Hepcat

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Scout made sure all was in readiness earlier today. Here she is making sure we'd included everything in the boys' bag: And the girls' bag: She noticed that we'd forgotten to put the big Halloween lollipop in the bags! Here she is inspecting the front porch: Across the street: And relaxing with a quick snack before the rush of little tricksters:

Season's greetings!

Witches can be very fashionable in this day and age:

Scout will have completed her rigorous five month Halloween cat training program on Friday. I'm a bit concerned that she won't be ready to fill Styx's shoes come Saturday. It's been tough to keep her focused on her studies. Rather than doing her homework she likes to goof off with Cowboy and Ace: Ace has been a particularly bad influence since he keeps taking her to the track:

Here are scans of twelve of my favourite Murphy Anderson covers from my collection:

So I was back in Port Stanley last weekend and I did of course stop in at Mackie's. Since we were soon heading to the Belmont Diner for their $9.95 Thanksgiving buffet, I was very moderate. I ordered only Orangeade, French fries and popcorn. I must say that the popcorn in particular was delicious, lightly buttered and well salted. It was in fact the best popcorn I can remember having. Highly recommended!

Here are photos I just took of some of my CFL player photo pages that were included in the Weekend Magazine supplement to Saturday newspapers from 1957-59: And here are a couple of shots of the CFL player photo pages I have that were included in the 1958 Star Weekly Magazine weekend supplement: These were a great feature in those bygone days when coloured pictures of sports stars were seldom found.

