Monthly Archives: June 2016

• The Senate should have voted down 12 more tepid gun control bills today. That would save time after the next three mass shootings.

When I was a lad, we sometimes got our bread and pastries from one of the yellow trucks that cruised the streets of Southern California back then. The following remembrance I wrote about Helms Trucks is cribbed from our sister site, Old L.A. Restaurants…

The Helms Bakery Building still stands on Venice Boulevard with much of its signage still intact…but inside, they bake no bread or cinnamon buns. It's a furniture mart in there now but once upon a time beginning when Paul Helms founded the business in 1931, they made bread and sugar cookies and rolls and cupcakes and all the things that great bakeries bake. Then nice men would load them into their Helms Bakery Trucks and drive about surrounding neighborhoods, selling them to housewives and kids.

If you wanted the Helms Man to stop at your residence, you had to, first of all, put the Helms placard up in your front window…although a good Helms Man knew his territory, knew that certain homes expected him whether they had the sign up or not. He'd pull up in front and blow his distinctive whistle and you'd scurry out to his truck and buy stuff. Inside the truck, he had drawers full of cookies and donuts and rolls and I think they even carried milk and butter, though at somewhat higher prices than the nearby Safeway Market.

When I was very young, you could often find me waiting outside our home for the Helms Man. We had a rough idea of when he'd get to our street and I'd go play out front, keeping an eye out for the guy. When he approached, it was very exciting and I'd run in and get my mother. She'd buy a loaf of bread and maybe some rolls and always at least a cookie for me. Actually, the first thing our Helms Man would do when we stepped up inside his truck to make our purchases was to hand me a free cookie, usually one of their terrific sugar cookies.

Once, I got to go inside the plant thanks to an L.A. City School District program of field trips. We all piled into buses which drove us over to Culver City for a tour. Upon arrival, we were marched through the place and shown how the bread was baked, how the cookies were mixed and formed on large conveyor belts…and you couldn't help but love how great it smelled in there. The aroma was heavenly and a whole lot better than the tuna cannery or the dairy we toured on other field trips. On the way out, each student received a small loaf of bread and a little cardboard Helms Truck.

I'm not sure why the business model was as successful for as long as it was. As mentioned, the prices on the Helms Truck were always somewhat higher than buying roughly the same things at a Safeway or Von's, and you'd have to go to one of those markets anyway to get the other things you needed. Why not get your bread and cookies at Von's while you were there and save a few bucks? Whatever the reason was to opt for the trucks, it seems to have faded out by the late sixties. Maybe there were fewer mothers staying at home all day or something. Maybe the quality of baked goods at the markets had improved. Whatever the cause, the whole operation shut down in 1969 and I still remember the day its trucks made their last, melancholy rounds. There was a real sense of loss when our Helms Man drove off, having sold us our rolls and sugar cookies for the last time.

The big building on Venice Boulevard sat vacant for a few years and rumors abounded as to what would become of it. In 1972, it was acquired by a real estate firm that soon began its transformation into a complex of furniture dealers…and even a little jazz club called The Jazz Bakery. Happily, as noted, they kept a lot of the old Helms Bakery decor intact and sometimes when you drive past it, you can almost imagine you're smelling the sugar cookies, fresh out of those huge ovens.

So why am I telling you all this here? Because today's video link is a short song about these wonderful trucks and their friendly drivers. It's from L.A. Now and Then, that musical revue that I told you about here. And by the way, a CD of the show has now been released and you can order one here. It's full of perky tunes like this one…

Quite prematurely I think, a lot of folks are assuming Democrats will win the White House and the Senate this year…but what about the House? Could all of Congress flip from red to blue? David Wasserman explains what it would take. SPOILER ALERT: He doesn't think it's likely.

Hey, here's an unlikely thing: Donald Trump firing someone. In this case, it's his current campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, who must be responsible for all that has gone wrong. I mean, none of that couldn't possibly be Trump's fault, could it? Of course not.

