Essay #2: Letters 2, Keeping in Touch with Comics, 1

In my second week at Antioch College, October 4, 1960, I wrote to my brother, showing off my dissipated life. After the Josh White concert (see last week’s essay),

“some boys from Siwannee, one of the better boys dorms asked us to a party. It was really dead. One fellow was drinking beer out of a mug, and every time he opened a new can it dripped all over the floor. The other one kept talking about the importance of comic strips and how you shouldn’t let yourself get out of touch with that is going on in the world of funnies.”

            This is one of those scenes I have no recollection of. I don’t remember the name of that boy, so no way to learn whether he ended up in the comics field, either as writer, artist, or critic. From my dismissive tone—the party was “really dead”—I must have thought “the funnies” were childish fare not worth the attention of a college student.

            But I liked “the funnies.” Our Philadelphia newspaper had, I think, two pages of comic strips ranging from Dennis the Menace to Prince Valiant. And my interest in reading comics goes way back to early childhood.

            I still have a battered (and much marked up) copy of Crockett Johnson’s Barnaby (Blue Ribbon Books, 1943), a collection of the cartoon that ran in the left-wing New York newspaper PM. During World War II, a small boy named Barnaby wishes for a beautiful fairy godmother, and instead, one night, a cigar-smoking, fat little fairy godfather with pink wings flies in his window. Naturally, his parents try to convince him that Mr. O’Malley is only a dream, but stranger and stranger things begin to occur. For instance, an old abandoned house in the neighborhood is believed to be haunted. Mr. O’Malley’s attempts to rid the house of “fiends” accidentally uncovers a gang hijacking trucks carrying bags of coffee and hiding them in the haunted house—and the parents and police all believe Barnaby and his friend Jane are the heroes for uncovering the thieves. I read this book multiple times, colored in some of the drawings, wrote comments in the margins.

            The barbershop on our block of 20th Avenue in Bensonhurst discarded out-of-date comic books in a box outside the shop, and neighborhood kids would sit on the sidewalk reading them. There were Classic Comics (classic stories like Treasure Island and The Count of Monte Christo told in comic book format), Blackhawk (a World War II comic with a crew of pilots from central casting, as well as stereotypical Japanese enemies), and Superman. Our mother didn’t care if we read comic books; any kind of reading was reading, and was good.

            The newspaper comics I remember most were the “soap operas”: Mary Worth, Brenda Starr, Mark Trail. I also read Terry and the Pirates, Steve Canyon, Dondi, as well as Peanuts, Archie, Lulu, Nancy, and Pogo. There are surely others, but I don’t remember whether any of the superheroes were syndicated in the newspapers in West Haven and Philadelphia suburbs where I lived through the 1950s.

(to be continued)

Essay #1: Letters, 1

It’s a cliché by now that nobody writes letters anymore. They started saying it when e-mail took over, and e-mail became email when txts took over. No one saves either e-mail or texts, unless they are old obsessives like me. But back when people did write letters, other people saved them, on whatever pieces of paper, or stationery, or notepads they were written on.

            When I went off to college in 1960, I wrote letters home, to my parents, and occasionally to my brother and/or sister. My mother saved them. Sometime in the past, [possibly when they sold their house in Pennsylvania and moved south, eventually landing in Florida,] she sent them back to me. [I’m guessing about the timing because one folder is all my letters from the 1960s, and they moved south in 1970, but maybe I’m wrong about this. Need to check what other letters of mine are filed away]

            I only recently began to reread them, and that is a fascinating exercise. First of all, I can see the seeds of my eventual career as a copy editor in my first letter questioning the spelling of the word “dillys” (I was describing the evaluation tests all the freshmen took to see what courses we would have to take for general education credits, which I said were “real dillys”; without looking it up in a dictionary, I’m guessing it perhaps could be “dillies,” though that looks wrong, too). On the other hand, I misspelled other words without wondering about them: “dissapated,” “deroggatory.”

            Second, all that ancient slang! “Kooky characters,” “they are all nuts,” “skuzzy bunch of boys.” And not so ancient I definitely used “hysterical” to mean “hilarious”—is that when that started, or have people been using hysterical instead of hilarious long before 1960?

            Then there are the scenes I don’t remember. In my letter to my brother, I mention meeting another freshman from the next town over from ours outside of Philadelphia. He knew many of my brother’s friends and said he was their business manager; I think they were in a band. And I express astonishment that one of those boys is a Merit Scholarship semi-finalist.

            And the scenes I do remember, once I read what I wrote about them. One night at dinner that first week an upperclassman sat at our table and introduced himself as a foreign student, though it was obvious he wasn’t. This is what I described: “Then he started talking Russian to me. He had a glass of water, and suddenly he put it to his lips and tipped his head back, as though he were drinking. But the glass was empty. He said he was looking at the lights, that’s the way they did things in his country. Then he asked us what country we came from.” My roommate and I thought this was one of the funniest things we’d ever seen, and I do vaguely remember it.

            Then there are the scenes I remember, but which I remembered in widely different circumstances. The Josh White concert, for instance. In my memory, this was probably my second year, or even third year, and I was on a date. I remembered this because during one of his encores, a string broke, and White continued singing as he restrung the guitar, without missing a beat. But the evidence from my letters says this happened my first week at school, and I know I did not have a date that early in my college career. This is one of many experiences that have taught me the fallability of memory.

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            I plan to continue writing about my discoveries in my letters that I hope will be interesting to strangers. 

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This year there is another essay a week challenge, 52EssaysNextWave. If you’d like to try it, go to the Facebook page for 52EssaysNextWave and sign up. Or just read some of the essays that will be linked to there.