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Caricature artist plies trade in McCook, Chase County
McCOOK and IMPERIAL, Neb. -- A couple of vagabonds, caricature artist Chuck Rak and his Portuguese-speaking Brazilian lover, Anna Delma, passed through McCook and Imperial this week, with Chuck doing caricatures for $20 apiece and Anna sitting by his side to provide moral and romantic support.
Born Jan. 23, 1949 in Vermont -- where his father was a psychiatrist -- Chuck discovered in his teens that he had a talent for doing caricatures. As a result, throughout the rest of his life, Chuck has traveled extensively in America and Brazil, drawing and coloring caricatures of faces. While in McCook Monday and Tuesday, he did caricatures of a string of McCookites at TJ's Family Fun Center and at the McCook Gazette.
Starting this morning, Chuck will be at the Chase County Fair in Imperial, where he will do another bunch of caricatures of fair-goers willing to pay him twenty bucks for his work.
"I've done a couple of thousand or more," Chuck said. This includes drawings of a number of ordinary Americans, as well as some fairly famous people, including Joan Rivers and U.S. Sen. Howard Baker. "The one I did of Rivers was the result of a drawing I did of her when I was on her show to talk about UFO's, which -- at that time -- was a topic of interest to her," said Rak, which is pronounced just like 'rock.'
Rak and Delma started their current journey August 1st, traveling to McCook and Imperial from Santa Fe, New Mexico. "We'll probably be here five or six days," Rak said.
He met Anna seven years ago in Vermont and they have been traveling together ever since. To enhance their relationship, Chuck traveled to Brazil with Anna, where he spent four months exclusively learning and speaking Portuguese, except for one nine-minute conversation in the middle of the Brazilian stay.
"We have no home except for our 2005 Toyota Matrix," Rak said. "We sleep in motels most nights, but sleep in the car when the motels are too expensive," he said.
This is not Chuck's first visit to McCook. He remembers stopping by here 35 years ago when Dick Crews still owned the bowling alley. He connected with Dick back then, and -- this time around -- connected with Terry and Jana Sides, the current owners of the renovated and re-purposed family fun center which, in the old days, was known as Willow Lanes.