By BILL FREEHLING
Watching swimmers in the Rappahannock River a few summers ago, Dr. Steven Mussey was horrified by what he saw.
Children bobbed up and down, unaccompanied by adults and oblivious to the holes on the river floor. None wore a life jacket.
“It amazes me that more people don’t drown in the Rappahannock,” Mussey said.
Mussey, an internist whose practice is on Lafayette Boulevard in Spotsylvania County, went to work on an animated short about the river’s dangers.
He wrapped up the project last week just as bad news came—two people had drowned in the Rappahannock during the July Fourth holiday weekend, and neither wore a life jacket.
“It was kind of eerie,” Mussey said about the timing.
His cartoon shows a father and daughter swimming in the Rappahannock. The father is without a life jacket, and twice goes under despite claiming to be a strong swimmer and knowing the river.
Cox Communications sensed an opportunity to help the community. The local cable provider will start airing the spot this week, less than two weeks after Mussey submitted it.
Cox spokesman Alex Horwitz said the public service announcement will run through September. It will appear throughout the day on dozens of popular channels.
“These spots are incredibly timely,” Horwitz said. “It’s a very unique way to get an important message across.”
This isn’t the first time Mussey’s work has aired on Cox, which serves customers in Fredericksburg and surrounding counties.
Two of his 30-second animated spots on aggressive driving have been running since March 30— about 1,200 times a month. Horwitz said they’ll probably be on through the end of the year.
One features a man angry at being stuck behind a slow driver. The other shows the same driver speeding to catch a car. Both end in wreckage.
The male voices in the cartoons are Mussey’s. His 7-year-old daughter, Emily, is the voice at the end saying “aggressive driving is bad.” The father–daughter pair also provide the voices in the Rappahannock-safety spot.
Mussey said he also dropped off the Rappahannock cartoon at Adelphia, the region’s other main cable provider. A company spokesman expressed interest yesterday in the possibility of airing it.
Mussey said he doesn’t get paid for the work, but he doesn’t have to pay Cox anything to air them. He said the reward is raising public awareness and getting to see his work on television.
“It’s so cool,” he said.
His next planned project involves the dangers of driving while talking on cell phones.
Mussey first took up cartooning in grade school in Springfield, when he copied scenes from the “Peanuts” strip.
As an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, he created “McGee,” a four-panel strip that appeared daily in the University Journal, the school’s alternative newspaper.
He continued drawing in medical school at George Washington University and later during his residency at York Hospital in York, Pa.
He does a weekly cartoon on the medical profession for The Free Lance–Star. It appears Sundays in the Healthy Living section.
He said he started getting into computer animation in the early 1990s, when operating systems advanced enough to allow it. He taught himself the skills, devouring books on animation.
He said it took him about three months to put one of the aggressive driving spots together. His work comes in spurts, when his creativity is peaking.
He does most of it on a laptop, using software made by Toon Boom Animation Inc. He said his wife and two children critique them when he’s done.
He doesn’t consider himself a great artist and said he’d never want to do animations professionally. But Cox is happy to have the amateur animator on board.
“We felt the campaign aligned very well with our core values,” Horwitz said.
Staff writer Jim Hall contribut ed to this story.
To reach BILL FREEHLING: 540/374-5424 bfreehling@freelancestar.com