LET'S MAKE MAGAZINES!

Summertime, 1964 was the defining moment for me as a true, dyed-in-the-fur monsterkid. As mentioned a few posts ago, after moving to the San Fernando Valley from the South Bay community of Torrance, California, I found myself sweltering in 100+ degree weather and wondering why the heck my parents wanted to drag us all out to the desert.

Well, it turned out it didn't take long for me to be invited to a friendly game of poker by a group of guys around my age. We were all sitting around at a picnic table in Doug's back yard and I thought this was great . . . except I didn't know how to play poker. They showed me the rules on the fly and from then on we were all pals pretty much through high school.

My best friend out of the group turned out to be Doug (I introduced him in the first MUSINGS FROM THE MYSTERIOUS MANSION post) and we shared a lot of the same interests . . . including -- you guessed it -- monsters! I don't exactly remember how we hit on the idea, but at some point we thought it would be cool to emulate the best ever monster magazine, Forry Ackerman's FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND.

From then on, one of our favorite pasttimes was to "make magazines". In future installments of LET'S MAKE MAGAZINES!, I'll be sharing with you some of the actual magazines we made back then (yes, I still have some!), as well as some other anecdotal tales from our far from misspent youth. Oh, and that's not me in the picture above eating Franco-American spaghettii. I did, however, say something to the effect of the words in the speech ballon a couple hundred times.