I was thirteen years old and about to start grade nine fifty years ago early this month. My father made a decision that summer which would end up having lifelong consequences for me. He had determined that it would be a good idea to pack me off to St. Anthony's, a boarding school for Lithuanian boys run by Franciscan Fathers in Kennebunkport, Maine. And so it was in the early afternoon on the Saturday before Labour Day that with suitcase packed I was driven by one of my father's drinking buddies the eighteen miles or so to Talbotville south of London on Highway 3 to board the Greyhound bus en route from Detroit to Buffalo. (Yes, my father and his buddy were already well over refreshed but why would that have prevented them driving those few miles to Talbotville?) Now I'm sure that most parents these days would be horrified at the thought of an unaccompanied thirteen year old taking the dog even from London to Talbotville but helicopter parents didn't exist in those days and my father thought that at the age of thirteen I was fully capable of making the right transfers and arriving in Kennebunkport some time the next day. And I was. The thought of journeying across the northeastern part of the United States filled me with excitement! Any apprehension I felt was mostly about the school year ahead. I thought my home town of London (population 154,000), was just a sleepy backwater compared to those exotic, happening U.S. cities through which I'd be passing. As you can imagine though the trip through Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Utica, Schenectady, Troy, Albany, Worcester and Boston was anything but fun. While it was an adventure it was also an ordeal. There were stopovers at Buffalo, Rochester (or Syracuse) and Albany with transfers required at Buffalo(?) and Albany. I was introduced to the wonders offered by "big city" U.S. bus stations, dinettes, newsstands, Coke or better yet Pepsi machines that dispensed not ten ounce glass bottles but cans(wow!) and even cologne spray dispensing machines in men's washrooms with exotic scents such as Brut, English Leather, British Sterling and Jade East! (The latter I regarded as the most exotic men's cologne available until well into my college years. I stocked up on Jade East aftershave on a trip to New Orleans 32 years ago and I still have a couple of bottles in my medicine cabinet!) Along the way I selected some reading materials at the newsstands. These included a Batman title and the following: I also picked up a Mad magazine and a Man from U.N.C.L.E. paperback: Awesome stickers! I was absolutely fascinated by THRUSH! It sounded like my kind of organization. My small stack of comics was after a few weeks confiscated as potentially bad for my moral character in a locker check by the priests at the school! I bought no more until Xmas. For one thing we were only rarely allowed off the monastery grounds. For another we weren't supposed to have any money. On the way I met up with other boys journeying to Kennebunkport as well and by the time we got to Boston at about 5 AM on Sunday there must have been at least half a dozen of us. There was a stopover of several hours in Boston before our connection to Maine and the older fellows (very sophisticated sixteen year olds who bought Playboy instead of Mad magazine) suggested we get breakfast at an all-night diner across the street. You can imagine the clientele that an all-night diner by the bus station in Boston attracted. The waitress was middle-aged and built like the proverbial brick house. I'm sure she thought she was hot and she probably was by the standards of her customers. Nonetheless, I ordered bacon and eggs over easy to which she snapped "Toast or English?" Getting a confused look from me in response, she immediately ordered the English. This being a big sophisticated U.S. city I wasn't sure what was in store for me. It turned out to be an English muffin clearly toasted some hours previously because it was as tough as hard tack. Certainly not a good first impression of Brit cuisine. Incidentally, when I returned to Boston on a trip with a buddy to see Fenway Park in 1988, I ventured back to that big city bus station in Boston. To my adult eyes, it was tiny, drab and entirely uninteresting. And the Pepsi machine I had found so fascinating and the diner across the street were both gone. In the end the rest of the boys and I arrived in Wells or Kennebunk, Maine with no real misadventures. I can't remember how we got to Kennebunkport from there, although we may have been met at the bus station by representatives from St. Anthony's. It turned out to be my last day of freedom until Thanksgiving Day. I used it to explore the extensive and spectacular wooded grounds of the monastery along the Kennebunk River: The bas relief sculpture behind the altar was done by my uncle. The stained glass windows above were done by my uncle. The bas relief sculpture above is also my uncle's work. It originally adorned the side of the Vatican Pavilion at the 1964-65 New York World's Fair. It was moved to the Kennebunkport monastery grounds following the completion of the fair. And the lovely village of Kennebunkport (both Edmund Muskie's hometown and the site of the Bush family's summer ocean front residence): Not that I was at all impressed with the natural beauty of my surroundings at the time. Nor was I really interested in the famous clam shack at the draw bridge in Kennebunkport. I was more interested in the dairy bar! That though is where I learned that a soda in Maine was not a concoction of soda water, ice cream and syrup; it was just plain ordinary pop such as Coke, root beer or ginger ale. Bummer! As it turned out though, St. Anthony's was where a lot of Lithuanian parents sent problem kids. So it was full of toughs and delinquents from Chicago and other American big cities from the northeastern part of the United States. (Admittedly the second largest contingent of students was from Toronto and Hamilton.) Interesting that because basketball is in the very genes of Lithuanians, St. Anthony's with an enrollment of only 115 or so students fielded a basketball team that finished in first place among "mid size" high schools in eastern Maine in the 1965-66 season. I in no way, shape or form fit in with all the grease boot wearing hoods with slicked back hair who liked to brag about their gang fights with "niggers" back home (greatly overstated now I'm sure). The highlight of the first semester was the expulsions that were announced at the start of December. The halls were for weeks buzzing with rumours of who could stay and who would go. The Franciscans were serious about not compromising St. Anthony's high academic standards and close to fifteen students were expelled including the sixth man on the basketball team, a little hard-rock from Chicago who could always be counted on to give the team a spark when it needed one because he could literally control a game with his ball handling skills. I saw him celebrating his expulsion that day in the junior dorm by packing up while smoking a cigar. Smoking was of course strictly prohibited inside the school. I'd paid no attention to my clothing up until that point, but I quickly "learned" how unfashionable, awkward, weak and ugly I truly was. Only one avenue was left for me. I could nonetheless apply myself to my studies and demonstrate that I was the smartest, and I did with the top standing in my class of fifty or so. The disciplined study habits I developed that year at St. Anthony's served me in good stead all the way through high school and well into university. I doubt though whether my grades earned me marks with my fellow classmates. There were though two billiard tables in the rec room. I gravitated to those tables instead of to the TV room during my free time. By the end of the school year there were only two or three students in the whole school who could beat me at pool. My proudest moment was when Mr. Lord, one of the outside teachers and a young bachelor, brought his girlfriend into the school to show her where he taught. Well I beat him at a game of pool with his girlfriend watching! Now that impressed every kid at the school! "Hey, Hepcat beat Lord at pool right in front of his girlfriend!" A couple of the Franciscan priests who taught at the school ended up being transferred to the Lithuanian parish in Toronto in the 1970's. Father Eugene who had been my first year Latin and third year Lithuanian teacher was one of them. Now for decades I'd been harbouring the fantasy of meeting up again with some of those students from St. Anthony's because I believed that I was now in a position physically to be the one sneering at them. When some six years ago I told Father Eugene of my lingering anger/resentment toward many of the students after all these years, he replied "Forgive them, Hepcat, forgive them." Very sensible advice of course. Father Eugene died a couple of years ago. Very sad. Since the death of my last uncle in 1999, he was about the only adult whose counsel I might heed.

