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Mort Walker, the creator of Beetle Bailey, will be 90 years old tomorrow, 09.03.13. Beetle Bailey started on 09.04.1950. I never had the pleasure of reading the strip on a regular basis as it was published in the Miami News, and my parents only got the Miami Herald.

But I remember one line from one of the strips that I did see:

"The first man in the boat is the last man on the beach." - Beetle Bailey

Way back in the late 70s, when I was pretty sure I would be a comic illustrator, I was fortunate to be at a mall where a few syndicated cartoonists happened to be doing a Q&A and demo.
Walker is the only one I remember, mostly because of his response to someone in the crowd who asked him to draw Beetle's eyes (this character's eyes were never, ever shown in the strip- always a helmet or cap obscuring them).
He flipped down a fresh page on the big pad of paper sitting on an easel, pulled out a fat marker, and made two big dots on the paper.