Norman Stone’s professional affiliation with C.S. Lewis began when he directed the original Shadowlands, a film about the marriage of Lewis to Joy Davidman and her subsequent death. Most may be familiar with the title but remember Anthony Hopkins in the role of Lewis rather than the BBC’s Joss Ackland from 1985. Lewis’ papers and family wardrobe are housed in Wheaton’s Marion E. Wade Center. Stone also produced a docu-drama in 2005 titled C.S. Lewis: Beyond Narnia, which is viewed to be more accurate than the final production of Shadowlands. After a long association with the creator of Reepicheep, Tumnus and the Pevensie children, Stone returns to Lewis with The Narnia Code. To air on BBC1 April 16th, The Narnia Code details Michael Ward’s cracking of the mysterious thread that holds the various Narnian tales together.

Norman Stone has had an illustrious career with his being awarded a first class honors degree in Visual Communication Leeds College before transferring to London’s Royal College of Art for a Master of Arts degree in Film and Television. He began his professional career in television as the youngest producer/director for the Religious Department of the BBC.

Moving from Everyman documentaries and a pioneering Sunday children’s show into drama, he produced the highly acclaimed film A Different Drummer about the blind and deaf Cornish poet Jack Clemo (1980). Shadowlands helped more firmly establish his career with its international success. The film won two BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) awards, an International Emmy and the Prague D’Or for Best Director. Other of Stone’s dramas include Martin Luther – Heretic, starring Jonathan Pryce; New World, starring James Fox; The Vision, starring Dirk Bogarde and Lee Remick, and the award-winning Burston Rebellion with Eileen Atkins and Bernard Hill. In 1988-89 he directed a three-part thriller series for BBC Scotland, The Justice Game (first series), and the television feature Pied Piper, starring Peter O’Toole and based on the novel by Nevil Shute (a Granada TV/CBS co-production).

While working on the script of The End Time with Murray Watts, Stone also collaborated with Watts on a film adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s Dream of a Ridiculous Man (BBC 2), starring Jeremy Irons.

Stone has won an International Emmy, Gold Awards for Best Film and Best Director at the New York Film and Television Festival, and the Monitor d’Oro for Best Drama at Umbriafiction TV ’92 for the Catherine Cookson television film The Black Velvet Gown, which he directed for World Wide International Television.

Following up on his successful direction of They Do It with Mirrors, BBC’s 1991 “Miss Marple” Christmas special, Stone has also worked on BBC’s final “Miss Marple” adventure, The Mirror Cracked from Side to Side.

Other awards include a BAFTA for the Omnibus special on the life of Dudley Moore, After the Laughter, an Andrew Cross Award for best documentary of the year for The Tartan Pimpernel and a Golden Remi for his first feature film Man Dancin’, which he created and directed in his home town of Glasgow. Stone directed Florence Nightengale, a period drama, which aired in the UK in mid-2008.

John L. Smith passed away Sunday, April 5, 2009 in Marlow, Oklahoma. Known to many as John L., Smith was born Monday, March 15, 1920 to Emmon and Viola Jeannetta (Gayle) Smith. In 1937 he graduated from Marlow High School and enrolled at Oklahoma Baptist University. He later attended Cameron University in Lawton, Oklahoma and Brigham Young University. He was awarded three honorary doctorates (Doctor of Divinity) and a Doctor of Theology from Southwestern Baptist Seminary.

On November 27, 1940 Smith married Winona Inez Muncrief in Coalgate, in south-central Oklahoma. They were married for nearly fifty-one years and together they bore and raised a son (John, Jr.) and two daughters (Winona and Bonita). Inez passed away on August 27, 1991. Smith married Pearl Gayle on June 4, 1995.

Rev. Smith’s career in ministry spanned nearly seventy years, serving for seventeen years in Utah. He pastored for fifteen years in several churches in Oklahoma, New Mexico and Utah. While in Utah, he began his study of of Mormonism–something he would engage in for over fifty years, leading Smith to write several books on this subject. In 1953 while in Utah, Smith and his wife, Inez, founded Utah Missions. They later moved the ministry to his hometown of Marlow, Oklahoma. Smith began to donate portions of his papers to Wheaton College in 1990. At the age of 80 he began The Ministry of John L. Smith to continue his missionary efforts.

Vaughn Shoemaker, who died in 1991, was a Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist for the Chicago Daily News and his work is as relevant today as it was when he sketched it. Along with being an acknowledged cartoonist, Shoemaker was a Christian whose work often displayed his convictions.

According to David Enlow in a tract titled Meet a Pulitzer Prize Winner, in 1918 Vaughn Shoemaker enrolled in the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, with a class that was overcrowded and with many waiting to get in, the instructor, after three months, took to the task of weeding out the least likely to succeed. The first one picked was Shoemaker.