Fall 1963? November 22? I see from Mike's Amazing World of DC Comics that Atom 9 theoretically hit newsstands on 22 August 1963 in the States and therefore perhaps a week later in Canada. I believe the school year had already started when I bought the issue, so it could very well have been in late September or even early October when I made the purchase.

Is this Atom #9 your Original copy ? No, my originals are long gone. I sold a pile of them to a used book store in the summer of 1965 for three or four cents each!

I very clearly remember the day in the fall of 1963 that I bought Atom 9 at the Canadian National Institute for the Blind newstand at the Covent Garden Market building in downtown London. I remember passing the police station comic in hand while walking home to my house in the Old South London neighbourhood. The excitement at my house otherwise that day was my sister modelling the dress that she was going to wear to her high school prom! Where they found her a swain for the prom I'm not sure....

Scout likes to join her uncles wherever they're flaked out on the floor. Here she is yesterday with Cowboy in the entrance by the door: And in the upstairs hallway:

Now that the Canadian football season is in full swing, I'll post some of my CFL cards. The 1954 Blue Ribbon CFL cards are the rarest of the CFL issues that can properly be called cards. Here are scans of a few of mine: The cards were included in with large Blue Ribbon chocolate bars retailing for a dime or more back in 1954. As a result, there were relatively few issued and trying to find the cards today in nice condition is extremely difficult. I've been pecking away at trying to complete the eighty card set for more than twenty years. My 1959 Topps CFL cards are among my most prized collectibles since they were the first cards I ever collected as a kid. Here are some scans from my set: I have a vague memory of getting them in this first wrapper here although some were evidently also distributed in this second wrapper which Topps had used previously for the 1958 NFL cards: The following year I initially collected only the Winnipeg Blue Bombers but then my best buddy turned over his small stack of 1960 Topps CFL cards to me. My third grade teacher Miss S. soon confiscated the stack when she caught me looking at the cards in class but she gave them back to me a week or so later. Here are scans from my current set: I really don't know what happened to these or any of the cards I collected early on as a kid but I suspect that my mother threw them out when I lost interest in them and left them lying around the house somewhere. That doesn't happen anymore since my cards are of course now all carefully and neatly catalogued in plastic sheets and binders.

Mmmmm, late August, Ex time! I always go for a corn dog or two:

They are all pretty well six feet in height. Unfortunately neither The MAN nor I own any of them.

I prefer Kid Colt Outlaw:

It's nigh impossible to find a run of covers as spectacular as those from the first seven issues of Creepy magazine. Here are scans of those from my own collection: These three classic posters were advertised for several years in the pages of various Warren magazines: They'd look great hanging on any wall! I love Vampirella's releasing the bat pose.

The Vibrators were the very embodiment of everything I liked about punk, sheer mindless nihilism compressed into catchy two and a half minute takes: No instrumental hot dogging, no message, no taking themselves too seriously, they were the natural evolution of the garage bands of the sixties.

This Blue Beetle cover has always impressed me because there's so much going on, everything from Ice Age animals to Soviet MIG fighters!

My favourite wildlife artist is John Seerey-Lester. He's a master at portraying the texture of fur, snow, bark, etc: Of the pictures I've posted, I own limited edition prints of the cougar, fox kits, bear cub, raccoons, chipmunk and bobcat.

Good stuff!

I'm here! And here in alphabetical order are scans of my ten favourite Neal Adams covers from my collection:

That's a rather clued in DC reference! To be sure! Here are scans of four Inferior Five comics from my collection:

Here's a favourite Charlton title of mine that not many collect these days: