Using my Facebook “memories” and “activity log,” I cut-and-paste them with whatever updates, such as cheery birthday greetings sadly becoming remembrances, are necessary. Most of the above posts were repeats from previous years. Here is my April 24 entry.Īnnie Oakley joins Buffalo Bill’s Wild West (1885)

This document has only the barest of bones of the information I post. I start with my “database,” a Word Perfect document that currently runs 167 pages. Most also express astonishment over the quantity of these I post and wonder how I manage to find the time to do it. I do know that a great many people at conventions and on online tell me how much they enjoy them. I don’t recall exactly when I began posting birthdays on Facebook or when I added remembrances and historical notes. My database kept growing and growing and growing. Now I had access to many other sources as well. That exploded as I “mastered” the Internet. As CBG added new dates, I added them to my database.

Using Comic-Book Superstars and the weekly notices, I built my own “database” of birth dates. If they were living closer to me, I would have also tricked them into painting my fence. The Thompsons had a fairly inclusive notion of what constituted a professional, but what interested me most about the book was.you guessed it.that the listings included birth dates.ĭoing my best Tom Sawyer impression, I suggested to Don and Maggie that they start running birthday information in every weekly issue of Comics Buyer’s Guide. Comics Buyer’s Guide editors Don and Maggie Thompson published Comic-Book Superstars, a hardcover book listing the names, contact information and resumes of comics professionals who’d filled out forms handed out at conventions. Also, no longer being on staff at DC or Marvel, my access to addresses was curtailed.įlash forward to 1993. I had to stop doing it because money was tight. I continued this practice for a time when I moved back to my home town of Cleveland. Of course, back then, you could buy a decent card for under a buck and mail it for thirteen cents.

Several of them wrote me back saying it was the first time they had received birthday cards from a writer or, for that matter, anyone else working at Marvel. Shortly thereafter, I began sending birthday cards to those Marvels artists and such with whom I had worked.

How To Be Everywhere by Warren Craghead