Jonathan Chait tells us more about it and he mentions something that I hadn't heard before. In his immediate, self-serving response to the Orlando mass-killing, Trump wrongly declared that the shooter was foreign-born. It says here that that's because "staffers had accidentally uploaded the wrong version of the speech into the teleprompters" — or as I spell it, TelePrompters. That sounds like a "blame someone else" fib but I suppose it's possible.

It's interesting to me that (a) Trump has begun to sometimes use a TelePrompter for his speeches instead of rattling off whatever silly thing pops into his mind and (b) it hasn't helped. He's still saying stupid, factually-incorrect things.

Remember when one of the umpteen insults that Obama detractors were hurling at that man was that he uses a TelePrompter? The people who don't like Obama will still say absolutely anything negative about him that comes to mind. He was born in Kenya, he's a Nazi, he's a fascist, he's gay, his kids are adopted, he's a puppet of William Ayers, etc. "He uses a TelePrompter" was how some of them said he really wasn't intelligent. Never mind that he did fine in debates and press conferences without one, he was incapable of uttering a semi-coherent sentence without reading what someone else had written for him.

This was uttered by people who fervently supported and voted for other politicians who often used TelePrompters and/or read speeches written by others. It wouldn't surprise me if some of the charges that Obama was so stupid he needed a TelePrompter were read off TelePrompters. And now here's Donald Trump employing one and none of the folks who thought that proved Obama was kinda dumb for using one thinks that of Donald.

Anyway, I am mystified why Trump is running such a weak, underfunded campaign. You don't have to be an experienced politician to know that you have to at least come close to matching the efforts of your opponent. There are wealthy Trump donors, even if he doesn't have as many as he'd like. So what's the deal here? Saving it all for the Big Finish?

One of the most-read articles on this site is the piece I wrote about the late, looney Rod Hull. Most of it is about me being on the set of The Tonight Showin 1983 when Rod made his first appearance with Johnny Carson. He was the second guest. The first was Richard Pryor, making his first public appearance following the accident (?) in which he suffered severe burns over most of his body.

Note to Self: Later this week, let readers of this blog know that that episode is airing Monday evening, June 27, on Antenna TV.

One of my reservations about Hillary Clinton as president is that I keep hearing she's too hawkish and likely to get us into ill-advised wars. Fred Kaplan gives us a pretty wide look at her past actions and inactions relating to defense. It makes me feel a bit better though I don't think I'll ever be totally comfy with anyone who supported the invasion of Iraq…even if Bush did pull a fast one and turn one kind of authorization into another.

Hey, my sometimes-employers Sid and Marty Krofft have brought forth a new version of their 1973 hit TV series, Sigmund and the Sea Monsters,and it's pretty good and not at all unfaithful to the original! I just watched the first episode for free on Amazon Prime and I think it's available elsewhere.

If you fondly remember the original show, give it a look. There's even a cameo appearance by the show's original human star, Johnny Whitaker. And if you fondly remember the original show and have kids, get them to watch with you do they can fondly remember this one. And if you don't remember the original show or are too young to have watched it, watch anyway. I think that covers everyone.

It's Father's Day so here's a rerun of what I posted here on Father's Day, three years ago. This was the first in a series that I hope you enjoyed reading because I very much enjoyed writing it…

I've been posting stories here for some months now about my mother. It's Father's Day so I've decided to write about my father.

My father, as I've mentioned here many times, worked for the Internal Revenue Service. It was a lousy job he took on a "just for now" basis while he looked for something better to do…and he wound up staying with the I.R.S. until he retired. He simply did not have any particular skill that would have allowed him to pursue any of his fantasies: Opera singer, baseball player, newspaper reporter or comedy writer. He was about as proud as a human being could be that I wound up realizing one of his dreams.

