"Life is What Happens..."

I have shared this post in a few other places, so I wanted to let my blog-reading friends know as well:

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 “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans…” 

—John Lennon

How very true those words are. At the beginning of 2026, I had no plans to embark on a major change of direction for my life. Less than a month into the year, however, I was stunned with the news that I had a very rapid-onset form of leukemia. I insisted that tests be repeated, but the results didn’t change.

In the almost three months since that diagnosis, I have had to make many changes in my life. The first two doctors offered me no real chance of successful treatment and told me to plan accordingly. The third, an oncologist, was convinced that treatment was possible. 

Under his guidance, I have begun a treatment plan that is already generating some positive results. My cancerous white blood cell count is down to almost normal numbers. My red blood cells are down significantly as well, as is my immune system, and there are some lasting side effects that hamper may ability to undertake tasks the way I used to, but survival is a work in progress.

What it means, though, is that I can no longer devote myself to Dr No’s Comics & Games SuperStore  in the way that I have for so many years (the store began its fiftieth year of operation in March, and I’m incredibly proud of that). I was having to ask the staff to take over more of my duties, and I felt like I wasn’t leading the store the way I have for many years.

A few fellow retailers and friends knew of my health issues, and some reached out to express an interest in buying the store to ensure that it continues to serve our comic book and gaming community whether I could guide it or not. It was long-time friend and customer Ryan Schwanke who came to me with a plan to do the three things most important to me: (1) to keep the store operating the way it has for decades, as one of the most fully stocked comic shops in the nation; (2) to fulfill my vision of expanding the store with even more merchandise lines, more merchandise selection, and more connection to our comics  and gaming community; and (3) to keep this amazing staff together, letting them help to guide the store into its second half-century. 

Ryan and his friend and business partner Jason McCarthy are set to pick up where I have left off with Dr. No’s. As of May 1st, they will be the new owners of the store. They have kindly asked that I continue as a part of the team, offering them guidance and consulting with them, and I will do so. But in order to focus on my own challenges and to share my own joys with my wife, friends, and family, I will be passing this wonderful store on to new owners. 

Rest assured, my friends: Ryan and Jason share my vision of what the store should be, and Ryan already has decades of knowledge of how Dr. No’s works and what talents out staff bring to their roles at Dr. No’s. Please welcome them, as I do, and thank them for keeping our comic shop vision going forward in years to come. 

I will definitely be on hand for Free Comic Book Day on May 2nd to welcome newcomers and to express my appreciation for all of you amazing friends who have helped make Dr. No’s so successful in its first half-century—and that includes some remarkably talented professionals,, both writers and artists, who will be on hand to make sure everyone experiences the joys of comics. May 2nd will be a celebration of comics as well as a celebration of Dr. No’s distinctive past and exciting future.

And I look forward to crossing paths with many of you in months to come. I will remain an active part of Dr. No’s as health and schedules allow, and I can’t wait to see what Ryan, Jason, Buck, Izzy, Shelley, Tom, and Jair have planned for the store’s future.

Thank you all for the support and friendship you’ve given me over the years. And take it from me—we’re all going to love what’s coming next!

—Cliff Biggers

The Retiring Type...

 One of the most perplexing questions that people ask me is "Are you retired?" My immediate reaction is to say "yes" because I retired from teaching (my only career where I my hours and duties were set by someone other than me) almost a quarter century ago. But then I realize that "retired," to many people," means "doing nothing," and in that sense I didn't retire when I left teaching. I continued to do Comic Shop News on a weekly basis until the end of 2022. So am I retired now, since we passed CSN on to the intrepid David Witting at that time? Maybe not, since I still have Dr. No's Comics & Games Superstore, and I work in the store five days a week, as well as doing a fair amount of work from home (orders, adjustments, record keeping, etc.), so there's only one day out of the week when I'm not doing something store-related. Even when we go on a trip (like our recent sojourn to Universal Studios), I take the MacBook Air with me and do frequent reorders. And I also write, both fiction and non-fiction. I don't get rich doing it, but I do get paid, so I guess that's working, too. But I'm aware that a lot of people interpret "retired" to mean "no longer doing something I don't want to do," so in that sense I've been retired all along. However, no one wants an answer that complicated, so when they ask, "Are you retired?" I usually just say "sort of." It's easier for all of us.

Let's Get Small!

Okay, if you're not involved in the world of comic book retailing, this may be a "deep in the woods" conversation that holds no interest to you. I hope you'll bear with me, though, as I discuss further ramifications of the whole distributor crisis that's been going on in 2025. I promise that my next blog post will be something less industry-focused, honest!

To make a long story very short, the largest distributor in comics, Diamond Comics Distribution, filed bankruptcy on January 13th. The new owners took over on May 15th, but they don't really seem interested in distributing anything, leaving a number of small and mid-sized publishers in the lurch. All of the mid-sized publishers have found new homes and are working to get the money they're owed, but the small guys are struggling to find distribution.

To fill the void, a comics writer and convention-runner named Phillip Russertt started a new distribution company, Philbo Distribution, a small operation that wants to distribute books from the small guys to comic shops. There's only one problem,.

For a retailer with a good understanding of his business, Philbo's model is totally unworkable. The company offers a super-short discount of 40% for orders of less than ten copies of a title, but almost all of the books that Philbo carries are the sort that hardly any store would possibly need ten copies of. Philbo wants prepayment at the time the order is placed, even though retailers have no firm idea of when the books will ship. No firm shipping date means that retailers can't count on aggregated shipping to cover the cost (what if only one publisher ships a book that week?). Philbo has no proven track record for reliability, packing quality, shipping efficiency, negotiated freight discounts, and so on.  That means that full shipping must be borne by the retailer with no volume discounts because Philbo has no volume (hopefully they'll use someone like Pirate Ship to at least get some discount off standard rates). 

Let's talk about the reality of the retail world. Retailers really need 50% discounts on comics to cover rents, utilities, taxes, employee wages, and other overhead items and still make a profit. The last survey I saw showed that most comic shops spend about 42% of their annual income on those overhead items. If that's the case, then it's more cost effective to toss a few dollars into the parking lot every month than it would be to order at this discount (because after paying shipping costs, the odds are you'll be looking at a 30% discount, realistically).

Now the old distributor, Diamond, offered 45% discounts on several of those small publishers and only a 40% on a few--but they also carried the big guys, so retailers could consolidate shipping across all the publishers into a lower per-book cost. Right now, Lunar and Penguin Random House have stepped into the void, taking over many of the mid-sized publishers (and in Lunar's case, some of the small publishers), almost all at a 50% discount. But the key here is lower aggregate shipping costs, payment on or after receipt of merchandise, and a proven track record of negotiated discounts on freight costs (or, in PRH's case, no freight cost at all).

When I first heard about Philbo, I wrote to Phillip about this. In his reply, he said that "creators pay print costs of $2.75-$3 per book [for a $5 book] and simply can't survive on offering 50% or more on orders of two or three books." First off, I don't think that's correct for most publishers; the only people I know who are paying that sort of cost are print-on-demand publishers.  But if that is true, then these small publishers they shouldn't be publishers at all--they're doing fanzines, not professional comics (how can they pay $3 a book to print a comic that they're wholesaling for $3 a copy, with Phillip keeping at least 10% of that $3 and the publishers also paying the ship the books to him? If these numbers are somehow accurate (an assertion I still question), that would mean they're losing money on every copy, so we're helping them financially by not ordering, right?

(I should add that for more than 35 years, Ward Batty and I published Comic Shop News, a weekly printed at the same facilities where comics are printed, and I know that none of the comics printed at these facilities cost even a significant fraction of $2.75/$3.00 per copy. So I do have decades of business experience in publishing on which my doubts are founded.)

