Monday, January 14th, 1974

Well, I did get back to the Ohio Book Store today and I picked up two more great ones! WHIZ and ALL-AMERICAN! 1948 and 1949.

Also did IT twice, though, but I'm getting over it. If it happens again I think I'll have to get rid of my mag collection.

NOTES: Readers of my 1976 Journal will recall that I never had trouble buying dirty mags. The other kids at school made fun of the fact that I was prematurely greying but I always credited that with why I was never carded at all. Not once. Ever. Ha. Ha. Ha!


Seen above are the two comics I bought this time. I love the Golden Age CAPTAIN MARVEL, arguably the closest thing to a perfect comic book series. And ALL-AMERICAN starred GREEN LANTERN, my favorite of the 1940's DC characters (as seen in the JSA revivals I had loved since '66). The issue I bought here, though, # 100, was a sign of the times in that it cover-featured the debut of cowboy JOHNNY THUNDER who would quickly take over the title as GL disappeared for about 15 years. 

Sunday, January 13th, 1974

Another boring Sunday.

I finally started reading my birthday present, THE MAKING OF STAR TREK and that's about all I ended up doing once I got into it!

NOTES: In the sixties, I only got to watch STAR TREK occasionally as, for much of its original run, it was opposite GOMER PYLE, USMC, one of my parents' favorite comedies. Sometimes I'd catch the last half of an episode. 


In the early seventies, however, the series became much more popular in syndicated reruns then it had been on the network and I managed to catch all of the episodes eventually.  As stated above, my birthday present that year (presumably from my parents) was THE MAKING OF STAR TREK, a paperback edition of the 1968 book by Gene Roddenberry and Stephen Whitfield...or at least that's what I thought at the time. It came out in time that author Stephen POE had written the book with NO contributions form Roddenberry, although Roddenberry's name went on it to give it some credibility and Gene collected all the royalties from the book.  For quite some time it was the ONLY book on STAR TREK but, I believe, by this point I had already read David Gerrold's THE WORLD OF STAR TEK.

Saturday, January 12th, 1974

Today Terry and I came across a great collection of Golden Age comic books and although I could only afford a couple, they were really good ones! I may be able to make it back Monday and get a couple more before they sell out!

NOTES: I had been collecting comic books for eight years by this point but I had never actually owned a Golden Age comic book from the 1940's. The earliest comics I had to that point were late fifties monster comics from Atlas, picked up as nickel back issues in sordid little junk shops that came and went over the years. 


Today, Terry and I made one of our regular stops at Cincinnati's Ohio Book Store and they had just received a shipment of 1940's comic books. They had only recently started dealing with anything related to comics and weren't quite sure what to do with these comics. Most of them they priced between $5.00 and $15.00 in spite of condition. That was a small fortune to my mind at that time! But I had ten bucks that day so I bought two comic books. 


I wanted to get at least one comic featuring characters I had heard about but really didn't know and I wanted to get one featuring favorite characters in ways I had never seen them. So I got the two comics you see above--FIGHTING YANK, which I had only ever read about, and SENSATION COMICS featuring Wonder Woman.


The Ohio Book Store would soon begin actually calling Terry and I whenever they got new shipments of Golden Age comics in! I've learned recently that they did the same for several other collectors.

Friday, January 11th, 1974

Well, today was a nice day.The weather turned better and I made it to school. On time even.

Terry called off our deal as I expected he would.

Tomorrow I return to Cincy. Picked up some new comics tonight at Scroggins.

NOTES: Around 1969, I discovered Scroggin's Confectionary, a crowded little store about 5 blocks from the main downtown area of Covington. They had more comic books than any of the other drugstores and dimestores and supermarkets where I'd been buying them up to that point. It was run by a woman who, I'm told, had a reputation  for grouchiness and supposedly didn't like kids. She always seemed to like me, though, and at times even gave me free comic books if I didn't have enough money!


Eventually Scroggins became the regular part of my route until I started to go into Cincinnati more often. For several years it was made even better because it was directly across the street from a junk shop that tended to get the absolute best selection of older, used comics in town...for a nickel!

Thursday, January 10th, 1974

Because of the weather again, I went to school a couple hours late today but I really didn't mind much. That meant I missed gym class.

Terry and I today began a race to see who can write down the most comic book titles by Midnight Sunday! The prize is something I have just got to win!

NOTES: I was never good at gym class. It wasn't even so much that I wasn't the athletic type. It was more the motion-sickness issue. For my entire life, I would get extremely nauseated and dizzy just from looking from side to side too fast, let alone actually moving. I couldn't ride in a bus or car without some issues and amusement park rides were out of the question. Period. 


