college Archives - Page 6 of 6 - Ramblin' with Roger

Roger Answers Your Questions, Tom, LisaF, Arthur, and Scott

In May 1980, when the semester was over, Tom nagged me to work at the store.

Lisa from peripheral perceptions, who has very nice toes, writes:
You may have already been asked and answered this one, but…How and why did you get into blogging?

The HOW question I answered, among other places, here, specifically in the fifth paragraph; curse you, Fred Hembeck! The WHY I’m sure I’ve answered, but, to reiterate, it’s mostly because I was composing things to write in my head, I didn’t have a place to put them, and the subsequent noise in my brain got too loud; I blogged to stay (relatively) sane. Now it’s so I can “meet” people like you.
***
Thomas McKinnon, with whom I worked at the comic book store FantaCo, said:
Hey Roger
Tell us the story of how you met Tom Skulan and started working at FantaCo.
I have never heard the story.

Well, those are two very different things. I’m going to go back to the old days of comic book collecting when you had to get your comics off the spinner racks at the local convenience store. I started collecting comics by early 1972 (Red Wolf #1 was cover-dated May 1972, Luke Cage, Hero for Hire June 1972). My friend and I were at college in New Paltz, NY but we had to go to some little hole-in-the-wall store on 44/55 in Highland, the next town over, to get our four-color fix.

At some point, maybe as early as 1973, a guy named Peter Maresca started a comic book store called the Crystal Cave, buying from a direct market distributor (Seagate? Bud Plant?) It was right across from a bar called Bacchus. It later moved a couple of blocks.

The chronology fails me here, but at some point, Tom Skulan, Mitch Cohn, and Raoul Vezina all worked at the Crystal Cave, so I met them all there. Tom also put bicycles together at Barker’s department store just outside the village limits.

At some point, Peter closed the store and sold the comic inventory, I believe, to Tom. In any case, I would see Tom at these little comic book shows up and down the Hudson River periodically. Then on August 28, 1978, he opened FantaCo at 21 Central Avenue in Albany, with Raoul as the front guy/graphic designer in residence, the same function he served at the Crystal Cave.

I was living in Schenectady by that time, and lost my job at the Schenectady Arts Council in January 1979; the federal funding was cut off. So I couldn’t afford to buy comics for a while. I’d take the hour-long #55 bus from Schenectady to Albany, sometimes do some work in the store, and get store credit in return so that I could feed my addiction.

I did some work on the first FantaCon in 1979. I know I helped schlep stuff into the Egg convention center, and worked the front door and/or the FantaCo table.

In August 1979, I moved to Albany, to attend grad school at UAlbany (or whatever it was called at the time) in public administration. It was a disaster, in no small part because I developed a toe infection two days before registration and literally almost died; I spent nearly a week in the college infirmary and never really caught up. But it was also very cutthroat competitive, unlike my later time at library school, which was very cooperative, and it did not suit my personality at all.

So in May 1980, when the semester was over, Tom nagged me to work at the store. I told him that I didn’t want to work at the store; I needed to go back to college in the fall. But I COULD use a summer job. So I was hired on that basis, primarily doing mail order, and didn’t end up leaving until November 1988.
***
Scott from the on-hiatus Scooter Chronicles – come back, Scott! – wonders: What is your take, if any, on the DC relaunch, with 52 new storylines and rebooted famous characters?

First, I know it’s inevitable that characters will get reimagined from time to time, in part a function of them not aging as the rest of us do. Still, the whole renumbering and reinventing the whole line smacks of both a frustrating disrespect for its own history and commercial desperation. If I hadn’t stopped buying new comics, this ploy might have motivated me to scrap the entire line. In other words, I HATE it.

That said, it appears that a couple of titles featuring female characters are specifically problematic.
***
A fellow political science major in college, Arthur@AmeriNZ, asked about a story. AP Reporter Responds To Chris Hayes Panel Debate On Racism Of Droppin’ G’s From Obama Speech
On Sunday morning’s Up with Chris Hayes, the panel discussed the contrast between the way Politico reported President Obama’s speech before the Congressional Black Caucus and the Associated Press‘ reporting. Unlike Politico, who used the official transcription to pull quotes, the AP’s article reflected the President’s folksier delivery by quotin’ him without the dropped g’s. Karen Hunter called the AP’s treatment racist, John McWhorter disagreed, and Hayes got a laugh by saying, “I can go both ways on this.”