As I continued to discuss this with Phillip, he told me that "...you wish to discourage small publishers the opportunity to get in the ring and potentially grow and feel that kills the market that's  why marvel and DC regurgitate garbage to stay safe [sic]... Only betting on sure things has worked so you play it safe." At this point, I saw little reason to explain that my store, Dr. No's Comics & Games SuperStore, is the most fully stocked comic shop in the metro area and one of the most fully stocked in the US, and that we have carried independent comics since the store got into comics back in the late 70s, when I was the guy in charge of ordering for the original owner. 

Christina Merkler, co-owner of Lunar Distribution, said on a podcast recently something to the effect that if a publisher can't sell 250 or 300 copies of a book (I forget which number she cited), then they're not really ready to enter the marketplace, and I agree with that. That's the number that Lunar is looking for, and I gather that a lot of the smallest publishers aren't hitting that number, even with 2000 comic shops as their potential market (and remember, a small publisher sells to retailers, not to readers because a small publisher has zero marketing budget to reach those readers), Small publishers have to make expansion of the buying audience their number one priority. That may require deeper discounts, losing money for a while (I know of hardly any small business that didn't take a loss initially), or most importantly of all, pricing your product so that you can offer industry-standard discounts. Does that mean you might have to charge $1 more cover price to give a 50% discount? Perhaps so--but it also means that you open a lot more retail avenues for your product. Offering a product at a lower cover price, and paying for that lower price by charging 20% more for your product at the wholesale level (I pay $2.50 for a $5 book at a 50% discount, but I pay $3 at a 40% discount, and $3 is 20% more than $2.50) is forcing the retailer to become a discounter... but most small businesses don't have the profit margin to survive as a discounter. 

There's also an added cost involved in adding new distributors. It takes time to calculate orders for each distributor, it takes time to handle payments, it costs more proportionately  to process a small order than it does to process a large order. Their is an economy of scale involved in dealing with fewer distributors for more product, and for a small business, economy is the key—we have to maximize return on every dollar spent if we want to survive.

I hope that small publishers can find a means to get into comic shops like mine. I said, when Diamond began having problems, that losing them would hurt the smallest publishers much more than anyone else. But they're going to need a better business model than this to achieve success. Maybe Phillip Russertt will prove me wrong, but from what I've seen from fellow retailers and other knowledgable industry veterans, it's not likely.

A Furry Mackerel-Colored Memory

 Last night, I wrapped up the first draft of an all-ages manuscript with the working title of Anna. It's not ready to publish yet—for one thing, the first draft of the first half of the book was done via voice transcription on an iPhone to set a simpler, more fundamental style and structure that was easier to evaluate if I heard it out loud, but the vagaries of voice transcription require a lot of correction—but I was proud to put the word FIN at the end of that last paragraph.

This wasn't an easy book to write, because the inspiration for it is the life of the most remarkable cat I've ever had the joy to share my life with.  I've owned cats since 1964, when almost-eleven-year-old me welcomed a black and white cat named Tyger (I know the color was wrong, thanks) into my family's home. She was with us for several years, even though she suffered injuries and lost an eye in a gory fight with another animal in 1966 and we weren't even sure she would recover. 

Since then, I owned (or cared for) four different cats between 1971 and 1973, then went cat-less until 1975, when Meade Frierson invited Susan and me to an event at his house and encouraged everyone to take a kitten home with them (I think the event was the front for a cat-distribution scheme, to be honest). Her name was Stormy, and she stayed with us until 1990, when she passed.

A week after Stormy's death, Susan and I welcomed two cats, a mackerel part-Persian named Asia and a blue-cream full-blooded Persian named Tisha, into our lives. Asia developed a fast-growing injection-site tumor and left us to soon; Tisha outlived her by two more years before succumbing to the accrued effects of old age.

Then came Anna. We stopped a pet store on a whim and saw this mackerel half-Siberian half-Ragdoll in a cage with four white Ragdolls, and I fell in love with her almost immediately. Previously, I had gotten kittens, not cats, but she was too irresistible to pass up. Anna was a joy from the day she entered our life, even though she was sickly and undersized at the time we got her.  She settled into our home and our lives right away, but seemed a bit lonely (after all, she had grown up with other cats). So three months after we got her, we brought Mischa into our house—a robust mackerel Siberian with black points and paws like snowshoes. 

Mischa passed at the age of eighteen, while Anna lived until just a week before her twentieth birthday. Anna was the only one of my cats to get to know and love Karen (Mischa died just a couple of months after Karen and I met), and it was quite touching to see her become so attached to Karen almost immediately. She followed Karen from one end of the house to the other, and settled in right next to her whenever Karen sat down. So Karen was just as devastated as I was when we realized that it was time to say goodbye to her.

We learned after Anna's passing that, while Karen was allergic to cats, they were a catalyst for a couple of dozen allergies that all went away just a couple of weeks after Anna's passing. So we decided that Anna would be our last cat—and that was a decision I had already reached before we learned of the allergies, because I realized that I am to obsessively devoted to my cats and I couldn't both own cats and travel or pursue other activities that I had put off for so many years.

But the week that Anna passed, I knew that I wanted to tell her story in an all-ages book. I can't say if it's a good one or not—I hope so—but I can say that writing it was an unforgettably moving experience for me. I'll keep you updated as to the progress of the rewrites, and perhaps you'll have a chance to read it on our own in the near future.

An Unheard-of Issue

Anyone who knows me is aware how much I love music. All my life, I have strived to acquire the best-quality recordings of my favorite artists. I listen for the slightest nuances of difference. I focus on each individual instrument or voice as much as I can. In the 1960s, when many of my friends had simple mono record players, I explored the two-channel wonder of stereo. Int he 1970s, quadraphonic music was an obsession for me, and I spent far more than I could afford to add a quad amplifier and turntable to my audio system. Int he 1980s, MTV introduced me to basic surround sound; a few years later, almost every stereo amplifier added a surround synthesizer to create the illusion of four-channel audio from two channel recordings. In the 1990s, I began to seek out five-channel audio on laserdisc and DVD. In the early 2000s, I immersed myself in DVD-Audio (which is decidedly different from the audio track on a DVD) and Super Audio CDs with surround mixes. More recently, I have added a lot of Atmos recordings to my collection of blu-ray audio. I am absolutely hooked on finding the perfect means of hearing every voice, every instrument, every echo, every resonance, every reverb...

So imagine my dismay when, after attending an outrageously over-amplified concert on May 16th, I discovered a day or two later that my hearing had been severely affected by the excessive volume.

I should have gone prepared with high-quality sound-reducing earplugs, of course--but it never occurred to me that a small performance in a local restaurant might be amplified to a volume that could overload a high school auditorium. I tried using wadded up bits of paper towel, which helped a little—but not enough, obviously.

The first sign I had that something was wrong was when we were watching the rerun of a Friends episode two days later. A couple of minutes into it, I thought that my Atmos surround system was malfunctioning. I was hearing distorted, tinny echoes of the characters' voices coming from behind me, it seemed. Sounds coming from my right were overloaded, boomy, and almost painful, even though the volume was relatively low. Karen assured me that everything sounded normal.

A few days later, I was startled when Karen put her hand on my right shoulder as I worked at the computer. She had spoken to me from my right side several times, but I had never heard her and had no ideas she was even there.

We sleep with a white noise generator/soiund machine that provides an ebb-and-flow wave sound throughout the night.  I turn over and over like a rotisserie chicken when I sleep, so I split time between my back, my right side, and my left side. As I lay there after waking up, I realized that if I was on my left side with my left ear fully pressed into the pillow, I couldn't hear the sound machine at all.

However, the hearing wasn't ˆ. The faintest bit of bass boomed into my right ear until it sounded like that annoying car you can't wait to get away from at a red light. Upper-register treble sounds were sharp and irritating, like some sort of siren. Voices were distorted, as if I was listening to them with water in my ears.

