Pulitzer Prize

Signe Wilkinson was a finalist last year for the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning. That near-miss apparently made a major impression on one of Signe's young daughters. I know this because of something that happened a few months ago. The child wandered away from her babysitter as they walked through Chestnut Hill. A woman found her and asked how to contact her mother. The girl said Signe worked at the Philadelphia Daily News and was "the second best cartoonist in America.

There was George Bush, American flag fluttering on his desk, declaiming to the populace, "I am your father who art in the White House! Hollow be my name. " And there was Signe Wilkinson, the Daily News political cartoonist whose deft satirical touch has bushwhacked Bush on many another occasion, with champagne dripping from her hair. For just the kind of biting bitchiness displayed in the first panel of yesterday's political cartoon, one concerning Bush and abortion, this impertinent Quaker with a scalpel for a pen who is really a very nice lady, won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning.

Signe Wilkinson of the Philadelphia Daily News won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning yesterday, and in a champagne-soaked speech, she thanked some of her suppliers: Saddam Hussein, President Bush, Clarence Thomas, Alan Simpson and "the divine" Ted Kennedy. Called the "attack Quaker" by colleagues, Wilkinson is the first woman to win journalism's highest honor for editorial cartoonists. While acknowledging the importance of political subjects, she said that she tends to mine social issues for cartoons - matters like schools, neighborhood life and "what people are up against day in and day out. " Addressing a staff feasting on hoagies, cookies and the bubbly, Wilkinson peeled back the dark blue lapels of her personalized Daily News jump suit and showed off her "Republican pearls.

Gwendolyn Brooks, the first black to win a Pulitzer Prize, will join California poet Rian Cooney in a poetry reading at 8:30 p.m. tomorrow in Founders Hall at Bucks County Community College in Newtown. Brooks, 73, most recently wrote "Winnie," a poem about Winnie Mandela. Brooks has received the Senior Fellowship in Literature from the National Endowment for the Arts, and she has been honored with the Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction by the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington.

Last week's announcement of the 1990 Pulitzer Prizes sparked parties in a dozen newsrooms across the country, with giddy reporters and editors uncorking champagne bottles and congratulating one another in celebration of journalism's greatest achievement. The pity is that a prize-winning newspaper's subscribers are often the only people who get to read these Pulitzer efforts. And that's something Joseph Pulitzer, the populist-minded publisher of the New York World who endowed the prize, would have loathed.

The Inquirer yesterday won a Pulitzer Prize gold medal for public service for articles by reporter Gilbert M. Gaul exposing lax federal regulation of the blood industry. The medal honored a five-part investigative series, "The Blood Brokers," last fall by Gaul, 38, a business reporter who has covered health economics for The Inquirer since 1983. Another public-service award went to the Washington (N.C.) Daily News for stories revealing that the city's water supply was contaminated by carcinogens.

Joe Livingston was stubborn. He was argumentative. He was, at times, acerbic. In conversation with a friend or colleague, he rarely if ever was heard to declare: "I agree with you completely. " The fact is he almost never let a statement pass without an addition or correction of his own. Whether it was a comment about the weather or a view of the world, he would generally find fault. If Joe could, he would jump in at this very point. He would screw up his mouth and admonish me in blunt language.

Services were to be held in Washington today for Miles Cunningham, a reporter for the old Evening Bulletin who went on to cover the nation's capital for the Washington Times and Insight Magazine. Cunningham, who was 59 and lived in Alexandria, Va., died Monday. A memorial service was to begin at 1:30 p.m today in St. John's Episcopal Church in Washington's Lafayette Square. Burial was to be private. "Miles was a top-notch reporter, a hard-nosed investigator, and yet, outside of the newsroom, a gentle soul, especially around children.

Larry Speakes' "Speaking Out" evoked the predictable and justifiable wrath of the press. Clearly, a spokesman can speak for the president, but not in place of him. Further, one does not make up post facto quotes on world events that rewrite history, possibly jeopardize international relations and mislead the public. If anyone should understand not to do such things, it sure as hell should be a professional PR man who is getting paid for his presumed expertise in how it should be done.

August Wilson has returned to Broadway with Joe Turner's Come and Gone, a weaker but more poetic play than Fences, which won him the Pulitzer Prize last year. The vivid production at the Ethel Barrymore Theater is another in the series of collaborations between the playwright and director Lloyd Richards, artistic head of the Yale Repertory Theater. This extraordinarily creative partnership has brought forth Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Fences, Joe Turner and The Piano Lesson, which has not been seen in New York.