If you were a kid growing up in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and wanted to annoy anyone in authority, you simply intoned the Magoo kiss-off that sounded like, “nack-nack” or “knock-knock” delivered nasally with squinty-eyes of its namesake character.And it worked!It was a delightful form of polite or not-so-polite rebellion, depending on your perspective.Parents and teachers loathed it while your friends urged you on.Ah, the loveable Mr. Magoo, a nearly-blind cane-carrying cartoon character who refused to wear glasses, dressed in an ascot and long overcoat, which he topped with a stylish homburg.And then there was that unmistakable voice that bore more than a passing resemblance to the West Chop, Massachusetts, foghorn that rounded out his cantankerous character, who was fond of repeating when things didn’t go his way, “Oh, Magoo, you’ve done it again!”Mr. Magoo was the creative result of a collaboration between animator John Hubley, and Millard Kaufman, who first gave life to Magoo in 1949 when Kaufman wrote the screenplay for the theatrical short “The Ragtime Bear.”He based the character on his Uncle “Bub,” an eccentric Baltimorean, whose real name was B. Leonard Liepman, who invented the aluminum horseshoe and was the owner of the Victory Racing Co. that produced them.Liepman was a large barrel-chested man who was quite deaf and “saw the world only one way,” his nephew, Frederick Kaufman, an author and professor of English and journalism at the College of Staten Island, told The Sun when his father Millard died in 2009.From 1949 to 1989, the blatting voice of Mr. Magoo was supplied by veteran actor Jim Backus, a character actor, who earned fame in the 1950s and 1960s starring in such TV sit-coms as “I Married Joan” and “Gilligan’s Island.”Kaufman was born and raised in a home at 2468 Lakeview Ave., not far from Druid Hill Park.At Baltimore City College — Class of 1934 — Kaufman was a champion wrestler, ran track and was known as “Boots.”After graduating from City, Kaufman worked as a merchant seaman roaming the world.“I loved it to the degree that I thought unless I get the hell out, I’d be doing this all my life, and I thought that would be a rather unnatural life. So I decided to go to college on the money I earned,” he told Johns Hopkins Magazine in a 2007 interview.He spent a year at Maryland before transferring to Hopkins in 1936.While not an outstanding student when it came to academics, he managed to graduate in 1939 and moved to Manhattan where he took a job as a copy boy for the Daily News and then went to work as a reporter for Newsday.“I don’t know, I was kind of nosy. I liked to mind other people’s business, and I liked to have a reason to do it that wouldn’t get the hell kicked out of me,” he explained in the Hopkins interview.“Also, I liked the speed of the city room. And thirdly, I liked sitting down at a typewriter and writing a story. I still like that.”With the outbreak of World War II, he enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1942 and saw heavy action at Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal and Okinawa, and was decorated with the Bronze Star for bravery.When the war ended, Kaufman headed for the West Coast and began his screenwriting career at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.His first Oscar nomination came in 1953 for “Take The High Ground,” starring Karl Malden and Richard Widmark.In 1954, came another Oscar nomination, this time for “Bad Day at Black Rock,” the acclaimed noir western picture directed by John Sturges that featured Spencer Tracy, Robert Ryan, Lee Marvin, Anne Francis, Dean Jagger, Ernest Borgnine and Walter Brennan.The film, which the Library of Congress added to its National Film Registry in 2019, was credited with changing how Hollywood depicted Asians.Kaufman, who wrote scripts for some of the biggest movie stars of the era, continued working in pictures and later TV.He was 90 when his first novel, “Bowl of Cherries,” a wacky, delightful, satiric comedy, was published in 2007.A self-described radical and a Red, on his deathbed, the elder Kaufman commenting on the nation’s latest economic woes, said, “See capitalism doesn’t work,” his son said.Even though he had spent the majority of his professional life in Hollywood, Kaufman retained a deep fondness for his native Baltimore.He enjoyed John Waters’ pictures and everyday at some point, his son said, he’d burst into City College’s fight song — which was his favorite song — “City Forever! We’ll praise her to the sky. We’ll fight for old City, Until we do or die. Rah! Rah! Rah!”In 2002, TV Guide honored “Mr. Magoo” ranking it No. 29 on its list of the “50 greatest cartoon characters of all time.” ...read more read less