About four weeks after the incident, we joined a friend for karaoke, which Karen loves. Even with noise-limiting Eargasm ear plugs, the volume seemed excessively loud and horribly distorted. Even when the volume was more tolerable, I had trouble following conversations because I could not isolate voices from distorted background noise.

I hit a real low after that. Music means so much to me, and now I couldn't enjoy it. I felt as if a vital part of my life had been taken away. I became aware that the continual frustration was leaving me depressed and angry, and had to make a real effort to control it so that I wasn't making life miserable for Karen and other people I see on a regular basis (I know I wasn't wholly successful in that regard, but I wasn't even aware for a while what effect all this was having on me). I had trouble sleeping because I kept struggling to hear the sound machine, or the air conditioning, or the fan that I sleep with every night.

"Give it some time and it will go away," several people told me. It didn't. I finally went to see a doctor. I told him that the problem had improved, but it hadn't gone away. It had been at its best during the six days we were at Disney, where we were near sea level. The night we drove back to our home, which is 1074 feet above sea level, I had a lot more distortion and discomfort the first night, although it returned to its pre-vacation level by the second night.

He did a number of tests. He said that I haven't lost any hearing--tests verified that I could indeed hear even very faint sounds at all frequencies. The problem was the fidelity of that sound; I was hearing distortion like a blown-out speaker at some frequencies, and it didn't follow a normal pattern. At some frequencies, I heard more distortion in low-volume sounds than I did at higher volumes. At other frequencies, I heard low volumes very accurately but heard distortion at higher volumes. And at some frequencies, I heard no problems at any volumes.

The good news is that my hearing does seem to be improving now, more than nine weeks after the event that caused the problem. The doctor said that that gave him some hope that it might continue to improve and gradually return to normal. But he said that correcting the problem would be difficult because it didn't follow a typical pattern. Hearing aids, he said, aren't designed to correct narrow-frequency-range distortion at mutliple frequencies without impacting the frequencies that I hear normally.

It has continued to improve. I can now hear the sound machine, and some low levels of bass and upper-register treble are less intrusive than they were, but it isn't back to normal.

Tonight, shortly after dark, I went for a two-mile walk to get in my five miles for the day (I had an appointment this morning, so didn't get to do my first walk). On the way home, as I neared my driveway, I heard the hoot of an owl, followed by the plaintive cry of a coyote. For the first time in a while, I felt like I could hear the sounds normally--and I could tell that one came from the woods to my left, behind my house, while the other came from the uphill woods to my right and somewhat in front of me, in the woods behind a neighbor's house. I welcomed the call of both the owl and the coyote, because they told me that I was hearing those frequencies, at least, in undistorted and equally balanced stereo.

I listened to the tree frogs, or crickets, or whatever it is that makes those midsummer night chirping sounds (my parents never could agree on which it was). I could hear them all around me, and if I turned to face the other way, I heard the sound equally well from the opposing ears as I faced the other direction.

I came in and listened to some music (Eric Tingstad and Nancy Rumbel... always a good choice when I need to unwind a bit), and I heard the stereo more than I have in a while. There is still some distortion, but I really believe it's not as bad as it was even a week ago.

Will it get back to normal? I have no idea... only a hope. But when depression or frustration attempts to ambush me again, I'll try to remember how bad it was, and how it has gotten better, and I'll try to fight off that ambush. 

There's still a lot of music I want to hear, after all.

Repaying a Debt

There are some people who will always have a home on the shelves at Dr. No's Comics & Games SuperStore. These are creators who play such an integral role in transformingcomics into an art form that I feel like our store is a better place just because they're on the shelves here. 

Jack Kirby—the man whose creative vision and artistry made the Marvel Age possible. Steve Ditko—without him, there's be no Spider-Man as we know him. Carmine Infantino—the artistic stylist who brought the Flash, Adam Strange, and the New Look Batman to life on the printed page. Joe Kubert—no one conveyed the gritty reality of war better than he. Carl Barks—the best of all the Duck artists, he's the man who gave us Uncle Scrooge. Gil Kane—a master cartoonist who could create drama on the page at Marvel, DC, Tower, and in his own projects like Blackmark and His Name Is... Savage. And the list goes on... Wally Wood... Curt Swan... Barry Windsor-Smith... Bob Bolling... Wayne Boring... Russ Heath... Frank Frazetta... Murphy Anderson... Neal Adams... Al Williamson...Bernie Wrightson... Alex Toth... Jim Steranko... Don Rosa... Michael Wm Kaluta... Jerry Ordway... John Buscema... Gene Colan...Gardmer Fox... Roy Thomas... Dennis O'Neil... John Broome... Charles Schulz... Vaugn Bode... 

Undoubtedly, a comic shop is a business that has to make a profit. For that reason, we spend a lot of time analyzing demand, sales velocity, trend projections, etc. In general, if a book takes more than six months turn a copy, my managers and I discuss it before we reorder another copy. If a book takes more than a year, our default position is "don't reorder."  With thousands of collected editions in stock, we have to consider space as well; we try to carry as much as possible, but you can't devote shelf space to a one-every-year sales item if you need to space for a one-every-month sales item. 

But these creators—well, without them, there wouldn't be a Dr. No's Comics & Games SuperStore. I got into comics through the work of Swan, Boring, and Bolling (who illustrated two of the first four comics that my parents bought for me). My imagination flourished through
the work of Kirby, Ditko, Barks, Kubert, Heath, Kane, and Anderson. I saw comics go in an all-new direction thanks to the artistic innovations of Windsor-Smith, Steranko, Wrightson, and Adams.  I discovered the fiction Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard thanks to the stunning work of Frazetta. And because of them, I fell in love with comics and SF and fantasy, and that love led me to the world of fanzines, then into the realm of comics retailing.

So these people are just some of the creators who get an All-Access Pass to Dr. No's. They're the ones who'll be on our shelves as long as there is a Dr. No's. I owe them a debt I can never repay—but I can take one small step in that direction by keeping their memory alive, by introducing new readers to their incredible body of work, and by allowing old readers to re-experience the creativity that got so many of us hooked to begin with. It makes us a better comic shop—and in fact, I'm not sure if we could call ourselves a full-line comic shop if we didn't include the works of these masterful creators.

It doesn't matter how tight those bookshelves are—when it come to these guys, if it's in print, we'll make it fit.

More Than a Boys' Club

 

My first personal contact with anyone at Marvel Comics was with Flo Steinberg. My parents had reached out to Marvel on my behalf in 1964 in hopes of locating some early Marvel issues that I had been unable to find to fill in a hole in my collection (a hole caused by a childhood friend who helped himself to a few books from my stack of Marvels one evening when he spent the night at my house). 

While the letter that Mom wrote was addressed to Stan Lee, it was Flo Steinberg who wrote back. Stan had asked her to send a stack of several issues from that list that Marvel still had in their office files--but he also asked Flo to send me a list of the books that Marvel had for sale. Apparently Marvel had heard from others who wanted back issues, and Flo had inherited that job. She sent a list of alpha-numerically ordered comics, with a simple price structure: 25¢ for a regular comic, 50¢ for an annual (which was about double the cover price, but that included postage). Flo's letter was cordial and kind. I had seen references to "Fabulous Flo" in various Marvel comics before, but this experience showed me how she earned her nickname. For several years (until the advent of mail-order back issue dealers  like Howard Rogofsky and Robert Bell, who ran ads in Marvel Comics) Flo became an invaluable source for Marvel issues that I had missed. (It was easy to miss books back then, in the days before comic shops, because most groceries and drugstores didn't care which comics they got, so long as they had comics to fill the racks. So you could never be certain that the store who got last month's Fantastic Four would get this month's Fantastic Four...)

For me, Flo was as vital a part of Marvel Comics as Stan, Jack, Steve, Don, and Dick were—and maybe even more, because none of them sent me manila envelopes with back issues in them!

