A Life in Four Colors Part Fifty-Two

The first few months of 1971 were almost comics-free. Susan and I diligently saved everything we could for our upcoming married life, and that frugality meant and end to unnecessary expenses. Quite honestly, I began to think that my involvement with comics had come to an end. After all, I had sold my collection to pay for Susan's ring; the comics that had been so important to me since before I started school no longer seemed to matter. I hadn't forgotten them, of course--I still had a great appreciation for the books that I had read and for the creators who had given me so much enjoyment---but I had assumed that I would no longer have any money for comics.

Apparently I had not discussed this with Susan, however.

Comic books brought Susan and me together back in 1968, and she and I had continued to read comics ever since then. While my collection was gone, Susan's wasn't. And Susan had always assumed that we would continue to read comics. "We don't have to buy every comic to enjoy some comics," she reminded me.

So we drew up a budget--a budget that included $5 a week for books and comics.

Because of Susan's dislike of Marvel Comics, there was only one Marvel on my must-buy list: Conan, the series that Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor-Smith had launched in 1970. My one-time favorite, Fantastic Four, had lost much of its appeal after Jack Kirby's departure from Marvel. As for other Marvel titles--well, the Marvel bullpen that I knew in my childhood was largely gone. One-time favorites like Spider-Man, The Avengers, and Captain America were enjoyable but no longer essential. And my other Marvel favorite, X-Men, had become a reprint book.

Most of the books we both wanted to read were DC's—Batman, Detective, Brave & Bold, Justice League, Green Lantern, the occasional Superman book, and the new DC titles that Jack Kirby was creating. The books had the scope and grand drama of some of Kirby's Marvel work, but he was building a new comics mythology, and I wanted to see where he ws going.

In spite of our meager budget, though, we also allotted a few dollars every month for fanzines. Both of us had become very fond of the amateur press alliances Myriad (overseen by our friend Stven Carlberg) and Galaxy (created by our friend Gary Steele, who wanted to come up with something midway between Myriad and the comics apa CAPA-Alpha).  We had made friends through the pages of those apps, so we wanted to continue doing a-amines as well.

And like every fan in the late 1960s and early 1970s, we learned to play the Science Fiction Book Club game to get new books cheaply. One of us would take advantage of the "six books for a penny" offer, get six book club editions, then we would meet our four-book purchase requirement and quit, at which time the other one of us would sign up for the same deal. Even though we weren't married yet, we were already sharing our comics and books with one another.

We also began to rely on Coosa Valley Book Shop in Rome and Croker's in Cedartown. Both stores had used comics and used books, which meant that we could get twice as much reading for our money. This began a lifetime habit of frequenting used bookstores, something we continued to do for the rest of our married life.

With June 15th approaching, we were diligent in our budgeting; We had a little bit of furniture of our own, but not enough. I had a sofa bed that I had used in place of a regular bed since 1967. (Prior to that time, I had bunk beds in my bedroom so that I had a second bed for my friends when they spent the night at my house. By 1967, I had outgrown bunk beds, and my parents were ready to buy a bed for me, but I liked the idea of a sofa bed because it would make my tiny bedroom seem a bit more spacious. Some people hate sleeping on a sofa bed, but I can sleep on almost anything, including the floor, so a sofa bed was fine for me.) I had a desk and chair. I had an end table.

Susan, who had never had a bedroom of her own and shared a bed with her younger sister, had even less: a bookshelf.

Thankfully, Howard Rogofsky's purchase price for my collection had been more than sufficient to buy Susan's engagement ring. I had some money left over--enough to pay for a Mediterranean style bedroom set. Dark-wood furniture with a Mediterranean/Spanish design was popular in the early 1970s, and we found a set that Susan fell in love with--a bed, a dresser, a chest of drawers, and a nightstand, along with an impressionistic matador painting that the furniture salesman threw in at no extra charge. (The painting and most of that furniture is long since gone, but that chest of drawers is till in the bonus room of the house that we had built for us in 1996. Susan wanted to save one piece of that furniture as a permanent reminder of our first important purchase together.)

Susan had also saved some extra money that I had not known about, and with that we were also able to purchase a harvest gold formica kitchen table and four dinette chairs with harvest gold and yellow patterned vinyl seats.

It may not sound like anything much, but all of this was very important to us. First, it meant that we had furniture for the bedroom and the kitchen of whatever house  or apartment we would eventually rent. Second--and more important to us--it was a symbol that we could build a modest life for ourselves. We had found a way to pay for it in cash, which meant that we were going to be able to fulfill our dream of starting our marriage with no household debts (Susan still had a car payment, but that pre-dated our engagement.)

There was one complication, though: we had budgeted $75 a month for a place to live, but the only thing we could find for that price was an old duplex in Cedartown, not too far from Susan's childhood home. We didn't like it, but we had pretty much resigned ourselves to the idea of a duplex.

Then my grandmother mentioned that she had a tenant moving out of her smallest rental house at the end of May.

The timing couldn't have been better: two weeks before our marriage, a house was about to become available. Even better, the price for the house was below our budget at $40 a month. That would put $35 a month back into our household budget, which seemed like a huge amount to a soon-to-be-married couple counting every penny.

One problem: the house was tiny (640 square feet) and it was it in horrible condition. It had once been a garage/workshop behind a larger rental house that my grandmother owned; she had it build out into a separate rental house, and I'm sure that none of the construction work would have been up to any sort of building code had anyone bothered to inspect it.

For all practical purposes, it was a two-room house: a living room/kitchen combination that took up about 300 square feet of the house, and a bedroom/bathroom/closet that took up the other 340 square feet. There were two radiant gas heaters, one in each room; there was a hole in the floor at the baseboard near the bathroom that had to be blocked off to keep pests and the occasional stray kitten (yes, it was that large) out of the house. The bathroom was so small that there was barely room to turn around, with a tiny shower that could not hold the two of us at one time (although we frequently tried). There was no sink in the bathroom because there wasn't room; the sink was actually in the bedroom, just outside of the bathroom.

But it was $40 a month.

Susan said she was fine with it; the rental house she had grown up was so poorly maintained and in such disrepair that she insisted that this was actually a step up for her. Her worry was that I would be unhappy. "You had a great house with plenty of room, and now you're going to have to live here." (I never thought of a 1000-squrae-foot home with three bedrooms, a living room, and an eat-in kitchen as having "plenty of room," but apparently it was all a matter of perspective.) I assured Susan that it didn't matter to me--and I meant it. For $40 a month, we were going to have a small house of our own, complete with all the furniture basics we needed. It may sound pretty humble, but we were incredibly proud of the life we were building for ourselves..