Serving in Italy during World War II, he was an artist and journalist for the U.S. military magazine Stars and Stripes.
[2] During the 1950s, Meltzoff created dozens of paperback covers for novels by Robert Heinlein and others, and did artwork for Madison Avenue advertising agencies.
With the advent of low-cost color photography and reproduction in the early 1960s, Meltzoff began painting saltwater game fish in their undersea environments.
Perhaps his most famous artwork is the cover for the 1976 Bell System directory, commemorating both the United States Bicentennial and the centennial of the invention of the telephone.
Based on Norman Rockwell's The Gossips, Meltzoff depicts America's great historical and iconic figures using the telephone.