Today we are thrilled to have Wayne Greenough author of a few books coming soon to Musa Publishing and the Euterpe imprint.
My parents were very brave. They had a radio and a son at the same time. I was born in 1932. The Lone Ranger arrived on radio station WXYZ in 1933. I may have been five before I started listening to that greatest of all Texas Rangers. In February I will be eighty. I have Lone Ranger pictures on my den’s wall, a mask, a holstered toy gun, and a Texas Ranger badge.
The radio grabbed me and still has me. I have several thousand Lone Ranger radio programs, and 15,000 other type radio programs
I entered the comic book collecting world late due to various things getting in my way. School, the navy and college were serious deterrents that almost unhooked me from my radio and comic book craze. Ah, but fate intervened. As a schoolteacher I saw an ad, Seventy two comics for $5-00. How could I resist? You guessed it. I was once again hooked, and this time for life. Whoopee!
One day at a store I was bellying up to the cash register with a fistful of comics books in my sweating right hand when one of my students said, “Hello Mr. Greenough.” Said student was with his parents. They had a very funny conversation about how I was buying the comic books for myself. To this day I love that moment.
As a schoolteacher I read children stories to my classes every school day. I love children’s books. I read more of them than adult books. Obviously ‘Champion of Justice and Freedom,’ were born in my class. But I didn’t know that.
If I may digress back to my college days when two days of entrance exams informed the college professors I was a Chimpanzee. Surprisingly I did score high in literary. Did my comic book reading do that? As I progressed through college I began to write and collect my three hundred reject slips by writing adult stories. Fifty years later I started to do what I should have been doing all along, writing children’s books.
As a final note comic book collecting should never be considered kid stuff. The last I heard about the first issue of Superman in mint condition it sold for $1,500,000. As this was maybe a year ago I imagine it could now go for Two million. Not bad for a ten cent comic book. Yes, as a six year old I probably had a copy. You can’t win them all.
Wayne
Get to know Wayne at his website http://www.waynegreenough.com
3 comments:
Wayne, I love your reminiscences about the old radio programs and comics. You might enjoy reading Cornell DeVille's Lost in the Bayou, which is influenced by The Lone Ranger. And I wish I had any of that stuff from my childhood, too--people pay for those things nowadays!
I'm just now finding time to browse through here and read some of the comments. Thoroughly enjoy the trip down memory lane. I never was into comic books much, but my brother was an avid fan. He used to allow me to read them over his shoulder if I 'tickled' his back with my fingernails while I read. But he wouldn't wait for me to finish the page, so I learned to read fast!
Lone Ranger, huh? I know Cornell Deville's book has a nasty villain with comic book attributes who is obsessed with the masked man.
High-Ho Silver and away! Yeah - great times! Good post Wayne!
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