In grade school, gym class was mostly boys and girls running around or playing silly games with only the occasional actual exercises or tumbling. Organized indoor recess.  I wasn't thrilled but I had learned to compensate. Starting with seventh grade, it was now P.E.---Physical Education. Boys only, you had to wear jock straps (which I could never figure out exactly), there were real, required exercises and play to win games of dodgeball and basketball and you had to shower naked with other boys. WHAT THE FUCK!? No one had warned super-shy me about this! 


Not only that, for all three years at that school, my PE teacher was a man who had not the slightest interest in understanding how I felt about this or about my motion sickness problem and if I got injured in a dodgeball game, he seemed to think I deserved it. I got the worst grades I had ever had in his "class." Needless to say, PE was one major reason why I no longer enjoyed school as much as I had all through the elementary years.


Any excuse to miss it and I was happy. 

Wednesday, January 9th, 1974

My birthday. About the only good thing about today. Well...in many ways it was better than most days lately but in others, worse. But then, I guess all days are like this.

NOTES: Never been big on birthdays. Never had parties either. Well...that's not true. I had one when I was very little and my mother went all out for some reason when I turned 11 an we had a bunch of kids at our apartment all at the same time including Terry, Doug, Debbie and at least a half dozen more including a kid I didn't know well who was brought along by another friend. His name was Mike. 


It was a memorable party but not for any good reasons. I threw an uncharacteristic late tantrum and locked myself in the bathroom. I guess it was just all of the conflicting personalities there in the same room. And then, a few weeks afterwards, Mike, with whom I had stayed friendly since the party, had a brain aneurism and dropped dead in the stairwell at school. He was the first person close to my own age I knew to have died. The whole school attended his visitation. 


I always try to at least treat myself to something on my birthday. This year, we've saved enough money from the bills to order a pizza! At the price they are these days, that's more of a treat than it might sound!

Tuesday, January 8th, 1974

Well, tomorrow's my birthday and I'll be 15 years old! Maybe for my birthday, I'll finally get to see BOLT this next weekend along with BLACK BELT JONES! " Black Bolt Jones." Ha, ha, ha, ha!

NOTES: In the actual journal, you can see where I had started to write the second movie title first and then accidentally mixed up the two and wrote BLACK BOLT and crossed it out. Thus the joke above, " Black Bolt" being the leader of The Inhumans in Marvel comics.


15. Wow. And now, tomorrow in 2012,  53. So much hope then and so much wasted potential over the years. Ah, well...

Monday, January 7th, 1974

Although I went back to school today, the new Daylight Savings Time made it seem like nighttime!

Finally, all seems like it really is back to normal...and I'm really glad about that!

NOTES: Kinda boring so far I'll admit but it gets better. I was still learning what to write about.


Daylight Savings Time? In the middle of Winter? My friend Derek reminds me that this was the early days of the seventies Energy Crisis. On the 'Net, I find: "On January 4, 1974, President Nixon signed into law the Emergency Daylight Saving Time Energy Conservation Act of 1973. Then, beginning on January 6, 1974, implementing the Daylight Saving Time Energy Act, clocks were set ahead. On October 5, 1974, Congress amended the Act, and Standard Time returned on October 27, 1974."


They say that one is a fool not to be a liberal at 20 and similarly a fool not to be a conservative at 40. In 1973, when I was in the eighth grade, I spearheaded the school support to re-elect Nixon as President. What the hell did I know about politics?

Sunday, January 6th, 1974

No movie again today! I was so bored that I just sat around watching TV and reading all day.

Today, that feeling hit me again--that feeling of a need just to feel real affection. I hope something happens soon.

NOTES: The desire for affection that I felt so strongly here surprises me. Oddly enough, I am not an incredibly affectionate person. Never have been. Eventually  I learned to hug but overall someone touching me makes me extremely self-conscious and as far as touching someone else, I always feel even now that I'm running the risk of offending them or violating a boundary. It doesn't help that I had one friend throughout most of the past decade who jerked away and acted as though I had turned into a monster if I so much as accidentally brushed up against her while we were walking together. 


I wanted a girlfriend...more than anything in the world, I wanted a girlfriend...but even then, it seems like I was leery of the basic concept for fear of "why would anyone ever want to show affection to me?" In my mind, I saw myself as the brainy fat kid with glasses, acne and prematurely greying hair. Why would anyone want to show affection to me? Sigh...