When I saw the first mention of Margaret Stohl's Super Visible: The Story of the Women of Marvel Comics, I initially thought that it focused on female characters (the image of Sue Storm, Invisible Girl, not he dust jacket misled me). Once I saw that it actually focused on the women who helped make Marvel through their work as office managers, business directors, editors, writers, artists, and more. I was intrigued: first, I wanted to see if it talked about Flo at all (it does—and it's heartbreaking to learn that she left Marvel because they wouldn't give see fit to give her a $5 a week raise). Then I wanted to see what it said about other women who have worked at Marvel over the years, many of whom I interacted with professionally as a retailer and as writer of Comic Shop News. 

Marie Severin, Jo Duffy, Anne Nocenti, Bobbie Chase, Trina Robbins, Paty Cockrum, Louise Simonson, Jean Thomas, Virginia Romita, Christie Scheele, June Brigman, Kelly Sue DeConnick, Janice Chiang, Amanda Conner, G. Willow Wilson, Irene Vartanoff... they're all in here. But most importantly to me, Carol Kalish is here. Carol passed away many years ago, far too young, but her acumen with both comics and business made her invaluable to Marvel's prominence
. Carol was my barometer: any book that didn't mention her contributions to Marvel couldn't pass muster. Thankfully, Super Visible acknowledges what Carol did for Marvel and for the comics industry as a whole.

The book focuses on many other creators with whom I haven't been lucky enough to interact professionally, including some about whom I actually knew very little. It's informative, but most importantly, it gives many of these women a voice to tell their own stories in oral history form, and their stories are fascinating. Many of them could be subject of an entire book on their own—and maybe that will happen down the line. But right now, Super Visible is the best way to learn about the women who made Marvel far more than a boys' club.

A Life in Four Colors Part Sixty

Our lives changed in so very many ways once we moved to Marietta.

You wouldn't think a move would make so much difference, but it did. Cedartown (and even Rome, eighteen miles away) was relatively sedate and stable; the wheels of change turned very slowly there, and we were young enough that many of the places that had been a part of our childhood lives still existed.

But Marietta in 1977 was a nexus for people in their twenties and thirties trying to build a new life for them in ever-growing metro Atlanta. When we moved into our apartment on Franklin Road in Marietta, many of our neighbors were nearly the same age as us (in contrast to our lives in Cedartown, where the neighbors around us were at least a quarter-century older than us, and some of them had children older than us). There was an energy to apartment life in Savannah Oaks that we had never experienced in Cedartown. 

In 1977, Marietta had a few 24 hour restaurants, a couple of 24 hour grocery stores, 24 hour drug stores--it seemed like a place that never stopped to rest. There was a vitality that the young emigrés brought with them, and it fed into our awareness that this was very different from anything either of us had experienced before. We had seen glimpses of it during our weekend visits to our friend Larry Mason, who lived across town in the Buford Highway corridor, but we never imagined that within a few years, we'd be right in the middle of it all. This may sound fairly insignificant now, but to someone coming into this world after living in a  town where pretty much everything closed at 9pm, it was a Wizard of Oz moment.

(Those of you who remember life before COVID have seen the world shrink in a mirror image of this. All those 24 hour stores started closing when COVID scared off some of their customer base, and few of them have returned to the pre-COVID boom era. I remember walking to Kroger or Walgreens at 2 in the morning to enjoy the night air as I made an impulse purchase, or driving th Walmart or Kmart at 3 or 4 am. Alas, the entire 24-hour economy seems to be one casualty of COVID that will not recover...)

With Susan's new job came more money--but with our move came more expenses. Even so, after paying $490 a month in rent for our two-bedroom townhouse apartment (a steep increase from the $75 a month we paid for a two-bedroom rental house in Cedartown), we still had unprecedented levels of disposable income. We also had health insurance, which we never had when each of us was in school; we had a retirement fund, which we had never even thought about in our early twenties; and we had comforts like central air conditioning, new appliances, and two and a half bathrooms.  While this is the sort of thing that a lot of people consider basic today, it was a significant step up from the simpler life we had lived in the first six years of our marriage. 

This was the sort of life that we had envisioned experiencing at some point--but we never imagined that we would be propelled into this life so quickly.

I know that it will surprised no one to learn that with more money came more books, more comics, more fanzines, more music... more of everything that had been a part of our lives ever since the time we met in 1968. Our entertainment budget grew almost ten-fold over the first few months. Where I used to have to make decisions about one or two albums a month, I could now buy the music I wanted as soon as it was released. I had Steve Leaf at the Book Nook hold one of every comic book for me every week so that I could pick up the entire stack every weekend. I started ordering more books from Donald M. Grant and Arkham House and a number of small specialty publishers. 

For fans, the things we collect have a tendency to expand exponentially while the space we have for them expands mathematically. So even though we had a much larger space than we had ever lived in before, we were rapidly filling up our library (the second bedroom). I had to move some of my comics into one of the storage buildings at my parents' house in Rome because I was buying so many books there wasn't room for them. But that wasn't a worry—we were intoxicated by the opportunities that came with life in Marietta.

Just a few months after we moved, I ventured into what seemed like the outer territories of Cobb County to check out a new store I had heard about, a place with used records, used books, some James Bond collectibles, and some back issue comics. I was intrigued by the store's name.

Dr. No's.

The owner, Artie Decker, had come out of the music industry where he worked on the promotional side of things. He had access to lots of promo albums from the label for whom he worked, and he had friends who worked for other labels who could supply him with surplus promo copies to stock his used record shelves. He had bought out the inventory of a used bookstore in metro Atlanta to fill his used bookshelves, and a friend had sold him about ten boxes of comics to start his inventory. Artie knew a lot about music, a bit about books... but nothing about comics. He did know, however, that it was a market that was growing rapidly for Alex Nunan at Book Nook on the other side of town, and he wanted to be Marietta's Book Nook.

Our fanzine Future Retrospective had been sufficiently well received that we were on the comp list for a lot of SF and fantasy publishers--and a lot of the books we got were reissues or paperbacks releases of hardcover titles that we already had. I began taking those books to Artie to trade in, because SF was like gold in the used book market in the 1970s: it was the ultimate printed commodity, and he would offer universal trade credit for anything he carried in order to get SF (most stores only let you trade genre for genre in books, and never for comics or records). 

As I read the comics I bought at Book Nook, I discovered that some titles didn't appeal to me, so I would take them to Artie to trade them in for books from his boxes. This piqued his curiosity even more, since I had comics he had never even heard of. "I want to get into new comics," he said, "but I don't know anything about them." I assured him that I did, and that for a modest payment in new comics credit, I could help him to order properly on a few titles to test out the four-color waters.

Artie was enthusiastic about that arrangement. As a result, within a few months of my move to Marietta, I began my first limited foray into actual comics retailing, albeit in a behind-the-scenes capacity.

I had no idea just how much this was going to change my life over the next few years...

"I Swear It's Not Too Late..."

Soon after Susan died in 2019, I began a still-ongoing process of evaluating my life to determine what I possessed and what possessed me, so to speak. There were many things that I had kept for years without even looking at. Susan's death helped me to realize that in many cases, the joy is in the memory. But sometimes the burdens of owning Too Many Things inspire changes. This is one of the reasons I sold my comics collection a couple of months ago. I still love comics, but I have collected editions of the things I truly love, and don't have to have the physical comics any longer (and this was the fourth time I've sold my collection in my lifetime, so it wasn't an unprecedented decision).

In the past few years, I have re-homed Susan's antique cross-stitch collection, as well as her cross-stitch flosses and linens; our voluminous 25,000 book mystery collection; over a dozen items of furniture (some no longer needed, some that reflected tastes that have now changed); over 500 laserdiscs; an enormous amount of clothing; multiple sets of dishes and small appliances; and a huge assortment of holiday decor items that I had not used in years. Along the way, I found a box that I had packed up in 1986, when I moved from my Kennesaw home to my first Marietta home; it had not been unboxed in the almost 40 years since. I looked through the items once, smiled a the memories as I said goodbye, and donated what would be useful before I discarded the rest.

