By Jane Glenn Haas
For Coastal Senior

At 81, illness has kept Hank Ketcham from drawing and painting in recent years - two other cartoonists have been producing Dennis for several years.

Here's my favorite Hank Ketcham cartoon:

Mr. Wilson is lying on his couch, napping, and Dennis the Menace says to Joey that "It's hard to tell if old people is restin' up for somethin' they're gonna do, or from somethin' they DID."

Five-year-old wisdom from the cartoon character who hasn't aged beyond his 6th birthday in 50 years.

Don't we wish we were all so lucky!

The ageless factor could be a reason why Dennis is a favorite with seniors. Why his antics still show up in 1,200 newspapers world-wide.

"Seniors are my biggest audience," Ketcham says, "and then come young marrieds with children."

He brings back images of the old neighborhood, he says, the place where boys romped in mud lots and moms were home "doing the very hard work of being a wife and mother."

That image may be as dated as Dennis' birth certificate, but in Ketcham's heart it remains ever-vivid.

"I really remember my youth," he says. He remembers so well that when he spent 18 years drawing from a penthouse gallery in Geneva, Switzerland, readers had no inkling he wasn't just around the corner. He kept up with American customs - toys and toilets, particularly - by reading the Sears, Roebuck catalog.

Today Ketcham lives in Pebble Beach, Calif. At 81, illness has kept him from drawing and painting in recent years. No one notices. Two other cartoonists have been producing Dennis for several years. "But they fax me everything," he says. "Dennis still has my footprint on it."

Age may have slowed Ketcham's drawing hand but not his spirit. The neighborhood where Dennis lives, he says, is the best place to grow up.

"I think most mothers work today because they have to," he says. "If they have that maternal instinct, they want to be home with children."

Old values and simplicity count to Ketcham. That's why Dennis still has a slingshot instead of an electronic Game Boy stuffed in his back pocket.

"The sling-shot is a symbol of that neighborhood life," Ketcham says.

"It's just there. Dennis would never shoot at animals, and his father has told him he can't shoot at people."

The cartooning bug first bit Ketcham at age 7. He was lured to Hollywood as an adult and joined the Walter Lantz animation studio. He worked on "Pinocchio" and "Fantasia" films for Disney. "That was the real university," he says.

After Pearl Harbor, he signed up for the Navy and developed cartoons, magazines, posters and animated film spots to promote the sale of war bonds.

Ketcham modeled Dennis after his own 5-year-old son.

After he left "Dennis" drawing to others, Ketcham turned to portrait painting. To see a retrospective of his work, log on to: http://www.hank ketcham.com/

The site also features some of his favorite cartoons.

Unlike North, now well into adulthood, "The great thing about Dennis is that he gets to blow out the candles on his 6th birthday cake and then he's immediately 5 again," Ketcham says.

Dennis has filled Ketcham's life.

Every wonder how much of yours he's filled?

Ketcham says the single-panel cartoon takes the average reader about 10 seconds to look at, laugh and move on. So I figured it out. If you read Dennis every day he was published, you've spent 50.6 hours of your life laughing at panels like the one showing Dennis with his feet on the pre-school desk. He's telling his teacher, "I'm like my dad ... I just can't get goin' on Mondays."

Jane Glenn Haas is the author of "Time of Your Life: Why Almost Everything Gets Better After Fifty." She writes for The Orange County Register. Write to her at: The Register, P.O. Box 11626, Santa Ana, Calif. 92711, or send e-mail to jghaas@aol.com, or through her Web site, www.womansage.com.