gbj-migration

Deep thought for the day- it's fun to go back and reminisce about what you did when you were 15 or 20 years old but I wouldn't want to just live and re-live that period. You've got to move on, I think. It's like the Monkees... they get, or got, to talk about and remake those two years the rest of their lives. I'm really kind of glad things happened, which I thought were bad luck at the time, that enabled me to move on and do other things, like writing for newspapers and writing books. Granted, nobody was dangling millions of dollars in front of me! I loved it all when it happened, but life is a lot bigger and more involved than just going to conventions.

Another memory of an early 70s Houstoncon (I think)... I was collecting movie posters at the time, and particularly Marx Bros. material. Robert Brown had a table and he had two original lobby cards from Horsefeathers (1932). Very rare, but at the time, he was asking $40 each. We dickered back and forth and finally he told me he also had the complete set of Love Happy lobby cards. This was the Marxes last film, and not nearly as desirable of course, but he said I could have the two Horsefeathers cards for $35 apiece if I bought the set of Love Happy cards for $5 each. So I ended up with the two Horsefeathers cards and the entire set of Love Happy for $110 total, which was a hell of a deal (especially in retrospect). And I was flat broke the rest of the convention. I'm guessing the HF cards are worth about $1000 each now, and the Love Happys a hundred or two apiece. And no, I don't still have them. I wish!

This is true. I guess 'simpler' doesn't always translate into 'easier.' Things we can do now with a computer and keyboard used to be ridiculously expensive and time-consuming. Printing photos (anybody remember ruby lith?), typesetting copy, making headlines with press-on letters, and of course the time and effort spent mailing the copies. We kept TNJ pretty basic for the most part... just did the editorials and articles on a typewriter and the whole thing was pasted up so it was 'camera-ready,' as we said back then. I remember using a composing service for some of my other fanzines. That was expensive too. I imagine desktop publishing has put all of those places out of business.

Oklahoma was always different. Still is, I think. Looking at some of the recent pictures, I was amazed at how many of the old fans not only are still around but are still going to conventions. I don't know that you can say the same about Dallas or Houston. But I don't really know. I'm not up on current events. The OK fans and their conventions always seemed more home-grown to me, not as big city-ish. Dallas and Houston were more like the east coast or west coast conventions.

"Growing pains as the hobby turned into a business." Exactly. And so many people back then didn't want it to turn into a business. So much of it now seems trivial or petty but at the time we were all caught up in it. And it really was a different, earlier time... simpler in a lot of ways, no computers for one thing. You could rent a hall somewhere, put up a few tables and have yourself a convention. It was a lot of fun, no doubt... glad I was a part of it.

If you go to The Comics Journal on Wikipedia, at the very bottom of the article, after the footnotes, you'll see a link to 'History of The Nostalgia Journal,' which is actually an interview with me from a few years ago. It answers most of the questions most people have about that period. It's kind of the Reader's Digest version of TNJ's history.

Thanks, Mark! I remember the first issue of Nostalgia Journal was distributed at three conventions... New York, Dallas, and Houston. We printed 10,000 copies. We carried them ourselves to Dallas and Houston, but the copies for New York we shipped in refrigerator boxes. That's what they looked like to me anyway. It wasn't until the second issue that we actually started mailing out copies. Larry Herndon and I pretty much produced and distributed the first three issues ourselves. It was a lot of work, really.

Yes, everyone was amazed that I had gotten it, and yes it was published in MD. As I'm sure you know, EC pretty much cancelled their horror titles in 1955 (I think?) and started a short-lived series of new comics... Aces High, Psychoanalysis (I wonder who thought THAT one up), MD, Extra!, and one or two others. I don't know how George Evans ended up with the artwork, but he did somehow and when he and I corresponded, I found out about it and bought it from him. Originally, I placed an ad (probably in the Buyer's Guide) offering it for sale for $1000. I had no cash buyers but I sure had a lot of people offering me the equivalent in trade... mostly rare Golden Age comics and such. When the minor furor erupted at the Dallas convention, I figured I'd better take what I could get at the auction, whatever it was. Gaines was a nice guy, but he made it pretty clear that the artwork was his property, and I'm sure it went directly from Cochran back to Gaines. Yeah, I've got a lot of stories from back then and as my faulty memory recalls them, I will post them! Glad you liked it.