Recently, I referenced the whole "Swedish death cleaning" concept, and a friend who is a part of the Dr. No's team laughed and said, "I started to say something about that but thought it might be taken the wrong way." I assured her it wasn't. While that's not the inspiration for my cleaning (my primary goal is to implement a five-year plan that would enable me to sell the overflow house after I have sufficiently downsized), it reflects a similar attitude. When Mom died, when Dad died, and when Susan died, I spent a lot of time going through the accumulations of three lifetimes and I became aware how many of those things had not brought joy into Mom's or Dad's or Susan's lives for many years prior to their deaths. It took me many months to go through all of those things and deal with them, and in some cases I had no real idea what to do with them (JM Early was a lifesaver when it came to re-homing cross-stitch and quilting materials).

I always recall the final moments of Citizen Kane, when the workers are destroying the accumulations of Charles Foster Kane's personal life (largely the items he had boxed up to save after his mother's death). To him, those items had meaning; to everyone else, they were junk. I didn't want my junk to be a burden on those who survive me--and I didn't want my junk to be a burden on me.

I am lucky that my memory remains sharp and vivid at 72. I carry the wonderful memories of every item that has brought me joy in my life, even though I haven't seen some of them in almost six decades (I still smile when I think about my Man from UNCLE gun and shoulder-holster set). I can get rid of some of those items and still have those memories. And if I someday get to the point that my memory isn't so sharp and vivid--well, having the items probably wouldn't do me much good at that point anyway.

This is not a somber, melancholy, or depressing process. It is a celebration of the myriads of things that have helped to make my life so wonderful, and a recognition that life is always an ongoing process of change. Life is not and should not be a museum of one's past. It should always be a process of finding joy and contentment in life's present, and an eagerness to experience life's future.

"Strange to Be Seventy..."

 Seventy years old.

 

It surprises me, to be honest. Mom didn’t make it to seventy. Neither did Susan, nor my cousins Frank and Karen, nor so many other friends and family members. 

 

I wasn’t given much chance of making it to seventy after my heart attack. They gave me a 30% chance of surviving the surgery, and not a much better chance of surviving until the surgery. 

 

But here I am.

 

Life has given me far more goodness than I ever imagined it could. I wake up without aches and pains. I walk five miles or more every day, and enjoy it even more now than I did when I began this habit more than twenty-three years ago. I eat the foods I enjoy, and enjoy the foods I eat. I listen to music every day, and still get the same thrill from it that I did when I first began buying records more than sixty years ago. I have never, not even one day, had to work a job I didn’t enjoy. I have dear and loving friends who value our friendship as much as I do, so they adjust their schedules to make sure we get to share a couple of meals together every week.

 

And I share my life with a beautiful, talented, amazing woman who has the courage to do things I could never bring myself to do, and I get to wake up next to her every day and lay my head on the pillow next to her every night. We share walks, we share meals, we share laughter, we share tears, we share stories of our lives before we met one another, and every week I learn new things about her that make me love her even more. Before I met her, I didn’t think I could ever find love again. She proved me wrong.

 

My immediate family may be gone now—Mom and Dad died too many years ago, while Alzheimer’s has taken my dear sister Kimberly from me memory by memory over the past several years—but I have threefamilies now. There is my family by blood—Aunt Jean and Uncle Red, my niece Jessica and my cousin Cathy, as well as my aunts Donna and Martha, both of whom are closer to cousins than aunts since only a small handful of years separate us. There is my family by choice—Charles, Darrell, James, Eddie, Ralph, Buck, Izzy, and Shelley, all of whom make each week of my life better. And now there is my family by marriage—Karen’s family, who have accepted and welcomed this quirky, introverted newcomer into their lives. 

 

I’ve lost so many that I’ve loved in the past seventy years. Five cats have been lifelong companions to me, and I was there when each of them left this world; I’d like to think I learned  from each of them how to love more and care more for the cat who followed. 

 

But the deaths of Mom, of Dad, and of Susan—a part of me died with each one of them. But I learned from that. I learned the value of loving while you have the opportunity, and making sure that the people you love know how much they mean to you. A single moment could be all that stands between love and loss. 

 

Death makes some people afraid to love again, or it fills them with regret that they loved at all, since every love has to end with sorrow for the person left behind. But I remember there are no great moments that I remember from any time in my life that don’t involve someone I loved, someone who loved me… That’s what love is. It’s every wonderful moment of your life, shaped into a multi-faceted gem of a memory—the treasure no one can take away from you. Death isn’t a reason to be afraid of love—it’s the reason you should love. It’s the best thing life can give you.

 

My obsession with numbers and statistics is no secret, so it may surprise a lot of people that I don’t place significance on the “landmark” birthdays. Twenty-one, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, sixty-five, and now seventy—they’re not turning points in my life. I’m only a day older than I was yesterday. I don’t know if I’ll ever feel old. I hope I don’t. I’m still filled with ambitions and plans and dreams, and many of them are the same ambitions and plans I had when I was a kid, a teenager, or a young adult. I still feel a rush of enthusiasm with new technology; I still feel a flood of emotions from new music; I still get lost in new books; I still rediscover my sense of wonder in new comics; I still want to tell more stories; I still hope to draw more; I still lose myself in playing my guitar, even though I’m little better now than I was when I took it up more than a half-century ago.

 

And there are new things, too. Dancing, which I never imagined I’d be able to do, absolutely enthralls me. I value the moments I get to share with my neighbors, many of whom have become so important to me. I want to make more trips with Karen, even though I have spent most of my life sticking close to home. I hear Karen playing the piano and I want to do that, even though I’ve never done so. I pluck at a mandolin, because I love its sound. I play drums now, even though I have no skill at it yet. 

 

Life is a process of scrutinizing the things that fill your days and deciding which ones to keep, which ones to discard, and which ones to add. I’m lucky. I keep finding things in all three catagories. 

 

So I’m seventy now, as of about two and a half hours ago. And I’m okay with that. 

"Too Wonderful for Anybody to Realize..."

 Life can be stranger, more unpredictable, and more wonderful than we can ever imagine.

It's been the better part of two years since I last posted here. So many things have changed since then, and as a result my life is better in ways I could not have imagined.

Karen and I got married; in fact, we celebrated our first anniversary on October 30th of this year. It has been everything that a marriage should be--two people in love with one another, sharing our commonalities and celebrating our differences. We haven't known each other for our entire lives, so we take joy in discovering more about each other's lives. Little things will come up in conversation that will lead to fascinating stories that fit into the puzzle of our lives. Each of us wants to know more about one another's life prior to our meeting, and the people who were important to us in those years. When Susan died in 2019, I envisioned a life of solitude; I had no idea I would find Karen, a kind, wonderful, caring woman who would help me to discover (and rediscover) so many of life's joys. 

Karen and learned that we both love dancing. She is very good, and I am very persistent. And through our interest in dance, we met our new friends Tatyana Heath and James Riley, the owners and instructors of Ballroom Dancetime. Getting to know them has been a wonderful experience as well, and I appreciate them more with each passing week.

I have gotten to know Karen's family--her four children and her six grandchildren, and her sister Nancy and Nancy's sons--and through them, I get to re-experience the love of my own family. I never had children and never thought it mattered, but I find it intriguing that several months after Karen and I became serious with one another I actually had dreams about Lulu, Donny, and Emma, the children that Karen and I might have had. Having lost my own family  a while back (both parents died, and my beloved sister still lives, but she is so devastated by Alzheimer's that I feel like I have lost all that made Kim such a wonderful person), it is touching to witness the love between Karen and her family.

We made a lot of changes to the house--adding a covered porch, replacing wallpaper with paint in colors that made the rooms warm and engaging, adding new furniture that reflected our styles and tastes, streamlining and rearranging for more eye appeal and flow, and getting rid of furnishings that had remained for years simply due to inertia. My mother used to redecorate and repaint the family house every decade or so, and now I see why--the changes help you to appreciate your home in all new ways.