And he'd never pushed me in that direction, not one bit. Matter of fact, he tried several times to warn me away from the profession for two reasons. One was that the one time he'd made a serious attempt at it, things had not gone well. This was back in Hartford in the early forties, not long after the military had rejected him for most of the same reasons he never became a baseball player. He had a friend who had an "in" to someone at a local radio station. My father and the friend wrote up several pages of comedy material, took it to the guy at the radio station…and received a devastating turndown. It was so insensitive and heartbreaking, he said, that he never tried again. Many a time, he cautioned me how writing could break your heart.

So that was one reason he was wary of me doing what I've now been doing for 44 years. Another was that as a Revenue Officer, every professional writer he ever met was in deep financial trouble. This included some "name" authors and prolific screenwriters you'd think would have had a buck or two. That they rarely did made him worry when I went that route. It was important to him that I do something I loved but being a Depression-era kid, it was also important to him that I be able to make a real living at it.

He had a little trouble with the way I was paid in my profession: Nothing for weeks and then a big check, then nothing or a month or three. It didn't bother me but it bothered him. After I moved out of the family home and into my own apartment, he'd come by to visit me once or twice a week — he was joyously retired from the I.R.S. by then — and he'd say, trying to be casual about it, "So…any checks lately?" That was his way of saying, "Please…reassure me you're doing okay." That was especially important any week in which my name didn't appear onscreen on a TV show.

He died when I was 39 and right to the end, he was a world-class worrier. He worried about the oddest, most unlikely things — and never about himself; only about other people. If I was due at the house around 5 PM, he'd start worrying at 5:02 that maybe I'd been in a terrible auto accident. Once, I walked in at 5 on the dot and he said, "Oh, thank God. I was worried you'd had an accident or something." I pointed out that I was right on time. He said, "I know. But I had the feeling you were going to be early."

Usually, people like that tend to shout a lot and lose their tempers. Not my father. He almost never got at mad at me or anyone. He just plain didn't see the point of it. When I was in my early teens, I had a best friend named Rick. When I went over to Rick's house for the day, I would literally hear Rick's father yell at him more than I heard my own father yell at me in those 39 years. I could probably list every time he raised his voice at me during those 39 years in about three Twitter messages.

I'll tell you one story right now. At what was for him enormous expense, my father arranged for me to get braces when I was thirteen. The orthodontist was a colorful man named Dr. Nathan M. Seltzer who was based in Beverly Hills and who did a lot of work on kids who went into show business. You've seen many a Dr. Seltzer smile on TV and movie stars who are roughly my age. At one point, I was supposed to wear this ghastly retainer at night — a terrible contraption that Josef Mengele would have condemned as cruel and unusual punishment. If Dick Cheney had known of these, he would have done away with Waterboarding and threatened prisoners with Dr. Seltzer Night Retainers. And believe me, those guys wouldn't have just talked. They'd have yodeled.

One morning, I awoke with bleeding gums. My mother and I phoned Dr. Seltzer and he said, "Stop wearing it until your appointment next week and I'll adjust it." So I didn't wear it the next night. Somehow, we neglected to tell my father about this.

The next morning, he casually asked me if wearing the retainer had interfered with my sleep last night. I told him I hadn't worn it — and before I could tell him why, he exploded. He was paying a lot of money for that orthodonture and I damn well was going to wear it. I don't think I ever saw him as furious as he was at that moment and it was a long time before I could get a word in, not even edgewise but between his sentences, to tell him about what Doc Seltzer had said. When I did, he said he didn't believe me. He was even angrier at me for concocting such a feeble lie. Then he stormed out of the house to go pick up my mother at the market. Shortly after that, Rick arrived.

Thirty minutes later, Rick and I were playing croquet in the backyard when my father came out of the house in tears, hugged me and apologized about eighty times. My mother had told him what Dr. Seltzer had said. I was crying, too…and I remember thinking it was embarrassing that Rick was seeing my father and me crying. But as my father headed back into the house and I turned towards Rick, I saw that he was crying more than either of us. I asked him why. He said, "My father isn't always right but he would kill himself before he'd apologize to me for anything."

I'd seen Rick's father in action and he was right. It was one of those moments when I realized how very special my father was.