Haven't been here in a while. Love the old fanzines! I wish I could post some pics of mine... maybe I can. Let me work on it. But the talk of Bill Gaines reminds me of a story. I became something of a pen pal with the EC artist George Evans back in the early 70s, and he told me he had the original art for a story he did for 'MD'. (I think that was the name of it.) The story was called 'Janie Someday.' Now you have to realize that at the time, EC original art was simply not available. Period. Gaines supposedly had all of it. Well he was a guest at DCON '73... I bought the art from Evans and took it to the convention and put it in the auction. They kept taking it out of the auction because they were afraid Gaines would get hacked off. Finally I had a little confab with Gaines and Russ Cochran and they allowed me to put it back in the auction. Larry Herndon was sitting next to me and he kept bidding and across the aisle were Gaines and Cochran who kept raising the bid. It seemed clear to me that Cochran was determined to buy it. Finally Herndon said the hell with it and Cochran bought it for $160.

I got a shout-out in the recent 'Superman Dailies '59 to '61' hardback. I guess if you live long enough, people start discovering or rediscovering some of the things you did thirty or forty years ago, which is what happened in this case. One of the authors/editors found a fanzine I did back '73 where I interviewed Mort Weisinger. Who'd a thunk it? I'd love to make either the Houstoncon or the Oklahoma con one of these days. I saw some pics from an OK con a while back and I couldn't believe how many people I knew... it's probably been over 20 years since I went to one.

Ha! I found it. It was called 'Massacre of the Innocents' and it ran in RBCC #'s 85 - 87 in 1971 and 1972. A guy named Brad Caslor wrote and drew it. (Don't know why I thought it was Don Newton.) You can see it at http://thegoldenagesite.blogspot.com Now I'll be able to sleep tonight.

No, it definitely wasn't 'Savage Earth.' I'm certain of that. And it definitely wasn't in the Buyer's Guide either. Weird Paper may be right that it was someone other than Don Newton. I don't think it ran for a year- maybe three or four issues. It wasn't real long. And I'm equally sure somebody ended up with the original art to it... either through an auction or a raffle or contest of some sort. It was kind of a big deal at the time and I'm almost positive it was in RBCC. Thinking of the other fan artists who were around back then, I have to say I'd be surprised if it WASN'T Don Newton, but it's possible. Bits and pieces I remember from it... for one thing, it was so easy for the killer to do away with the various superheroes. I think he just used a rifle. He'd see Hawkman flying toward him and he'd just shoot him out of the sky. Then the Flash showed up and the guy just shot him too. It was kind of like that. I don't think it was meant to be 100% serious. I'm going to do some searches and see if I can find anything. This is bugging me now.

It was just a one-off fan strip, kind of unusual for RBCC to publish at the time... at the end, I THINK the killer was revealed to be Billy Batson! But it's been so long since I read it, I can't be sure.

Does anybody remember the strip that ran in RBCC about a guy who went around killing all the superheroes? I think Don Newton drew it and at the end they either auctioned off the original art or gave it away in a raffle. It was very cool. I'd guess it was sometime in the early/mid 70s. Forgive me if it's already been mentioned here.

I don't think it's available on Kindle. I need to check into that. By the way, I wasn't trying to be overly flippant about fans who had died. I just did what I thought was the usual 'smiley face' and it looked like I was laughing my off. Anyway, I appreciate the interest in my book and I hope everyone who orders it enjoys it! I really hope someday soon, someone will write a book about Larry Herndon... he figures prominently in this one, but someone should do a proper bio of him. He was an amazing individual.

See, I remember most of these guys... Bart Bush, Earl Blair, Roy Bonario (love that first communion pic of them... wow what a time trip) Ken Donnell, G.B. Love... they probably remember me too, unless they have fewer brain cells than I do at this point. And if they're still alive.

Much appreciated, David! I apologize in advance for not knowing nearly as much about Oklahoma fandom and the cons there, but I do give the OAFs a shout out in the book and mention several people that you'll probably all recognize.

It is kind of sad that we can't remember each other even though we went to cons at the same time in the same places. But hell, such are memories, right? I've just written a book called 'Trek in Texas: the 1970s Star Trek Conventions'. It's available on Amazon, if anyone's interested. There are some old pics around, I've discovered... one site is called Fanlore, I think. Lots of old program book covers and others.

Another story from way back when- I corresponded with George Evans, the great EC artist, for a while and actually bought a seven-page story of original EC art from him. For those who are unaware, this was considered almost impossible as it was generally believed that William Gaines owned all of the EC original art. So I took the art to the next Dallas convention (73? 74?) and guess who was a guest. William Gaines, publisher of MAD and formerly EC Comics. There was a bit of a stink over the whole matter... I tried to put the artwork up for auction but the people running the con didn't want to offend Gaines so they took it down. I ended up having a conversation with Gaines at the back of one of the meeting rooms and he was very friendly and unperturbed about the whole matter. I put the artwork up again at the next day's auction and sold it, but I think it was rigged so that Gaines was sure to get it back.

