Monster Memories

[Hepcat]

...as I came around the corner toward that patch of dirt, there under the swing set was my Easter Basket. How did I know it was mine you may ask, well right there, in that basket, surrounded by fake green grass and candy eggs, larger than life itself was a cellophane wrapped Aurora Creature From The Black Lagoon model. In my memory a shaft of light beamed down upon that shiny cellophane and a choir of heavenly voices sang aloud. For me, that is a moment frozen in time.

Wow! But are you implying that your sister wasn't a big fan of the Creature as well?

[Hepcat]

Perhaps the best score of my young life to that time was in the summer of 1964 on a family trip to visit my uncle and his family. I got my father to fund a purchase of a "Mad, Mad, Mad Scientist Laboratory" at the hobby shop on the north side of Seven Mile Road just west of the Southfield Expressway in Detroit!













I guess my father thought that a chemistry set must be educational...! It was a fabulous piece. My two best buddies were more than eager to be my demented half-brained lab assistants and enthusiastically fetched tapwater for me while I mixed up the concoctions.

Unfortunately, I think my father gave it away to the snot nosed kid down the street when I went off to boarding school in Kennebunkport, Maine for ninth grade. Very sad. I've been looking for another one ever since. It's my holy grail item.

[Hepcat]

One of my fondest monster memories was back in about 66.' I bought a combination of of Famous Monsters, Creepy and Eerie magazines for a quarter from my sister's friend, about 20 total and I remember to this day the weather.  It was overcast and the wind was picking up as I was walking home with these treasures.  We lived in a Leave it to Beaver neighborhood and the wind going through the trees really set the mood while I was walking home.

Twenty for a quarter? Great score! And thanks to mother nature for helping to set the mood.

[neonnoodle]

Yes, around 1980, to my attention comes the comic book store a couple of miles away from home, with comic book characters painted all over the outside.  I wonder to this day who painted them.  It is surprising to find that it is not just a comic book store but something much more magical and mysterious.  Inside are various comics in boxes, marvelously disorganized and begging to be thumbed through.  There are old bookshelves with older paperback books--here's Horror Times Ten, and Curt Siodmak's Skyport.  In the magazine section, after a little searching, I find one of the first issues of Eerie and some other Warrens.  The Eerie looks like a real find, and I am started that the guy behind the counter wants a dollar for it--even in those days, a great price.  There's a glass case near the cash register with treasures inside, including an old Castle Films Son of Frankenstein Super-8 film, beckoning.

The comic book store does not stay there forever.  Today, the building is there but now they sell air conditioners.

[Howler]

When I was in first grade I went as the Creature from the Black Lagoon for Halloween. I loved that costume. I really stood out from the other kids because they were dressed up as happier things. Not me though. Though Wolfman is now my favorite Universal Monster, Creature was my first favorite. In 2002 at the first Flashback Weekend Horror convention I met Ben Chapman. He was such a nice guy....and really tall! It was such an honor to my one of my childhood heroes.

[neonnoodle]

I just love reading all these great memories!  Every one a special gem.

[RICKH]

Where do you start? Playing with my Palmer monsters in the backyard.  Having my brother assemble and my mother paint my Aurora Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Wolfman models...then staring at them for hours.  Seeing Lugosi's Dracula for the first time when I visited my cousin in northern Mississippi and seeing Memphis horror host Sivad (he scared the crap out of me!).  Getting an electric thrill when I went to the newstand in Fulton, KY and saw the latest issue of FM and the Horror of Dracula/Curse of Frankenstein filmbook.  That filmbook gave me hours of chills looking at those b&w stills of the movies.  Sitting in front of the television in the living room watching The Thing and jumping out of my skin when James Arness jumped out of the doorway at the humans!  Watching Invisible Invaders and wondering if they might animate the bodies in the cemetery down the road.  I waited and watched with my loaded bb gun.  Wearing my Ben Cooper Dracula costume to the school Halloween carnival.  Okay, I've got to stop...too much nostalgia.

[horror1o1]

Great topic indeed!

I remember trick or treating on Halloween in London, Ontario with two of my best buddies in 1963 or 1964 when I was given one card in a generic wrapper. Opening it up we discovered the "Hairy Fiend" card from the Mars Attacks set. We were awestruck since we'd never never seen any of the cards before and the card was absolutely wild! Without the wrapper, we failed to even figure out the name of the set despite the Mars Attacks title on the back!



Nonetheless, that "Hairy Fiend" card became the prize of our gum card collection which was soon to reach 6500 cards or so. It wasn't until about 25 years ago that I figured out that our "Hairy Fiend" card was part of the notorious Mars Attacks set. I've been pecking away at the elusive, and expensive, Mars Attacks cards ever since but I still don't have a "Hairy Fiend" card!

I don't have this card yet either for my set. If memory serves me right i'm about half way there

[Hepcat]

It was a Saturday morning in April or May of 1964. My mission: to go door to door in downtown London and sell fifteen Globe & Mail newspapers for fifteen cents each. The reward, five cents per paper sold plus an SPP monster wallet of my choice!



These wallets were perhaps the coolest things that I'd ever seen and I absolutely, positively had to reach the target.