Karen retired in the summer of 2022, and that has given her time to pursue interests ion music, acting, and writing. It makes me very happy to see her finding the time to be creative; I have been lucky enough to have that sort of time for many years now (although I'll have even more in 2023 (but more about that in a couple of paragraphs), and now we both have that freedom. It also means that we both are free to travel--something I haven't really done at all in the 21st Century, due to the chronic health issues that Susan suffered until her death. (Susan couldn't travel with me, and I had no interest in traveling without her.) Now Karen and I can enjoy time away from home and appreciate it even more when we return!

Our Wednesday dinner group has grown to a Wednesday-dinner-and-Friday-lunch group, and both gatherings are always festive and fascinating. Charles Rutledge, James Tuck, Darrell Grizzle, Eddie Coulter, and Ralph Groff are regulars for at least one of those meals every week, and we have a number of occasional lunchtime companions who join us as their schedules allow. Having such good friends as these is remarkable. I talk to so many people I know who lament the absence of good friends from their lives and I feel even more lucky to have so many.

After 35 and a half years of weekly deadlines, I have stepped away from Comic Shop News as of mid-December. I never dislike doing CSN, but in recent months I wasn't enjoying it the way I once did, and there were other issues that made preparing a weekly publication more challenging than it had been. So my business partner Ward Batty and I put CSN up for sale and found buyers who have a game plan to keep the publication going. It's fascinating to see something you co-created continue after your own involvement comes to an end, and I'm eager to see where they take it--but I'm also happy to have time to write what I want when I want.

Alas, there were some sorrows. We lost my beloved cat Mischa in the summer of 2021 at the age of 18, and eleven months after that her sister Anna passed just a week before her twentieth birthday. Losing a feline companion is always heartbreaking, but it's also one of those things that you realize you will have to endure from the very moment you let a cat into your heart. I found some solace in the facts that I gave the two cats the best lives they could possibly have had, they lived longer than any cats I ever owned, and they were happy and loved until the very end. For now, I will refrain from replacing them; this is the first time in 45 years I have not had a pet, and I'm not sure I could ever find two cats who could fit my personality as well as Anna and Mischa did, so I'm not going to try (at least not for now).

But as 2022 comes to an end, I am appreciate of all the joys that have come into my life since the last time I wrote for this blog. I promise that I'll be here more frequently from here on (it's up to you to decide if that's good news or a threat). Those of you who had followed my "Life in Four Colors" entries will see more about my life as that series continues, and I'll even use the blog as a place to talk about comics, now that I no longer have a weekly Comic Shop News deadline. But most of all, not much'a nothin' will be a place where I can once again discuss my life and the things that make it better--just as it was when I first launched not much'a nothin' as a fanzine back in 1968!

Hit Me With Your Best Shot

Since I got my second Moderna COVID vaccine on Wednesday, several people have messaged or called me to ask how I felt and what, if any, side effects I experienced. 

I got my first dose of the vaccine on January 13th. The only side effect I had was arm pain—not a surface pain like a puncture or  scratch, but a deep muscle pain that is comparable to what I feel when I've moved up a weight level in my exercises and have overdone it. My deltoid gave me twinges to say "Hey, I'm here and I'm not happy" with almost any activity, but it certainly alerted me to its discomfort when I tried to lift the arm above shoulder level. 

How bad was the pain? Not very bad at all—on the tried-and-true "one to ten" scale that medical professionals often ask patients to use in rating their pain, I'd have put it at a four overall, with a few hours on Thursday morning hitting a five, perhaps. But by Friday, it had largely gone away, and I was totally back to normal by Saturday evening.

"But the second vaccine is going to be a lot worse," a number of people told me. I heard horror stories about fever, extreme chills, nausea, intense migraine-like headaches, whole body aches, and more. I was told be several people that I should plan on taking two days off when I got my second vaccine.

It is no surprise to those who know me that I didn't listen to that advice. 

I got my second shot at about 10:30am on February 10th. I worked a full day after that, exercised (both walking and weights), and went to dinner with my best friends who always join us on Wednesdays. We finished dinner at about 7:45 and felt fine. 

It was about 9pm or so that I began feeling the soreness in my right deltoid (I'm left handed, so I get the shot in my right arm). It became a little more sore as the night progressed. We went to bed a little after one in the morning, and by that time my arm was sore enough that I was having trouble positioning it without discomfort. Again, the pain felt like a severe muscle pain, not a surface pain--although putting pressure on the injection site made the overall pain more intense. By the time I went to bed, the pain had already surpassed the worst pain level of the first vaccine—on that old one to ten scale, I'd have ranked it at a five overall with some moments of a six-level pain.

As I was getting in bed, I had a few moments of shivering, but I don't know if they were really chills or just a reaction to the pain. When I am in pain, I tend to perspire a bit. I sleep with a fan on. So I was standing in front of a fan, feeling the effects of evaporative cooling—that may not have been a chill at all. I know I did not have any body temperature fluctuations, because I checked it consistently—I never fluctuated more than two-tenths of a degree from my 97.5° body temperature norm. And the shivering went away as soon as I got in bed, never to return.

The arm pain got worse for me as the night went on. Soon, even the weight of my arm was painful. The effects of the pain were evident on my sleeping: normally, I sleep for six or seven hours, and all but about 45 minutes of that will be quality sleep, with about 35% to 40% of that being deep sleep. On Wednesday night/Thursday morning, I was in bed for nine hours and 47 minutes, but only four hours of that was quality sleep and only 15 minutes was deep sleep. Most significantly, my sleeping heart rate (which normally declines to about 75 beats per minute—and I know that sounds high for most people, but that's  real drop over my normal 95 bpm resting heart rate when I'm awake) never dropped below 96 bpm, while my resting-awake heart rate held at about 105-110.

By Thursday morning, the pain was maintaining at a seven with some moments spiking to an eight. I was so limited that I had to get dress using reach-across techniques I haven't used since I broke my hand several decades ago. Even so, I was able to go to work at get a fair amount done, although I know that I wasn't working to my normal levels.

By Thursday night, things began to improve. My pain dropped back to a level five or so, and I was able to sleep. My sleep tracker numbers returned to my norm: 8:24 sleep, 7:36 quality sleep, and an amazing 4:42 deep sleep, with an average sleeping heart rate of 74. When I awoke Friday, the pain had declined even further, to perhaps four or so. By the end of the day Friday, it was down to a 2 at worse, 

Did I have side effects from the second vaccination? Obviously. Were they worse than the side effects from the first vaccination. Undoubtedly. Would I still get the second vaccination knowing this? Absolutely! The psychological boost of knowing that I am now vaccinated and that, if all goes well, I will be largely COVID-resistant by February 27th, is immense. I will continue to be careful and take precautions when I'm in public, but I will feel that my life is closer to normal, and I will no longer be apprehensive about visiting friends or family who are not a part of my direct circle of contacts. 

I also feel like I've done my part to help deter the spread of this devastating illness. And if they tell me this time next year I need a booster, I'll be the first in line to take it, even if they warn me that it might have similar side effects to the second shot. And now I'm hoping that they can expand the eligible base for this vaccine as soon as possible so that more of my friends can experience the sense of relief that comes with completing the two-vaccine regimen.

Biblio Philos

 Today I spent an hour or so carrying boxes of books back and forth between the main house and the overflow house. Last spring I purchased four bookshelves to go in the dining room. At the time, I filled them with mystery hardcovers (mostly Susan's, but some mine) that had been overstocked and upstairs shelves. Then, in the summer, I began moving a couple of shelves' worth of books between the houses, replacing the mysteries with my horror, science fiction, comics, fantasy, and literary volumes that spoke to me. These are the books I'm more likely to read and re-read, to refer back to, and the revisit, so why not make that a convenient process.

