Cartoonist Garry Trudeau recently published a book titled Yuge!: 30 Years of Doonesbury on Trump.

I’m afraid I missed all 30 years of it, even though I have a Doonesbury connection: I inadvertently helped get the cartoon thrown out of the Akron Beacon Journal 45 years ago in 1972. I’ll tell you why.

Doonesbury wasn’t famous in 1972, as it is now. It had been a cartoon in the student newspaper at Yale University, The Yale Daily News, from 1968-1970 and was just getting off the ground as a national comic strip in 1972. It was banished from the Akron Beacon Journal for one particularly political cartoon.

Zonker — a main character in Doonesbury — sarcastically thanks President Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, for not doing anything about the Kent State shootings during an anti-war protest at Kent State University, May 4, 1970.

The Akron Beacon Journal is published 10 miles from Kent State. The governor of Ohio, James A. Rhodes, made the decision to send Ohio National Guard troops into Kent State, leading to the shooting. Can you smell the politics?

I was concerned that the comic strip’s creator would be angry with me because he created the John Mitchell comic panel at my suggestion. To quote a later story in the Akron Becaon Journal about the controversy:

“Trudeau admits the strip was politically motivated. He says he was moved to do something on the Kent State affair by a letter he received from KSU graduate student Paul Keane, who had been active in pushing for a federal investigation of the shootings.”

Actually, I had called Trudeau — whom I did not even know — after sending a letter. “I wrote this after I talked to you,” he penned in a handwritten reply to me enclosing a glossy of the cartoon.

Doonesbury got censored by many more newspapers after that, until its popularity forced papers to reinstate it. But many brought it back by positioning it on a page other than the comic page, a way of implying it is not a comic strip but a political strip.

Like all forbidden fruit, this new location made people more motivated to sift through the pages to hunt for the quarantined Doonesbury.

I guess I need not have worried that Trudeau would be angry with me for getting him censored in Akron. In fact, editors taking Doonesbury off the comic page became one of its trademarks, making it a counter-culture favorite.

I suppose I should feel some small pride that I helped make Doonesbury the pariah of newspaper comic pages in the 1970s, but I have a confession to make.

Except for the one cartoon Garry Trudeau created after talking with me on the phone for 25 minutes about Attorney General John Mitchell’s refusal to convene a federal grand jury investigation of the Kent shootings, I have never read another Doonesbury cartoon in all these 45 years.

It just doesn’t interest me. I have read articles about Doonesbury’s success, however. But the thing itself ? No.

I have it on good authority that the cartoon banished from the Akron Beacon Journal infuriated Ohio Gov. Rhodes. I only hope it irritated Attorney General John Mitchell, who later went to jail over his role in Watergate.

Paul Keane is a retired high school teacher who lives in Hartford.