“You’ll never become a cartoonist in a thousand years,” said the director.

Twenty years later he had won his first Pulitzer Prize. Also he won the National Headliners Award, two National Safety top awards, eleven Freedom Foundation gold medals, topping it off with an honorary degree from Wheaton College and his second Pulitzer Prize.

What happened to transform this young man into a distinguished American cartoonist?

In 1917 as a lifeguard on a Chicago beach, he met a beautiful girl who later became Miss Chicago and it was love at first sight. Not only was this girl beautiful, but she was also sensible. It was “no go,” she said, unless Vaugn showed more signs of making some success in life.

With this incentive, Shoemaker found himself attracted by an ad in a magazine: “Draw this cartoon and become a famous cartoonist.” The fact that he had no particular aptitude in that direction did not stop him. Soon he found himself in art school, from whence came the director’s discouraging word.

An apprenticeship in the art department of the Chicago Daily News opened up, and this laid the groundwork for his 44 years of successful cartooning.

At the age of 20, a storybook situation brought the first break of his life. The chief cartoonist for the News left to take a position in New York City. His assistant had gone to take another position in the same city, and the second assistant had to leave because of illness in his family.

“You, Shoemaker!” the boss shouted. “Draw something, anything, until I can get a cartoonist somewhere.”

As he faced his dilemma, Vaughn thought of his mother, who years earlier had taught him to pray at her knee. Right in the chief cartoonist’s studio, he fell to his knees and asked God for help. Somehow, the cartoon came off his pen. He was known at The Chicago Daily News as a “gospel cartoonist.” He once said he started each cartoon “on my knees with a prayer.” He noted that the boys at the newspaper noticed it. Some laughed. “Some kidded me,” Shoemaker said. “I laughed back. There I stood: God helping me, I could do no other.”

In addition to his professional success, Shoemaker travelled far and wide to share the Good News of the Gospel which transformed his life.

Shoemaker created the character John Q. Public and won two Pulitzer Prizes. Shoemaker’s most familiar character represented the beleaguered American taxpayer. The character appeared first in The Chicago Daily News, the paper on which Mr. Shoemaker began his career in 1922. In 1963 Mr. Shoemaker’s cartoons were syndicated to more than 75 newspapers. He worked at the Daily News for 27 years and then moved to the New York Herald Tribune, the Chicago American and the American’s successor, Chicago Today, where he retired. By the time he retired, in 1972, he had drawn 14,000 cartoons

He won his first Pulitzer in 1938 for a drawing, “The Road Back,” which showed a World War I soldier marching backwards into war. The caption said, “You’re going the wrong way.” His cartoons were criticised by Herman Goering who described his work as “horrible examples of anti-Nazi propaganda.” In 1947, he won his second Pulitzer, for a cartoon titled, “Still Racing His Shadow.” In this cartoon a worker, marked “new wage demands,” tried to outrun his shadow, “cost of living.”

Many artists admit that motion stimulates creativity. A somewhat surprising source of imaginative inspiration is the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA). For many years it proved to be a dark but generous muse for Chester Gould, creator of the Dick Tracy comic strip. Each weekday Gould rode the train from his home in Woodstock, Illinois, to downtown Chicago where his office in Tribune Tower was located. Known for devising spectacularly nasty opposition for his square-peg hero, Gould frequently modeled his villains on the physical characteristics of the passengers sitting near him. One of his best-remembered baddies, Pruneface, was patterned after a horrifically scarred WWII vet. Other notorious mugs from Tracy’s Rogue’s Gallery were Flattop, Mrs. Prunface, the Brow, Pear Shape, the Mole and Little Face Finny.

Another proud graduate of the “CTA School of Artistic Expression” is Vinita Hampton Wright. Working as an editor at a Christian publishing house, Wright daily rode the train from her home in southside Hyde Park to suburban Wheaton. Already busy with various projects, she decided to use the travel time to finish her novel, Grace at Bender Springs (1999). After politely asking her usual commuting companions to ignore her as she concentrated, she opened her laptop and typed for the duration of the trip. When the book was published, she gave them free copies.

Reversing Wright’s trajectory was Dr. Ken Taylor. In the early 1960s Taylor rode the CTA from his Wheaton home into Chicago, where he served as Editorial Director of Moody Press. Desiring to produce a paraphrased Bible that appealed to young, modern eyes, Taylor, now concentrating on the Pauline epistles, set about performing his task during the morning journey. He writes: “…I sat with a Bible on one knee and a writing pad on the other. I tried to keep everything balanced and not let it fall over on my seatmate as he perused the morning paper.” And so, “…as the swaying train bumped along over the tracks,” he eventually completed The Living Bible, providing the foundational publication for the successful Tyndale House Publishers, international distributors of books, Bibles and videos.