Another came a few years later. It was my father's unfortunate job to go to people who were seriously in arrears in their taxes and say, "We need to negotiate a payment schedule." He hated it. No, that's not strong enough. He hated, hated, hated it. He especially hated it when the people were desperate and in trouble.

Not all were. Some of them were very rich guys who just felt it was beneath them to pay taxes. When my father called on one, he'd walk into a mansion in Bel Air or Beverly Hills. Most of them had on their walls one or more framed photos of themselves with Ronald Reagan and/or Richard Nixon.

My father knew what that meant. These guys would never pay their taxes in full and probably not at all. He'd be lucky to get five cents on the dollar out of them. And he'd be real lucky if his boss didn't call him in and say, "We got a complaint from someone in Washington about you harassing this fine, patriotic gentleman." My father was about as menacing as Wally Cox with a broken fly swatter. In the meantime, the boss would order him to get every cent plus penalties out of the poor woman in Venice whose husband had never paid their joint taxes, then had deserted her and the six kids she now couldn't afford to feed.

The woman in Venice was a real person. My father came home pale from the afternoon he called on her. She owed more money than she could ever possibly come up with and since she was not a Reagan donor, she was expected to actually pay it. She had six kids who were all running around her little dilapidated home barefoot.

My father had a thing about "barefoot." No matter who the person was, if they didn't have shoes on and weren't on the beach or en route to a swimming pool, he felt sorry for them. It was from his upbringing, I guess, that he associated shoelessness with stark, life-threatening poverty. After I was six or seven years old, I was discouraged from it.

We used to get a lot of these mailings that asked us to "adopt" an orphaned child in some third world country — one of those deals where you send the kid five bucks and he can somehow eat for nine months. They would include what looked like trading cards of these impoverished children and ask you to select one or two and send money for them. My father would always send money for any child who was barefoot. If a kid had shoes on or if the photo didn't show his or her feet, no bucks…but he was very generous with the others.

He asked the woman in Venice why the kids who were old enough to be in school weren't there. She had a chilling answer: "The school won't let them attend without shoes and I can't afford to buy shoes for them." This was the person my father had been ordered to get thousands of dollars out of.

For days after his first meeting with the woman, my father was haunted by the image of those kids scurrying about sans footwear, unable to go to school and better themselves. Finally, one night about 3 AM, he woke my mother up and said, "I need to do something I probably shouldn't do but I have to do it." My mother knew what he was thinking and she said, "Do what you have to do," kissed him and rolled over and went back to sleep.

The next day, my father went to a Stride-Rite shoe store in Santa Monica and made arrangements with the manager. The woman would bring in the six kids and he would pay for one pair of shoes for each. Children's shoes cost a lot of money and working for the I.R.S. didn't pay well so it was a big, significant expenditure…but he had to do it. I think that year we didn't go on summer vacation because of it but I sure didn't mind. I did ask if I could somehow get the free March of Comics comic books that Stride-Rite gave out when you purchased shoes at their stores.

He also went to bat for the woman with his superiors, finally getting them to settle her case for considerably less than the full amount. She was so grateful for that and for the shoes, she found out who my father's boss was and wrote him a letter, praising Bernie Evanier for his kindness. She meant well by it but my father was scolded. People were supposed to be afraid of an I.R.S. man, he was reminded. They were not supposed to think he'd tear up most of their bill and buy their kids shoes. Not unless they were a pal of Nixon's, at least.

He was still glad he'd done it. He did things like that all his life, often anonymously. I think I need to write more about my father here…and not so much for your benefit as for mine.

Nate Silver just posted a bunch of tweets which collectively say…

In state-by-state polls, Trump is considerably underperforming Romney 2012 in red states; he's similar to Romney in blue & purple states. This has several implications, one of which is that national polls may *slightly* overstate his troubles. We need more purple state polls. On the flip side, if the election were to turn into a rout, there aren't very many totally safe red states, and Clinton could get 400+ EV.