My first instinct was to say that, if that same news organization would drop the G when quoting, say, George W. Bush (which seems to be the case), it’s a non-issue, but would be if Obama were dealt with differently. However, it is NOT because, as McWhorter argued, “Black English is becoming the lingua franca of American youth, and that ‘America, including non-black America, loves that way of speaking.'” Yuck.

Hunter says she teaches “a journalism class, and I tell my students to fix people’s grammar because you don’t want them to sound ignorant. For them to do that, it’s code, and I don’t like it.” That was an interesting point. I’ve seen literal transcripts in the newspaper, often in criminal cases, sometimes with the (sic) or “as stated” designation, and I’ve been of two minds on that, how that might color the public’s perception of the case.

I guess I agree with Hayes when he suggested, “journalistically speaking, the AP’s transcription gave a more accurate impression of the flavor of the speech.” Especially when the President clearly intended to be dropping his Gs for the particular audience to whom he was speaking. Or speakin’.
***
You have more questions? Just ask away!

Art from Sold Out #1 by John Hebert; story by Skulan, Green, and Hebert

40 Years Ago: First Day of College

That night, I went to my room and cried myself to sleep.

With colleges now starting before Labor Day, I’m fascinated to note that I didn’t begin my college career until September 12, 1971. As noted, I was attending the State University College at New Paltz only before my high school girlfriend was attending there. And well before I got there, but too late to apply anywhere else, she had dumped me for another guy.

So what to make of the place? I’d been there before and had had some affection for it. There were three red-brick dorms at one part of campus. Scudder Hall was where I was assigned, room B-2. My parents and sisters helped me drop off my stuff, which included bedding, a few books (a Bible, Roget’s Thesaurus, Robert’s Rules of Order, a complete Shakespeare among them), my record player, and about 30 LPs (all the Apple label Beatles, The Band’s eponymous second album, Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys, Daydream by the Lovin’ Spoonful, the Supremes Sing Holland-Dozier-Holland, The Temptations with a Little Bit O’ Soul, a Mamas and Papas greatest hits album, Aftermath by the Rolling Stones, and a few others).

But my roommate wasn’t there yet. It turned out, when I met him the next day, that Ron was a graduate student. So why on earth would they match him with a freshman? Maybe it was because we were the only two black males in the dorm.

At some point, we were directed across the grass to another red brick dorm, Bliss Hall. I knew Bliss all too well; that’s where I had gotten dumped four months earlier. The food the college was serving was in the basement.

In the line, I met this weird guy who also was assigned to Scudder, Room 110. It turned out that Uthaclena collected comic books. How does a grown person collect comic books? I had given them up years earlier. Of course, he got me into collecting, seriously, for about two decades. He also had a weird habit of squatting off his desk as though he were Peanuts’ Snoopy as a vulture; it was very peculiar.

That night, I went to my room and cried myself to sleep.

The next night, there was a mixer, and Uthaclena introduced me to a friend and classmate of his, originally from Durant, Oklahoma. I started throwing peanuts in her beer; oddly, this was an effective pickup technique. And by the end of the month, the Okie and I were seriously dating.

40 Years After: May 1971

She apologized but said she had started seeing someone else, so she had to break up with me.

Here’s a new thing I’m doing on this blog: a periodic recollection of my freshman year, into the beginning of my sophomore year, of college. These were significant events that had medium-to-long-term consequences in my life. If I had the discipline, it’d be an essay or one way-too-long blogpost.

I won’t be writing them even every month, but in September of this year, then in February, May, June, August, and October of next year; maybe a couple of other times. I’ll probably link back to the previous episodes, but I’m not going to write the whole thing then chop it up. But the background from the previous segments should inform the subsequent pieces if I do it write, or right.

I went to college where I did because my girlfriend was already there. But that didn’t exactly work out as I planned.

