At 17, it looked like Gloria Stoll Karn’s — known then just as Gloria Stoll — dreams of being an artist were through.
It was 1941, and she had recently graduated from New York’s High School of Music and Art, but her father had died a couple of years earlier, and Stoll had taken a job with the New York Life Insurance Company to help support her widowed mother. The job was dull, but it paid the bills. And now her accumulated artwork from school was cluttering their Queens apartment.
One night, Stoll tried to stuff it all down the building’s incinerator. But the bundles were too big, so she just left it stacked there on the floor for the janitor.
The next morning, the janitor knocked on her door.
He’d found Stoll’s artwork, but instead of burning it, he’d taken it upstairs to the apartment of Rafael DeSoto, who was also an artist. DeSoto made his living illustrating pulp magazines and liked what he saw, so he invited Stoll up to talk.
“I was up there so fast, and it was very exciting for me,” she said.
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