Obviously, this is not good news for Trump. I mean, equaling Romney's performance still means you lose by a pretty wide margin. Underperforming is even worse.

Obviously too, we're 141 days from the election, the presumptive candidates are still presumptive, they don't even have running mates yet, the debates haven't happened, yadda yadda yadda. I still think we have some scandals as yet unknown to the public and that you can count on both Clinton and Trump saying and doing some really, really stupid things.

So why does current polling matter? Well obviously, this makes it harder for Trump to get certain donors and endorsement and supporters. Other candidates have come from behind to win but other candidates didn't have his disapproval ratings. Hillary has whopping disapproval numbers too but hers don't seem to be hurting her too much.

More significantly: Trump's primary appeal, such as it is, is that he's sold himself as a "winner," as a guy who always triumphs. It's hard to make that work when your opponent has a double-digit lead on you and there's a real possibility that you'll lose states that have traditionally gone for your party.

At the same time, one of the bigger arguments for Bernie Sanders was that he could beat Donald Trump but Hillary Clinton could not. That's also a hard argument to make at the moment.

I'm about 97% certain the Hillary/Donald contest will change in the coming months…then change again and again and again. I will get more "talk me off the window ledge" calls from friends who are panicked that Donald Trump will be the next President of the United States. But I'm happy to not be getting them now.

Hey, do you know about this Ticketmaster thing? As I understand it, Ticketmaster got sued for various shenanigans relating to overcharging ticket buyers and as part of the settlement, they're giving away millions of dollars in free tickets and discounts to upcoming shows.

What upcoming shows? Well, there don't seem to be any yet but if you have vouchers waiting for you, you need to keep watching this page to see if and when there are any.

How do you know if you have vouchers? Well, if you bought tickets via Ticketmaster between October 21st, 1999 and February 27th, 2013, you probably do. Since you may not have the same e-mail address now than you had when some of those purchases were made, the Ticketmaster people may not find you. If you have an account with them, go there and log in. On the "Your Account" page, there's an option that reads "Active Vouchers." That will show you how many free shows and/or show discounts they owe you.

I have about eighteen vouchers there, each of which should in theory enable me to obtain a pair of free tickets for some show or concert between now and June 18, 2020, though that date may be extended for up to two years. I am not anticipating that they'll offer me eighteen events I wish to attend. I'll be surprised if I get a free Punch & Judy Show out of the deal.

Ann Morgan Guilbert is best remembered for playing neighbor Millie Helper on The Dick Van Dyke Show. She was very good on that show. Everyone was very good on that show, which may well be my favorite ever.

She passed away last Tuesday at the age of 87 and a lot of folks wrote me to note that I had not posted anything about her. No slight was intended. I just never met the lady and couldn't think of anything to write beyond the obvious.

Someone who did know her very well did post about her on the 'net, however. Dick Van Dyke chose a sketch from his first TV special, which was in 1966, and had our friend Stu Shostak post it online. Dick then wrote the following about her…

The world is full of comedians, but there has always been a scarcity of what they used to call "straight men." Those second bananas with talent, timing and experience to make it work, without them we're nothing. For five years, I watched Ann Morgan Guilbert be the backbone of scenes that literally wouldn't have worked without her.

I played "The World's Oldest Magician" with Annie as my doddering assistant in a special. The sketch was supposed to be eight minutes long, it lasted for fourteen!! Unexpected things happened and she went right with me at every turn. She never stopped honing her skills and could break your heart in a dramatic role. She was also sweet and kind. I was thankful I was one who was lucky enough to know her.

Hey, I've been playing around with the GoPro Hero4 Silver video camera — one of these. It's a great little camera but I'd like to minimize the "fisheye" look it gives to people when you shoot them close up…like in the same zip code.

I find conflicting advice on the Internet. Does anyone reading this know the camera well enough to advise me? I know there are programs for the MAC that can correct the imagery but I'm a Windows kinda guy.

