make the people in the foreground more prominent.” Uncertain of exactly what he meant, Roth sat down in the art director’s office, mulling it over for several hours, but in the end left the illustration intact. “The editor looked at it again and said, ‘See, that’s exactly what I was talking about.’”

Sports have always been a favorite subject for Roth. In 1974, he published A Comic Book of Sports, his own spin on the origins and histories of various games. Although considered a children’s book, its visual and linguistic subtleties make it enjoyable for adults as well.

His unique style demands to be taken humorously. “That’s the whole idea,” he said. “It’s all based on exaggeration. It’s my natural propensity. I love to take any subject and work it for what its worth, either make up a hokey history, get playful with it. What I did a lot in that book was make an assumption that kids knew something about the sport just by absorption, and then I’ll say completely the opposite of what is the truth. I don’t do it all that consciously going in, but when I look at the end result, that’s what I’ve done.”

Roth’s caricatures grace the cover of Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville, a collection of essays on baseball by the late Stephen Jay Gould. He was given the task of portraying several legends of the game, including Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, Joe DiMaggio, and other more contemporary athletes.

The cover, which spans the entire book jacket rather than just the front, “was probably done within what would be three normal working days.” But for him, a “normal working day” can be almost 14 hours. “I really got into it. It probably looks more tedious [to draw] than it was.”

Roth also has a serious side as well — relatively speaking — providing illustrations for political and scientific publications such as The Nation and Smithsonian. “I even did one about a death and burial; they thought the article needed a lighter touch because the subject was so heavy,” he said. “I try to force humor on every situation.”

At 77, Roth is still active. “I work for whoever calls me,” he said, rattling off a list of magazines to which he contributes.

Not every drawing draws smiles, however. His cartoon of Lassie for an issue of TV Guide earned reproach from a reader who chastised him for “making fun of an America icon.”

“Controversy, that’s in the eye of the beholder,” Roth said. “There’s always someone who will sound off on perceived offensive material.” He spoke of correspondence about his work in Humbug, a defunct humor publication. “People who objected to what we were doing would send in letters that would start off ‘Dear bastard…’ Then it got nasty, with salutations of ‘Dear Jew bastard’ and ‘Dear Jew commie bastard….’”

When he’s not drawing, he keeps his hands busy by playing the saxophone. “I’ve played since I was a teenager during the Second World War,” he said. With most adult musicians serving in the military, Roth and his young cohorts had the opportunity to work professionally. (His sons, Charles “C.P.” and Adam, both musicians, run a music house for films and other media). Roth performs monthly in a private club with pianist William Zinser, author of On Writing Well. “I find it, to this day, fascinating.” Zinser, in his 80s, and Roth “can play all the 1920s, 30s, 40s tunes. We don’t know too many since Elvis came on the scene. We attract that age group. Of course, through attrition, we might start playing to an empty room.” Roth quips, “If I hadn’t become a cartoonist, I would have been working in Pep Boys selling auto parts and playing at Jewish/Italian/German weddings on the weekend.”

Roth doesn’t profess to be a spiritual person; “I feel I’m putting everyone on if I show up [for High Holy Day] services.” He attended religious school, was bar mitzva, and “if people needed a 10th for minyan, I’d volunteer.” He says that although his identity “is completely Jewish, the Jews might not care for me.” In a typically twisted Roth scenario, he predicted the end of the Jewish people would come when “avian flu will put an end to chicken soup.”