Saturday, January 5th, 1974

Although I awoke this morning anticipating that i would finally get to see the movie I'd been wanting to see so bad, I found that i wouldn't be able to again today. I did, however, pick up quite a few good comics and a record.

Later I found out that Doug was in the hospital for appendicitis!

NOTES: Doug had been my other best friend in grade school besides Terry. I had two! We had met in fourth grade and become both pals and also--at least in my mind--rivals for the affection of my dream girl. Debbie. Debbie had moved in the sixth grade--1970--and, after a year or so, we stopped staying in touch but, as I never really had anyone to replace her with, she would remain my "ideal woman" (in spite of the fact that she was thirteen when I had last seen her) for several years more. 


In fifth and sixth grades, I walked up to Doug's house every morning and then we'd walk to school together. He lived in a church or at least an apartment connected to a church. His mother was the caretaker there. As elementary school became junior high, like so many things, our relationship changed and we grew apart. We were still friendly but we no longer saw each other as much, even in school. I still called him now and then, though, and that's probably how I found out his health issues here. I never had my appendix removed so the operation fascinated me.


The movie referred to here was, again, THAT MAN BOLT, a fun film that I wouldn't see for another 37 years! Wonder if Terry ever saw it? Since I was spending an awful lot of time hanging out on the streets of downtown Cincinnati, it was only natural I'd see a number of the blaxploitation films of the seventies since they tended to play mainly in the urban cinemas and Cincinnati still had a number of those at that time--The Albee, The Place, The Studio, The Times, The International '70, The Grand and The Skywalk!


I wish I'd bothered to note what the record was that I bought. I was still getting the hang of things with this journaling business. 

Friday, January 4th, 1974

Well, today the weather is, if anything, worse. And my cold is definitely worse! The sidewalks are still slick as glass. I'm staying home again in hopes that by Monday, this will all blow over.

I did IT again, today. Twice. I think I've solved the problem though by stapling my magazines shut!

NOTES: Those of you who followed me here from my 1976 Journal blog know that I referred to masturbation as "IT." It was a major issue in my life at the time as it felt good but made ME feel bad so I was always fighting against it! I felt the need to occasionally note it in my journal but couldn't bring myself to refer to it as anything other than..."IT."


That said, I wonder what magazine this was. HUSTLER just started later in 1974 so it wasn't that and the HUSTLER ripoffs obviously wouldn't have existed yet. I had never seen a PLAYBOY by this point. Hmmm....At some point I had mail-ordered some 1971 CAVALIER mags that had comics by Berni Wrightson and Vaughn Bode. Could have been those. Or maybe NATIONAL LAMPOON. Some of those issues got awfully dirty in those days and I had definitely started buying them by '74!

Thursday, January 3rd, 1974

Today the ice and freezing rain were so bad that I couldn't make it to school at all! I don't really believe this will affect my grades or anything, though. The weather got a little better for a while this afternoon but then worsened again toward evening. I just spent the day reading comic books in bed.

NOTES: As I write this in 2012, we're getting our first minor snowfall of the season. In 1974, though, I remember that this had been a massive ice storm with wind and freezing rain. Not the same at all. I doubt either of my parents went to work even though I didn't mention that in the journal. 


What you have to realize is that I lived only a couple of blocks away from the school. In those days they never, ever called off classes in my city school district due to weather (as opposed to these days when a couple of snowflakes can prompt call-offs). So we were expected to be there come monsoon or blizzard...and I usually was...but in the ice that year, I couldn't even get off my block!


I was already a major comic book collector so I immensely enjoyed the day I'm sure!

Wednesday, January 2nd, 1974

School started again today and, after the first hour or so, everything was back to normal.

I wrote a short but rather interesting sci-fi story today called MECHANISM.

Talked to my friend Terry and he says we will almost certainly make it to see THAT MAN BOLT this Saturday.

Feelings are so hard to write down. Either for fear of actually admitting them, lack of the proper words or just worrying that someone might someday find them and read them. In my case, its about all of the above.

NOTES: I had wanted to be a writer forever. Seen above is a photo of me as a small child with a typewriter my parents had gotten me when I first told them. This journal was a conscious attempt on my part to do just that--write. I had read a quote from Ray Bradbury that said a writer must write every day and I wanted to make sure i did.


I no longer have nor remember MECHANISM. I had begun writing short stories a few years earlier. The earliest I have is dated 1972 but there may have been a few earlier. I know I made my own mock comics before that but gave them to my friend Terry to read. 


Terry and I had bonded when I was in 2nd grade and he was in 3rd. It was a split class so we were both in the same room and we were both the nerds, the geeks. We remained friends for about 15 years and then didn't see or hear from each other until Facebook nearly 3 decades later!


