The other day here, I mentioned that in the seventies, I — well, here. Let me quote that paragraph again…
I did, however, spend some time at both their offices. Every year or two, I'd go spend a week — once it was three weeks — back in New York and I'd hang around the DC offices or the Marvel offices where absolutely no one ever said to me, "What are you doing here? You don't work here." Most, if they noticed me at all, just presumed I did. And once in a while, I'd be asked to do something as if I was an employee and I'd do it.
So now I have about a dozen e-mails asking me what I actually did while poaching in the DC and Marvel offices. I hung around. I kept friends company and tossed out a few ideas. I read some comics that were going through the production process and in so doing, did some proofreading.
On the last day of one of my New York trips, I was up at Marvel when an issue of Unknown Worlds of Science-Fiction was being readied for the printer. This was a black-and-white magazine featuring comic book stories and text articles. A gentleman named Len Grow was in charge of whatever was being done with it and he started reading one of the articles that had been pasted-up onto page blanks. Today's that's all done on computers but back then — this was mid-seventies — the type for an article was set on sheets of glossy paper and you'd literally — like with a scissors — cut out blocks of this typeset copy and paste them in place on the page.
Mr. Grow couldn't make sense out of the article and he was under the gun to do a dozen other things on the book before a messenger would arrive to take it away for printing. Thinking I was some new employee, he handed it to me and said, "Quick! See if you can make any sense out of this." I read it over and I couldn't; not until I realized that whoever had pasted it up had pasted several paragraphs in the wrong order.
I figured out the right order and marked the text in blue pencil to indicate what should go where. Then I looked around for Len Grow so I could tell him what had to be done. But I couldn't find him and time was running out so I grabbed up an X-Acto knife, peeled the blocks of copy off the page and repasted everything in the proper order. Just as I was finishing but before I had the chance to give it a read and make sure it was right, Grow ran back in and said, "The messenger is waiting for the issue. Did you figure out what was wrong?" I told him I'd fixed it, handed him the pages and off they went.
I don't recall now which issue or article it was but I do remember that a couple months later when that issue came out, I read it carefully and was relieved to see it was really correct. I also recall wondering who Len Grow thought I was or if he was puzzled as to why I wasn't at work the next day or any day thereafter.