So many friends. Book after book reminded me of an encounter, a conversation, a friendship, or a close kinship with the author. These aren't just words on paper. They're unchanging connections to people I have known, preserved in paper and fabric and leather. Some of the people are still with us today, some aren't—but on my bookshelves, they're always here.

Piers Anthony—sometimes erudite, sometimes conspiratorial, a man who smiled with his eyes.

Michael Bishop—a gentle, thoughtful soul whose intellect counterbalances his literary passion.

Isaac Asimov—Gregarious, confident, amiable, unpredictable, and always fascinating.

Jack Kirby—Engaging, kind, amiable, continually creative, and always looking ahead eagerly at his next project.

Philip K. Dick—Mercurial, intense, sometimes troubled, and never predictable.

Stan Lee—Self-effacing yet confident, brash, loquacious, but always eager to please and appreciative of the admiration of his fans.

Thomas Burnett Swann—Scholarly, refined, genteel, with a love for the written word more intense than I've ever seen in another writer.

Stephen King... Clive Barker... Philip Jose Farmer... Ray Bradbury... Robert A. Heinlein... E. Hoffman Price... L. Sprague de Camp... Greg Benford... Hal Clement... Kelly Freas... Michael Whelan... Jim Steranko... Neal Adams... Murphy Anderson... George Alec Effinger... Frank Miller...  Each meeting with each of them lives on in the books on my shelves. I have no idea if I'll meet some of them in person again; others are no longer with us, so I will only know them through these books and the memories they bring back as I look at the books.

Why do I keep books? Friends live in those pages, that's why.

19,030

366 days.

I shared 17,569 days of marriage with Susan. I loved her for 18,664 days before her death.

But sometimes the past 366 days seemed longer than the 17,569 or the 18,664.

I was never alone until Susan's death on July 22, 2019. I moved from my parents' house to my and Susan's house on June 15th, 1971. We spent occasional days apart when she or I attended conventions alone (usually because one of us had to stay with the cats we always spoiled), but the total number of days we spent away from one another during our 48 year marriage was less than a dozen.

"You weren't meant to be alone," Susan said to me once when she was contemplating a doctor's prediction that she had less than a year to live due to a chronic, debilitating illness (she proved him wrong by living for seven years beyond that—and even then, it was not that illness that took her from me).

I was certain she was wrong. I tried to prove her wrong. I failed, because she knew me better than I knew myself.

My therapist asked me, "Could you live the rest of your life without love?" I told her no. Thankfully, I never had to—I had the love of friends who saw me through my bleakest moments,  who shared my pain and sorrow.

Those friends led me to rediscover something I had said many years ago and have repeated often since then: every day, no matter how heartbreaking or painful, contains a nugget of joy in it. On the day that Susan died, Brett and Allison and Charles took me to El Rodeo for lunch because I hadn't eaten in over thirty hours. They reminisced with me of happier times when Susan was healthy, and those memories made me smile. Even on that day, friends helped me discover a nugget of joy.

I have experienced and endured all those somber firsts without her—the first birthday, first Halloween, the first Thanksgiving, the first Christmas, the first New Year's, the first Valentine's Day, the first anniversary,

With the help of others, I have learned that I can be alone. I have learned that I can like myself. And I have learned that I can love and can be loved. And I have learned that life can surprise me. I learned all of that in the past year.

366 days. But that's not the most important number.

19,030 days—that's how long I have loved Susan, as of today. And that number increases by one every time another midnight arrives. That's the most important number.

Fifty Years Ago This Week in West Rome - 7/6/1970 to 7/12/1970

New Rome City Schools superintendent Jesse C. Laseter ordered county news to conduct a thorough cleaning and repainting of Rome City Schools in preparation for the upcoming school year. Laseter had already gone on record regarding his hopes to renovate and improve school facilities, but until there were enough funds to make that possible, he at least wanted to make the schools look better. This would be the first time West Rome High classrooms were fully repainted since the school's founding in 1958. The school board also approved more than $20,000 for West Rome's 1970-71 athletic budget, which included $4800 for new uniforms for several sports teams.

With construction of Floyd Junior College running a bit behind schedule, there was a chance that some classrooms wouldn't be ready for the fall opening, To ensure that no classes would be postponed, the Georgia Board of Regents contracted with First United Methodist to hold classes in a portion of the church's educational building on East Third Avenue. The plan would allow classes to meet there until the facilities were completed, at which time they would move to the Floyd Junior College campus.

If you lived in West Rome in 1970, you undoubtedly loved Kay's Kastles, the ice cream shop in Gala Shopping Center. There was good news for all Kay's Kastles fans this week in 1970: to make it easier to cool off on a hot summer day, Kay's Kastles lowered the price on their sherbet pints to 21¢ each, while pints of ice cream were 29¢ each.

Piggly Wiggly had chuck roast for 43¢ a pound, cabbage for 12¢ a pound, and Royal Cup coffee for 49¢ a pound. Kroger had sirloin steak for $1.29 a pound, Morton frozen dinners for 33¢ each, and Country Club ice cream for 44¢ a half-gallon. Big Apple had fresh whole fryers for 29¢ a pound, Lenox Park peanut butter for 49¢ a jar, and Save-On canned biscuits for 8¢ a can (that's right—8¢ for a can of ten biscuits!). A&P had swiss steak for 75¢ a pound, okra for 29¢ a pound, and a 3.5 pound box of Cheer detergent for 87¢.  Couch's had pork chops for 59¢ a pound, tomatoes for 15¢ a pound, and Van Camp's chili with beans for 35¢ a can.

The cinematic week began with A Boy Named Charlie Brown at the DeSoto Theatre, The Boys in the Band (starring Cliff Gorman) at the First Avenue, M*A*S*H (starring Elliott Gould & Donald Sutherland) at the Village, and True Grit (starring John Wayne) at the West Rome Drive-In. The cinematic week brought the X-rated Female Animal (starring Arlene Tiger... and yeah, I'm sure that's her real name) to the First Avenue and the X-rated Gutter Girls (starring a bunch of... well, gutter girls) to the West Rome Drive-In, while A Boy Named Charlie Brown and M*A*S*H hung around for another week.

This week in 1970, Three Dog Night held on to the number one slot for another week with "Mama Told Me (Not to Come)." Other top ten hits included "The Love You Save/I Found That Girl" by the Jackson 5 (#2); "(They Long to Be) Close to You" by the Carpenters (#3);  "Band of Gold" by Freda Payne (#4); "Ball of Confusion (That's What The World Is Today)" by the Temptations (#5); "Ride Captain Ride" by Blues Image (#6); "Lay Down (Candles In the Rain)" by Melanie with the Edwin Hawkins Singers (#7); O-o-h Child/Dear Prudence" by the 5 Stairsteps (#8); "Gimme Dat Ding" by the Pipkins (#9); and "Make It With You" by Bread (#10).

Fifty Years Ago This Week in West Rome - 6/29/1970 to 7/5/1970

Jesse C. Laseter officially assumed his new role as superintendent of Rome City Schools this week in 1970. His number one priority was improving the school facilities. "We probably have the most outdated buildings in the state," Laseter said. "You can't have a quality program without adequate space for libraries and the like." Roy Goolsby joined the system as assistant school superintendent, while George Kemp signed on as director of maintenance.

Traffic on Shorter Avenue was moving slower than usual thanks to Southern Bell's efforts to expand the telephone cable network in West Rome and West Floyd County. Plans called for the work to be completed in less than a week, but Southern Bell warned West Romans that one lane of Shorter Avenue would be closed in each direction every afternoon until the work was finished.