What you're looking at here is Part 12 in my series of articles advising writers who ain't sold their stuff how to maybe sell their stuff. Part 1 can be read here, Part 2 can be read here, Part 3 can be read here, Part 4 can be read here, Part 5 can be read here, Part 6 can be read here, Part 7 can be read here, Part 8 can be read here, Part 9 can be read here, Part 10 can be read here and Part 11 can be read here. Part 12 starts right now.

---

This time out, I have a piece of advice that's mainly for writers who are just starting out and who've sold little or nothing, though there are those of us who've been around for a while who could stand to remember it. It's advice which may be very, very hard to follow — the kind where your brain may tell you it makes good sense but you still may not be able to resist doing what your brain tells you what not to do.

The thing you shouldn't do is rush to brag.

In writing, a certain amount of self-promotion is sometimes necessary but a little humility can also go a long way. Obviously, I'm talking about selling your work or getting people to hire you but it's also sound advice with regard to protecting your mindset and keeping things in perspective.

I have two stories to tell here. The first is from when I was just breaking into the writing of comic books — or at least I thought I was. None of this led to me getting a professional sale or assignment but I think you'll see that I had good cause at the time to think it was happening.

Around 1968 when I was 16 years of age, I was the president of the local comic book club and I was also published a lot in comic book letter columns. I was living (as I always have) in Los Angeles and though I loved comic books, I had no strong notion of ever working in that field. Every interview I'd read about the business said you had to live in or around New York to do that. That was where DC and Marvel and all the major publishers were and the editors there didn't work with writers who couldn't show up at the offices there.

That wasn't exactly true. They were a wee bit more open than they said to working with writers by mail and there was actually a major comic book company in Los Angeles. Western Publishing Company had its Gold Key comics line and half of their books — mostly the ones with the Disney characters, the Warner Brothers characters and a few others including Tarzan — were edited out of an office in Hollywood. By 1972, I'd be steadily employed by that office but in '68, even though I knew they were local, that possibility somehow didn't occur to me.

I had resigned myself to not writing comic books when I suddenly had three invites to submit to East Coast publishers. Mort Weisinger, who edited the Superman titles for DC, wrote in reply to one of my letters and suggested I try my hand at writing for him. Something in one of those letters (I have no idea what) had made him think I might have the necessary skills.

Not long after, I received a similar offer from another DC editor, Jack Miller, who was editing romance comics and The Inferior Five and Strange Adventures, and who had just taken over Metal Men. Then Dick Giordano, who was the editor-in-chief at Charlton Comics said he'd be open to any ghost-type stories I sent him for his books.

So I wrote and sent Weisinger a Jimmy Olsen script which he immediately rejected. I was actually startled by how quickly it was back in my mailbox — sooner than I'd thought the U.S. Postal Service could physically transport it there and back.

It was a flat-out rejection but a person I assumed to be Mr. Weisinger had jotted down remarks on its pages and they were very wise and very educational. I may have learned more from those brief comments than I learned from any writing teacher I ever had. As I will explain in a few paragraphs, I later had cause to question if Mr. Weisinger himself had authored those notes.

Was this script that bad? Yes, I'm afraid it was. A few years back, I came across my manuscript and forced myself to re-read it — and believe me, that was not easy and not pleasant. By page five, I must have looked like Edvard Munch's painting of "The Scream." Just awful…far worse than I could have imagined.

Weisinger was so right to reject it and I cannot comprehend why on God's Earth he encouraged me to submit more. That script should have caused him to write back and say, "Please stop sending scripts and while you're at it, don't read any more of our comics. I don't want to run the risk that you'll be inspired to submit something else."

But he didn't say that so I sent a few more ideas and outlines and within about three months, I'd written a short Krypto tale for the rear of the Superboy comic and Mr. Weisinger liked it. He wrote to say he had some "minor notes" for rewrites and he'd send them to me as soon as he returned from his vacation. His letter said, "If you can't fix the problems, I can do it here so you basically have your first sale. Congratulations."