I haven't kept up with things in a while regarding collecting/conventions/prices etc... but it seems to me there came a point, maybe in the late 80s or early 90s, when prices just went out of reach for the average fan. Well, there was a recent article about Action #1 being sold at some auction for what, $1.5 mil or something like that? Back when I started collecting, the top price for ANY piece of memorabilia, whether comic book or movie poster or whatever, was $500, and THAT was considered exorbitant. For one thing, the people collecting back then weren't very wealthy, and the rich people hadn't yet discovered the hobby. But when they did, that kind of killed it for me and a lot of other people. I remember a convention in Baton Rouge I went to, and a couple of well-known comic book dealers who were relatively well-off showed up with impressive table displays of golden age comics, and during a conversation with them, one of them asked the other, "What if someone wanted to buy everything on your table?" The other thought about it for a minute and said, "I don't think I'd do it. I make more money than that in a week. I just like showing off my collection." That was kind of a defining moment for me, between the old fandom that I'd known and whatever it was morphing into. The other big change was when videos of old movies started becoming widely available. Like a lot of others, I used to collect 16mm films and we'd show them at the conventions. Suddenly, there didn't seem to be any point. Nobody was too excited anymore to see 'King Kong' at a con when you could buy or rent a VHS copy for a few bucks.

I'll relate a little story about me and Robert. At one of the Houstoncons back in the 70s, he had a lobby card from the 1932 Marx Bros. movie, 'Horse Feathers.' I was collecting Marx Bros. material at the time and I really wanted it... he was asking I think $40 for it. I know it sounds crazy now, but back then, that wasn't cheap. I tried to get him down, and finally he said, "I'll tell you what. I have a set of 'Love Happy' lobbies. (This was the last Marx film, from 1949, not nearly as desirable.) I'll sell you the 'Horse Feathers' lobby for $35 if you buy the set of 'Love Happy' cards for $5 apiece." I probably don't need to point out that all of this material is worth a small fortune today. I agreed to his terms, but no, before you ask, I don't still have them. I sold them years later and turned a nice profit, though like a million other collecters have done, before and since, I can't help but wonder what I could get for them now, especially the Horse Feathers card. I haven't kept up with prices, but I'm thinking it's worth north of $1000. Probably WAY north.

Thanks, David. And I love the pics. Last night after I posted, I was going back and looking at a lot of them. Saw a fairly recent one of Robert Brown and Bruce Shultz (sp?). Have not seen those guys in probably 20-25 years. My brother Joe and I have talked about making a convention trip but darn it, it just never seems to happen. Oh well, one of these days, for sure.

No, it's me, Gordon Bailey, as I pointed out a while back. I'm not quite dead, though I don't look too much like that anymore (thank God)! This is mid-70s. I had forgotten I'd saved this site until just now as I was doing some cleaning up on my computer. Again, this is a very interesting page and I'm glad there are people who are keeping the memories alive. I really loved that period and I used to love the conventions... used to live for them really. Lots of great memories of old friends, some still here and some gone.

We never could afford Shatner or Nimoy or Kelley. But we had all the rest... George Takei, Walter Koenig, Nichelle NIchols, Grace Lee Whitney and James Doohan. And we also had hangers-on and fellow travelers like David Gerrold and Mark Lenard... I'm sure there were others that I can't recall right now. I particularly remember James Doohan. In one of his talks, somebody asked him if it was true Scotty wouldn't drink anymore. And Doohan said, patting his coat pocket for effect, "I have a letter right here from Gene Roddenberry that says Scotty can drink whenever he damn well feels like it!" The audience applauded mightily. After the convention, I drove Doohan to the airport. He obviously didn't want to talk about Star Trek, so it was kind of awkward at first. Then when I told him my dad was a motorhome dealer, he was very talkative the rest of the way. He kept asking me how you fixed this or that on a Winnebago... I thought it very ironic that one of the most famous 'engineers' in TV history hadn't a clue how to work on his own motorhome! One of my favorite memories.

Okay, I've been looking back over this thread... I recognize a number of people. Robert Brown, John Wooley, and people who's names escape me now... the one guy in the Australian hat was a big friend of John Harper's and they went to several conventions together. But I was at almost all of these conventions. I remember George 'Spanky' McFarland and asking him some questions during a Q and A. George Takei and Nichelle Nichols were guests at one of our Spring Cons in Dallas. I think I have a copy of the Nostalgia Journal with a report from that one somewhere... it's got a great pic of Takei, Nichols, Joe Bob and me. I don't think that's Bruce Hamilton in the pic that everyone's speculating about... but it could be. The one of Russ Cochran is definitely him. What a trip through the past...