The Big K Sunday Opening War continued. The store manager, Montie Rasure, was convicted of violating Georgia's Sunday closing laws, but Big K responded by opening once again on Sunday. When Sheriff Joe Adams paid them a visit, they chose to close at 2pm rather than face another arrest. Sheriff Adams said that his visit was prompted by a request from Floyd County District Attorney Larry Salmon, who in turn said that he made the call after Broad Street merchants called him to complain. In the meantime, Big K filed an appeal of the conviction, hoping to have the case heard by the Georgia Supreme Court.

Floyd Hospital employees were given a 6% raise effective June 29th; to pay for the raise, the hospital announced plans to raise the cost of hotel rooms by $4 a day, pushing the lowest-cost hospital room to $35 a day and the best private rooms to $46 a day.

Oh, how lucky we were back in 1970: Citizens Federal was offering 6% interest on certificates of deposit with a $5000,00 minimum. Home Federal matched those rates--but they also offered 5.75% interest on a CD of only $1000!. Sure, $5000 equals about $32,000 today and $1000 equals about $6400--but 6% is also about 6 times what most CDs are paying today!

Piggly Wiggly had ground beef for 49¢ a pound, Duke's mayonnaise for 49¢ a quart, and whole watermelons for 69¢ each. Kroger had round steak for 98¢ a pound, Morton pot pies for 19¢ each, and plums for 33¢ a pound. A&P had shank portion hams for 39¢ a pound, milk for 89¢ a gallon, and nectarines for 49¢ a pound. Big Apple had turkeys for 48¢ a pound, Stokely catsup for 19¢ a bottle, and corn for 7¢ an ear.  Couch's had pork roast for 59¢ a pound, Bounty paper towels for 29¢ a roll, and bananas for a dime a pound.

The cinematic week began with The Hawaiians (starring Charlton Heston) at the DeSoto Theatre,  The Libertine (starring Catherine Spaak) at the First Avenue, 1932: The Moonshine War  (starring Patrick McGoohan) at the Village, and the "terror-rama" of Guess What Happened to Count Dracula, Curse of the Stone Hand, The Crawling Eye, and Terror of the Blood Hunters at the West Rome Drive-In. The midweek switch out brought A Boy Name Charlie Brown to the DeSoto Theatre, The Boys in the Band (starring Cliff Gorman) to the First Avenue, M*A*S*H (starring Donald Sutherland & Elliott Gould) to the Village, and True Grit (starring John Wayne, Glen Campbell, & Kim Darby) to the West Rome Drive-In.

The number one song this week in 1970 was "Mama Told Me (Not to Come)" by Three Dog Night. Other top ten songs included "The Love You Save/Found That Girl" by the Jackson 5 (#2); "Ball of Confusion (That's What the World Is Today): by the Temptations (#3); "Ride Captain Ride" by Blues Image (#4); "Band of Gold" by Freda Payne (#5); "Lay Down (Candles in the Rain)" by Melanie with the Edwin Hawkins Singers (#6); "They Long to be Close to You" by the Carpenters (#7); "The Long and Winding Road" by the Beatles (#8); "The Wonder of You/Mama Liked the Roses" by Elvis Presley (#9); and "Hitchin' a Ride" by Vanity Fare (#10).

The first episode of Casey Kasem's "American Top Forty" aired on radio stations across the country this week in 1970.

Neither Friend Nor Enemy

Death is not my enemy.

Death has shown me kindness. Didn't keep me, back in April 2000. Things to be done, so death sent me back after seven minutes. Not yet, death murmured.

Death didn't take my mother right away. Nor my father. Nor my beloved Susan. Nor Anna, or Tisha, or Mischa. I give you one more good day. One more good night. One chance to say goodbye.

An evening of family photos and shared stories. A hearty meal and plans for a home recuperation. A loving smile, a gaze that saw all the way into my heart, and whispered words of love. An hour of affection that transcended weariness. A contented nap beside me. A weary head resting on my arm.

Take these moments. My time comes soon. I can wait a little longer.  I have eternity.

Sometimes it takes a while to see what death gives. Too busy raging against what death takes.

Discomfort. Fear. Confusion. Anguish. Pain. Death takes those, too.

Not entirely, though. Death leaves a bit of those feelings in us so that we can comprehend what those we love endured before they were taken.

What you feel now? They felt it, too, only so much more. I ended their discomfort. Their fear. Their confusion. Their anguish. Their pain.

That's not the action of my enemy. I can see that now.

Someday death will be my final friend. Not yet, I murmur.

Take these moments. My time comes soon. I can wait a little longer. I have eternity.

Fifty Years Ago This Week in West Rome - 6/22/1970 to 6/28/1970

Rome City Schools and Floyd County Schools announced the fall opening of the Coosa Valley Vocational High School, which would be open to tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grade city and county students. The Vocational High School would be located on the Coosa Valley Tech campus. The school would begin in August with classes in electrical repair, construction, metal working, drafting, transportation, and cosmetology. Students would be enrolled at their regular city or county high schools, but would be transported to the Coosa Valley Tech campus for two hours of instruction each day. West Rome students would attend classes from 10:30 to 12:30 each day.

Armed robbers decided that the Dari-King was a major retail center, so they targeted it for robbery on Wednesday night, June 24th. The robbers took almost $300 from the Dari-King's register and from the wallets of four employees inside the restaurant, then forced one of them to drive the pair of thieves to their getaway car on Selman Road, not too far from the Dari-King.

Columbia Records country music star Stonewall Jackson came to Gibson's Discount Center in Rome on Wednesday, June 24th, signing records and offering an impromptu acoustic performance. Gibson's said that this would be the first of several signings planned for their new record department.

Piggly Wiggly had chuck roast for 89¢ a pound, cantaloupes for 33¢ each, and milk for 89¢ a gallon. Kroger had fresh whole fryers for 28¢ a pound, whole watermelons for 89¢ each, and Morton frozen cream pies for 23¢ each. Big apple had sirloin tip roast for 99¢ a pound, Coca-Cola/Tab/Sprite/Fresca for 33¢ a carton plus deposit, and bananas for a dime a pound. A&P had taken hens for 29¢ a pound, Farmbest ice milk for 39¢ a half-gallon, and yellow or white corn for a dime an ear. Couch's had pork steak for 69¢ a pound, Nabisco saltines for 43¢ a box, and fresh locally-grown tomatoes for 19¢ a pound.

The cinematic week began with Paint Your Wagon (starring Lee Marvin) at the DeSoto Theatre, Women In Love (starring Jennie Linden & Alan Bates) at the First Avenue, Beneath the Planet of the Apes (starring Charlton Heston) at the Village, and 100 Rifles (starring Rquel Welch & Jim Brown) at the West Rome Drive-In. The midweek switch out brought The Hawaiians (starring Charlton Heston) to the DeSoto, the X-rated film The Libertine (starring Catherine Spaak) at the First Avenue, 1932: The Moonshine War (starring Patrick McGoohan) at the Village, and a low-budget horror film fest of Guess What Happened to Count Dracula, Curse of the Stone Hand, The Crawling Eye, and Terror of the Blood Hunters at the West Rome Drive-In.

The Jackson 5 took the number one slot this week with "The Love You Save/I Found That Girl." Other top ten hits included "Mama Told Me (Not to Come)" by Three Dog Night (#2); "Ball of Confusion (That's What the World Is Today)" by the Temptations (#3); "The Long & Winding Road" by the Beatles (#4); "Hitchin' a Ride" by Vanity Fare (#5); "Ride Captain Ride" by Blues Image (#6); "Band of Gold" by Freda Payne (#7); "Lay Down (Candles in the Rain)" by Melanie with the Edwin Hawkins Singers (#8); "The Wonder of You/Mama Liked the Roses" by Elvis Presley (#9); and "Get Ready" by Rare Earth (#10).

This was a busy week for album releases in 1970. New titles available this week included Marrying Maiden by It's a Beautiful Day; Changes by the Monkees; Ecology by Rare Earth; On Stage by Elvis Presley; Runt by Todd Tundgren; and Vehicle by the Ides of March.