But the Globe & Mail was a pig of a paper and very tough to sell in London. First of all, the Globe & Mail was Toronto based. The London Free Press was the paper of choice for most Londoners. Secondly, the Saturday Free Press cost only a dime. Thirdly, coming all the way from Toronto, the Globe & Mail had to be printed much earlier and so didn't contain that many sports scores from the previous day. Fourthly, the Saturday Free Press was loaded with features including a coloured comic section. The Globe & Mail was comparatively drab and had no comparable comic section. Finally, on Saturdays a whopping three editions of the Free Press were published, the regular Free Press published early in the morning, the London Evening Free Press published in mid-afternoon and the Night Final which included various afternoon race results for punters and sundry other horse degenerates.

What did the Globe & Mail have to offer in return? Just the best business section of any newspaper in Canada. So I could only hope to sell the thing to stuffy old businessmen or the odd deluded Torontophile. The maximum I'd ever sold before was six or seven papers. I really had my job cut out for me.

But I could not fail! I flung myself into the task with avid, wild-eyed enthusiasm! And my efforts bore fruit. Nearing the end of the afternoon I'd sold eleven papers; then one more. So close, so close, but yet so far.... Time was up.

But then, an idea! I bought the remaining three copies of the stupid rag myself! And there they were, a whole box of wallets from which I, one of the successful newspaper boys, could choose! "i want the Mummy, I want the Mummy" was the popular refrain I was hearing from other boys. I, however, had a mind of my own and I chose shrewdly - the Creature-Wolfman wallet!

And the three papers I had bought myself? No problem. I sold one to my father and two to neighbours on my own street! Easy sales indeed.

And I was now the proud owner of a wallet like no other in the school yard! Shortly thereafter I caught on as a morning paperboy for the London Free Press (a real newspaper) with my own thirty paper delivery route which actually took me less than ten minutes since the houses were all on the same block. And there I was, proud as a peacock brandishing my super cool monster wallet as I went collecting from my customers every week, a wallet that I had incidentally earned stuffing the crappy Globe & Mail down customers' throats just a few months previously!

Unfortunately, my wallet's change purse started coming apart in less than a year (cheap bloody plastic) so I very sensibly threw it out. I mean what do you need a wallet for anymore if it's all falling apart? Right? Right?!

Now I've since managed to acquire the Mummy-Dracula and Frankenstein-Phantom wallets:





But another Creature-Wolfman wallet continues to elude me to this very day.

[Flower]

Nice write up Hepcat, now I want some monster wallets too.

[RedKing]

Gosh this is  great topic! I still remember how I became addicted to monsters in the first place, it's one of the earliest things I can remember. I was about  3 or 4 years old at the time, back around 1974 0r 75. King Kong vs Godzilla came on TV and I was mesmerized as well as frightened. The real memory of this for me though come from after the movie when I was supposed to be taking my nap. I couldn't sleep because I was terrified that Kong and Godzilla were going to step on our house. I've never been the same since!

[Hepcat]

It was late autumn 1964. I was perusing the comic rack at the News Depot on the north side of Dundas Street just west of Wellington in downtown London. Staring me in the face right beside the comics were two monster magazines unlike any I'd ever seen before.
 
The first was this very wild 3-D magazine:



The second was the first issue of Creepy:



So taken was I by these two magazines I forgot all about the comics. As a result, I can't narrow the date down to a certain month from the comics I remember on the rack.

I decided to choose just one of the two magazines, finances probably being a consideration. Now the 3-D concept was powerfully exciting to my young mind, but the Creepy magazine had more content overall. Moreover, the 3-D Monsters was $0.50 and the Creepy only $0.35. That settled it. So the Creepy it was!

A sound choice too in retrospect given how that Creepy issue launched a whole genre of new horror magazines while the 3-D Monsters ended up a largely forgotten one shot. But a vague recollection of that 3-D magazine stayed with me over the years and I wondered about its identity after I started reaccumulating the Warren magazines again thirty years ago. But lo and behold a copy showed up on the wall of Dragon Lady Comics on Queen Street in Toronto some twenty years ago, unused 3-D glasses and all! I snapped it right up.

[CreepysFan]

  Finding some Marvel horror comics in another kids desk during detention in 1973 (no I didn't take them, just read them).  Started a horror conversation with the kid a day or two later.  Me and Jeff would bring issues almost every week for each other to read, and talked about the monster movies that were shown over the weekend.   

[Zackuth]

My memory was being allowed to stay up on Saturday nights and watch Creature Features.  I was 8 and got to stay up to watch a horror movie which ended at midnight.  Creature Features introduced me the the Universal Classics and Dracula was the first movie I watched.  It was also a treat for me to get the TV guide from the Chicago Sunday paper and look to see what movie was to be on the next Saturday.

http://wgncreaturefeatures.tvheaven.com

If you look at the site and click on TV Guide Ads and More, and go about half way down, you'll see "many thanks to Kent R Dulaga...".  Right under that is what was a full middle section page of the newspaper with the opening poem, I had a copy of that hanging in my bedroom.

[Zombiology]

So many monster memories....  Every time my monster world grew bigger, it added another to the vault.  One I've always tried to recapture whenever I watch a good ol' spooky movie was when I used to watch Science Fiction Theater as a kid.  Every Thursday night they would show an old black and white movie with enough commercials to bump it up to 2 hours.  That was where I discovered all the old 50s and earlier movies for the first time.  Strange, I was never scared by them.  They were neat little windows into a fantastic realm that I wish I could visit.  Even then I loved Halloween more than Christmas.  Each monster was a bigger movie star to me than John Wayne or Cary Grant.