We never did get to see THAT MAN BOLT that weekend. In fact, I finally saw it just about a month ago! It's a pretty good, fairly big budget film with Fred Williamson as a James Bond-type. 

Tuesday, January 1st, 1974

Midnight! It's 1974 now! Happy New Year to me!

I'd like to say right now, right in the beginning here, that my one and only resolution is to do better this year than last. Not to make the same mistakes. To gain greater will power and to control my personality traits more.

As the year progresses, I hope it's exciting so that this book is not left entirely empty.

(LATER:) Today itself isn't all that interesting. I've just been putting away all the remainders of the holidays and preparing to return to normal mode tomorrow morning.

I had a dream last night and in it I hugged a girl! It was wonderful! That's what I need--affection! I know others who get it and I feel like I deserve it, too. Maybe this year...but I doubt it.

NOTES FROM 2012: As 1974 began, I was 14 years old and in the 9th grade at Covington Junior High School in Covington, Kentucky. It was the same school I had attended all my life. After I finished sixth grade, they rebuilt the school into a junior high with 7th, 8th and 9th grades and renamed it. 


Other than the building itself, however, I had been quite traumatized by the switch from elementary school to what they now call middle school. There was no one thing. It was everything! The new teachers, more bullies, so many new students, the showering in gym class, the sex education classes! I had gone from enjoying school to hating it almost overnight and I hated it throughout 7th and 8th grade. In 9th grade, where we find me as 1974 begins, things had eased up quite a bit (or I had finally gotten used to them) and I was slowly sorta-kinda starting to enjoy myself again. 


I lived with both parents in a huge apartment we had moved into when I was 6 and where I would end up staying until I was 32. I had collected comic books since I was 7 years old and I was very much the budding film buff. I loved television and ever since I had seen THE DICK VAN DYKE SHOW as a kid, I had wanted to be a writer. 


I guess that's why I decided to try my hand at a journal. 


I'm not reading too far ahead in the Journal, though. I want it to come as a surprise to me as we go along, just like it did then. Check back tomorrow when I return to school after the holiday break. 

***Where I Lived in 1974***

This was where I lived in 1966, 1976, 1986 and up through part of 1992. Our apartment was the one you can see lower left. This is the back side of the apartment house. We lived in the biggest apartment and it was the only one that went all the way through from front to back. 


The smaller building partly seen here is the Social Security Office which was literally in our back yard. It was owned by the same people who owned our building and ultimately would become special to me for several widely different reasons. 


The building still looks roughly the same and in recent years I took, on separate occasions, my wife, my son and my friend Brittany down there to be photographed out front the same way my mother photographed me so often as a kid. 

Introduction or Who Says You Can't Go Back in Time?

 In December of 2010, I came across a box with a couple of journals I had kept in high school in the 1970’s. I thought it might be interesting to read them and see how far I’d come.

But I hadn’t really. I’m a blogger. I have multiple blogs and I write about movies and TV shows and celebrities and comic books and cartoons. And that’s exactly what I was writing about in my journals way back in the mid-seventies! Once a geek, always a geek, I guess. My 1976 journal read like a 1976 blog by me might have read.

So I thought…why not? Make it an actual blog. My Net friends all said it was a lame idea. Even though I started work on it in mid-December, I nearly dropped the whole idea right at the last minute. But I didn’t. A GEEK’S JOURNAL 1976 went up on January 1st of 2011 and ran daily through December 31^st…just like my journal.

And here’s the thing. People related. People from literally all over the globe related to poor, lonely, geeky seventeen year old ME! AOL spotlighted the blog early on. BOING-BOING recommended it in mid-year. It was written up in a UK computer magazine, the local newspapers and reviewed on dozens of blogs in many different languages.

And outside of the inevitable few snarky comments, people all over the world somehow really did relate! I was flabbergasted!

For me, revisiting my earlier self with his hormonal issues and pop culture obsessions was educational but more to the point was learning that I really had NOT been as alone as I thought I was.

As the year came to a conclusion, the question came up---“What next?” I didn’t keep a journal in 1977. The only other journal I had was actually from earlier—my very first journal from when I was in the ninth grade.  So I asked on Facebook. Would anyone be interested in more of the same as a prequel? The answer was a resounding YES with much more enthusiasm than I could have expected!

So now, starting tomorrow, we return to those halcyon, pre-disco days of 1974, when I was 15 and even more awkward!  Thanks for all of your support. I hope you won’t be disappointed as tomorrow we once again time travel back to revisit unsuspecting teenage me!