I never would have believed it. And I never heard back from Mort Weisinger about it.

Soon after, he passed the editorship of Superboy over to another editor at the firm who did not want Krypto back-up stories and who was notorious, I later learned, for never buying anything from writers who had not made a substantial number of sales to other editors first. Then not long after, Mort Weisinger left the company. But come to think of it: Though he never wrote me again about my script, I did have one more contact with the man.

In 1970, I happened to be paying my first-ever visit to the DC offices the same day Weisinger was paying one of his last. We were introduced, we shook hands and I chatted with him briefly, all the time savoring the irony. He was getting out just as I was getting in.

The person there that day who introduced me to Mr. Weisinger was Nelson Bridwell, who had been Weisinger's assistant back when I was submitting. I related the whole tale to Nelson later and he vaguely recalled the Krypto script, saying "If Mort had bought it, you would have been the last 'new' writer he ever hired." Nelson did not recall my Jimmy Olsen script but he said he, not Mort, probably wrote the comments on it. I got to know Nelson well enough to believe that was so.

My relationship with Jack Miller had almost the same denouement. We had a brief but furious correspondence and soon, he had me developing stories for Metal Men. He told me in one letter that he was going to assign me — meaning yes, I would be paid — to do a script for it. He was waiting, he explained, for some writer and artist juggling within the office to settle down so he'd be authorized to buy scripts for that book.

I never heard from him again, either. He was soon juggled right out of the company, not by choice.

In the meantime, I wrote a script intended for The Many Ghosts of Dr. Graves, one of the books Dick Giordano edited. Dick wrote back to say he liked it and would have accepted it on the spot with no changes but he'd just been hit with a temporary "buying freeze" at the company. He'd bought too many scripts lately or committed to too many writers and had to wait a month or two before purchasing any more.

He asked if it was okay if he held onto my script until he was allowed to buy it. I wrote back to tell him that was fine with me. A few weeks passed and then he wrote me again to tell me he was leaving Charlton but he would pass my script on to his successor and urge him to buy it and get me going on others.

It's been 46 years now and I have yet to hear from that successor. To be fair, I'll give him 'til 50 — but not a decade longer. Then that's it. No more of this Patient Writer crap.

Three opportunities, three strikes…but I think you can see why for a few months there, I was sure I was on the verge of becoming a professional writer of comic books. And being 16 years of age, I think you can sense why I made the mistake of anticipating reality a bit and telling the guys at the comic book club that I was about to be writing for Superboy and Metal Men and Charlton. It wasn't exactly a lie…just a slight advancement on the truth. Later, when that truth turned out not to be true, I was sorry I'd told them.

It wasn't just that some of them thought I'd been lying, though there was that. There were also those moments when someone would innocently ask, as they did for months after, "Hey, when is that Superboy you wrote coming out?" There was no way to explain to them why it wasn't coming out without feeling naïve and a little foolish and maybe that they didn't believe me.

I did feel naïve and foolish, like I'd kind of deceived myself. That's never a good feeling. Career management requires a very clear, honest understanding of where you are at any given moment. Turned out, I wasn't where I thought I was. As I have since learned — and have tried to impart in previous editions of this column — sometimes, projects don't happen for reasons that have nothing to do with you. I didn't do anything wrong in any of those three incidents except get my hopes up too high and too soon and to tell others.

Breaking into professional writing is a very personal matter which can involve a lot of emotion and self-doubt and self-discovery and self-everything. You only ratchet up the emotion and make it more difficult for yourself when you try to do it in public, perhaps feeling you have to prove something to others. It would have been so much easier if I'd kept it all to myself until my first sale was not only made but published; so much easier if I'd resisted the temptation to boast so I might savor a bit of jealousy from others.

Here's the other anecdote that applies to this topic. In the late seventies, I was running the comic book department for Hanna-Barbera and I was hiring writers and artists to create comic book material that was published overseas. We paid about the same as DC and Marvel and we paid promptly. It was a very good operation while it lasted and we employed a lot of good people.

