The way Grass Valley artist Ron Rodecker remembers it, his triple bypass surgery in 1977 did two things.
It convinced the now-octogenarian of his own mortality and, believing he had not done enough to pursue a life in art and with the sense that his time on earth was short, he decided a course correction was in order.
“I was madder than hell,” Rodecker said. “I had used my artwork for teaching and for various comic strips in the local paper, but had never achieved what I had expected. I thought it was my manifest destiny to be the cartoon editor of New Yorker magazine, but then girls got in the way, food got in the way, life got in the way. I was angry that my epitaph was going to read, ‘Could have been an artist.'”
There is an elaborate and beautiful ink drawing called Hobbit Glen that hangs in the living room of Rodecker’s house, a reminder of that time. Look closely at the depiction of the many trees in the piece. Rodecker says that you can actually see the outline of his coronary arteries in the tree limbs.
“After getting out of the hospital, I did a pen and ink of the trees without having to do any sketching or anything,” Rodecker said. “It just came together and my art was born. I entered three pieces into the prestigious Festival of Arts; of course no one ever gets through the jurying system, but I did. That started me off on an art career.”
That triple bypass had turned out to be blessing in disguise.
“One of the best things to ever happen to me was being able to stare mortality in the teeth,” Rodecker said. “It gets your priorities settled up.”
Rodecker had lived and worked in the Laguna Beach area for many years, and began participating in the city’s Sawdust Art Festival, an annual event that is a spin-off of the world-renowned Festival of the Arts. It was at Sawdust that his work first caught the attention of representatives from Columbia Tristar/Sony Pictures, eventually leading to his involvement in Dragon Tales, a highly popular animated children’s PBS television series that was based upon characters designed by Rodecker.
“Sawdust is a wild and woolly collection of reject artists,” Rodecker said with a laugh. “It has hippies, fine artists, and crafts people. It came together because people were angry at being rejected by the big festival (Festival of the Arts). The Sawdust Festival has become more of a crowd pleaser and display for artists’ works, than the Festival of Arts itself.”
During summer 1995, two representatives from Columbia Tristar had walked into his booth at Sawdust and spotted Rodecker’s illustrations featuring dragons. They were impressed. A meeting with the brass ensued where Rodecker was asked to explain his concept.
“Being a former teacher, I could BS like crazy and I said, ‘I’m using the dragons to teach children how to meet new situations with confidence,'” Rodecker said. “The dragons are big and if the little children can guide them through their play and rough situations, it builds confidence in the children. I was asked, ‘What do you see as the name for this show?’ and I said, ‘Dragon Tales.'”
The incubation process took more than two years, with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting eventually signing on as a partner in the project. By 1997 Dragon Tales was on the air, with Rodecker working as the animator for the long-running show until 2004. During that time Rodecker was thrice nominated for Emmy Awards.
“It was exciting because I was a player,” Rodecker said. “It was sort of fun to phone up the heads of the studio and have them recognize my voice. For a little guy, I felt like a big man, but I never lost sight, it was all a big kick.”
Tiring of the traffic and the smog, Rodecker left Laguna Beach in 2004, moving with his wife Katherine to a home in the woods that is a short distance from Grass Valley. He quickly became a cartoonist for The Union and has involved himself in the local art scene.
He is quick to point out that the message of Dragon Tales is universal to all age groups.
“There’s a story in the dragons that exemplifies where I was coming from,” Rodecker said. “Dragons are the things in life that are too big to conquer, like heart disease. You can either go belly-up or take it as a risk and a challenge. After my heart surgery, I was put on disability. Five years later, after lots of working out and being on a strict Pritikin diet, this doctor I was seeing refused to validate my disability claim, saying I was in too good a shape.
” I had the choice of going to court and facing the state’s lawyers because I knew I needed the disability to live on. All of a sudden, I had an epiphany. I realized that I had been working out and fighting heart disease to try and prove that I was able, that I was not disabled. Instead I looked at the dragons, faced them and dealt with them.”
Tom Kellar is a free-lance writer who lives in Cedar Ridge. He can be reached at thomaskellar@hotmail.com.