MY FAVORITE ISSUE OF FAMOUS MONSTERS (PART 1)

It was a dark and stormy night . . . wait, it was a bright and sunny morning. I remember it being a Sunday, but maybe it was a Saturday; I had cajoled my Dad into taking me a few miles away to the newsstand outside the Owl Rexall Drugstore just off Sherman Way in the San Fernando Valley city of Canoga Park. I think my pretense was comic books, but there was always a glimpse of the forbidden fruit waiting to be seen, tucked away on the racks. No, I don't mean the girly magazines -- at the time I was interested far more in another subject -- monster magazines!

And there it was -- the 3,000-year-old eyes of Boris Karloff as The Mummy (painted by Maurice Whitman) stared back at me, beckoning, "Please take me home!" I took a copy of the rack and started bravely flipping through the pages (monster magazines were just as verboten as girly magazines, you see). With my heart racing I summoned up the courage to ask -- no, plead -- with my Dad: "Can I buy this?", I seem to remember saying, although I was probably in an altered state from the anxiety and said something entirely different . . . and equally lame.

Then I heard the words that shocked me more than a jolt of juice to the Frankenstein monster's electrodes: "Sure, son. But don't let your Mom catch you with it."

And that, dear fiends, is how it all began for this Monster Kid -- my first monster magazine purchase in 1964, and it certainly wouldn't be my last. Thanks, Dad!