Drawing editorial cartoons for Newsday in the tumultuous 1960s put Kenneth E. Crook on the front lines of that decade's political and cultural wars.

His son Keith remembers his family receiving death threats because of his father's work. People who said they belonged to the right-wing John Birch Society "would call and threaten us," he said, and his mother found a letter in the family mailbox that read, "Better dead than red."

"My father was not the most liberal person in the world," Keith Crook, of Stamford, Connecticut, said in a phone interview Wednesday. "But he was opposed to the Vietnam War and he was pro-civil rights, and that put him on one side of the political divide in America."

Kenneth Crook, who drew cartoons for Newsday for more than a decade before leaving in 1970 to purs

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