In the fall of 1970, I was in the second half of my senior year at Binghamton (NY) Central High School, and I would be graduating in January 1971. Meanwhile, my girlfriend, who was six months older than I, was a freshman at the State University of New York at New Paltz, about 150 miles away, in a small town along the Hudson River about halfway between New York City and Albany.

I would visit her at the all-female Bliss Hall when I could, which was difficult because there was no direct bus there. There was no train, and I would have had to take two buses, through New York City or through Albany, to get there by that mode.

The easiest way was to hitchhike. But this not to say it was simple. I had to go from Route 17, an interstate-type road to these series of local roads (52, 209, 44/55, and finally 299) to New Paltz.

I visited her once or twice in the fall and saw her at Christmastime, and perhaps once in the winter.

Then I got a job working at IBM in March 1971. It was allegedly 40 hours a week, from 5:12 p.m. to 2 a.m., with a 48-minute lunch break, but business was good, and I generally worked a 56-hour workweek, i.e., 5:12 p.m. to 4 a.m., then Saturday from noon to 6 p.m. As a result, I was very tired but too tired to spend any money, and I socked away enough for my first year in college by the time I quit in August.

One weekend in May, I must have had a rare Saturday off, so I decided to surprise the girlfriend by hitching out to New Paltz. I got to Bliss Hall, and her hall neighbors said that she wasn’t there. But I had met them a couple of times and they seemed a little weird.

Finally, the girlfriend shows up. She apologized but said she had started seeing someone else, so she had to break up with me. Needless to say, I was devastated, and left. I contacted my friend Steve, who was across the river in Poughkeepsie, hitched over there (or maybe she gave me a ride; I’m not sure), and he commiserated with me. I specifically remember him going on and on about this great singer/guitarist named Bonnie Raitt, who I had never heard of, but who he had seen perform in the area; her debut album would come out later that year.

Then I hitched home.

Did I mention that New Paltz, where I had been accepted, was the ONLY college I applied to? So I’ll be going away to this particular college in the fall for, as it turned out, no particular reason.

LaMBS is 55

At some point, around 2:30-2:45 a.m. on what was by then her actual natal day, everyone had left the office except Lynn (who fell asleep on some furniture), a Vietnam vet who was in love with Lynn and kept staring at her, and me who kept watching him.

When I was in college, I was co-editor of a thrice-weekly newsletter, inexplicably called the Wind Sun News, sponsored by the Student Government. They instituted this publication in no small measure because the editors of The Oracle, the student newspaper, decided that political issues such as American involvement in overthrowing Chile’s Allende in favor of Pinochet was more important to cover than the prosaic issue of college politics.

I had a very good friend then, who I’ll call Lynn, mostly because it was her name. She had been kvetching about turning 20. It was a Wind Sun News night, when a bunch of us would work from 8 or 9 p.m. until around 2 a.m., and occasionally later. Normally, Lynn would be there, but her friend Pam convinced her to go out to dinner with her because she “needed” to talk to Lynn about her relationship with her boyfriend. It was an effective ruse because Pam apparently DID talk to her about the beau.

Lynn came back to the office just before midnight, glum because the staff was still all around, which she assumed meant the newsletter wasn’t done. Except that it WAS done, since the other co-editor, Kevin, and I had hustled to do so, largely that afternoon. The staffers were all there to put together and celebrate Lynn’s birthday.

At some point, around 2:30-2:45 a.m. on what was by then her actual natal day, everyone had left the office except Lynn (who fell asleep on some furniture), a Vietnam vet I’ll call Paul, who was in love with Lynn and kept staring at her, and me who kept watching him. Finally c. 4 a.m., he left. I locked the door and slept on a chair or sofa.

About 7 a.m., Lynn wakes up and says, “Roger?” (It’s pitch-black in the room – no windows – so one can’t see anything). I must be half-awake & say “Yes?” We take the newsletter to the printer, go out and eat breakfast at the Plaza Dinner – not unusual – then later pick up the newsletter to distribute. Lynn was one of my best friends in college, then we lost touch for a good long while. But we’ve been in e-mail contact for the last couple of years. I always remember her birthday because it’s an arithmetic sentence: 4X14=56.

So happy birthday, Lynn, 35 years after that night still stuck in my memory.

The graphic is a blend of two different iterations of the WSN.