Jerry Van Amerongen carries a tattered notebook in his hip pocket. He collects words, phrases and illustrated observations. Later, he converts these into drawings for his offbeat comic strip BALLARD STREET.

Van Amerongen started cartooning for his school newspaper while attending Ferris Institute in Michigan. Nearly twenty years later, he restarted with a cartoon panel for a community newspaper in Minneapolis, where he now lives. In between, he was a middle management member of corporate America, a great source for many of his ideas.

Prior to creating BALLARD STREET, Van Amerongen wrote and drew THE NEIGHBORHOOD, a successful comic panel which was syndicated to 130 newspapers nationwide. After 10 years of creating THE NEIGHBORHOOD, Van Amerongen decided to discontinue it in order to devote full-time to BALLARD STREET.

Van Amerongen grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, his boyhood memories shaped by the ethnic influences in his Dutch and Polish heritage, images of roly-poly women in large print dresses and rotund men in baggy trousers. The characters in his strip are older, exaggerated versions of the people from this neighborhood.

"I don't think of myself as drawing older people," Van Amerongen explains. "It's more the attitude of people as they go through the life process. We all see ourselves as having wrinkles and rumples on the inside no matter how we look on the outside. We all perceive ourselves as having big bottoms."

In his spare time, Van Amerongen reads and runs and travels, catches all the movies and the art openings. But mostly, he just observes.