A fellow I knew from comic book fandom heard about what we were doing and contacted me about possible work. He wanted very badly to write comics, he said, but had struck out with the New York companies. I decided to give him a break and asked him to send me some plots for a six-page Mumbly script. You remember Mumbly.

I sent him samples of the Mumbly stories others had been writing for me and he sent back a half-dozen plots, all of them too long and convoluted to fit into six pages. Density of Information is a key factor in any kind of writing. How much space/time do you have? What kind of story can you tell at a proper pace within those limitations? I would guess that the biggest mistake made by beginning comic book writers is trying to put too much or too little plot into one story and/or too much or too little dialogue and/or action into each page or panel.

All of his submissions were plots that would have gotten claustrophobic in twenty pages. I simplified one of them way, way down and told him to turn it into a script, reminding him that the primary market for our comics was other nations…so no puns, no references to American holidays or current events, etc.

Back it came a week or so later and it was not very good. I am here using "not very good" as a euphemism for "terrible and totally unusable." And really, really amateurish.

He had followed my simplified plot but added in lots of extraneous "in" jokes that most readers wouldn't get — and which wouldn't translate for our foreign audiences. And even if this story was published somewhere in English, most readers still wouldn't get them because they were jokes and references targeted at his friends and really, really devout comic book fans. He'd put way more effort into that kind of thing than to telling a cute story about Mumbly.

Throughout, he had done something that in the world of science-fiction writing is often called "Tuckerizing," though I'm sure it exists in every genre. Tuckerizing was named for a writer named Wilson Tucker who famously inserted his friends' names into his stories. It's a generally harmless practice if your friends are named Bob Johnson or Jane Porter or Henry Delaney or even Wilson Tucker. It's obvious and distracting if your friends are named Harlow W. Feinblatt or Gustavo Jakobsovinski or Fenmore Gyllenhaal.

The Mumbly script was loaded with gratuitous references to people he knew so he could say to them, "Look! I put your name in a comic book!" The whole script was like that. He even got himself into it via a "breaking the fourth wall" joke where Mumbly mumbled "Frazzl snazzl something" and another character said, "Yes, I know this doesn't make sense but this is the writer's first script!"

I called him up and gave him the facts o' life as nicely as I could. I said something like, "Your goal here is to please your editor, which you do by pleasing the general readership. Forget about showing-off to your friends. And get yourself out of the story. It's about Mumbly, not about you."

After apologizing nine thousand times and swearing, "I got it, I got it," he did a total rewrite, removing all the references designed to amuse his pals and/or call attention to himself. It still wasn't a very good script and at this point, I decided I had to cut my losses and just rewrite it myself. I could have written six six-page Mumbly scripts in the time I'd spent trying to midwife his one.

I did pay him the full rate but made it clear that he'd had his chance and that further submissions were unwelcome. Nevertheless, he continued to bombard me with plot ideas and pitches, none of which seemed worthy of acceptance.

Three weeks after I'd cut him off, I received in the mail a copy of a fanzine. It included a "news item" he'd planted proclaiming he was the new writer of the Mumbly comic book published overseas and that his work would soon be appearing in the American Hanna-Barbera comics. I'd never told him either of those might happen. Obviously, he circulated that announcement before I'd even reacted to his first draft…and I suspect he was a lot more interested in writing that press release than he ever was in writing comic books.

If you are an aspiring writer, there is much to learn from this story. He may not have made every possible mistake but he came darned close. He later submitted elsewhere, made a few modest sales but ultimately did not have anything resembling a professional writing career.

What's the moral of this story? Well, you should be able to figure that out.

Attention, Donald Trump! Has Seth Meyers got an offer for you!

Good Grief: The Story of Peanuts is a half-hour audio documentary on Charles Schulz, Charlie Brown, Snoopy and the beloved comic strip. It was done in the year 2010 and for the next 27 days, you can hear it online over at BBC4 Radio. Thanks to George Meredith for letting me know about this so I can let you know about this.