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I had created four issues of the newsletter titled Told in the Whole, the publication for the Springfield Towed in a Hole tent of the Sons of the Desert, between 1986 and 1987. My momentum only stopped because the tent stopped actually having any meetings. Of course, many things in my life happened that would have precluded me from putting too much emphasis on this aspect of my life anyway – namely spending lots of time with my first girlfriend Christi and the birth of my daughter Ashleigh. Nevertheless, by Fall of 1990, I was hoping to resume publication of this fine newsletter. In fact, I even wrote a tribute to my friend, actress Virginia Karns who had starred with Laurel and Hardy in Babes in Toyland.
But it didn’t happen. There were still no meetings being scheduled and I was finally faced with the fact that as far as meetings went, the Towed in the Hole tent had become defunct. In fact, I had to rely on my friend Bob Satterfield to even get the information regarding the upcoming Sons of the Desert convention that was going to held in Las Vegas, Nevada, in 1992. It was then that I decided that I was going to not only re-start the publication under a different title, but that I was going to start my own tent as well.
Since portions of Laurel and Hardy’s 1942 feature A-Haunting We Will Go took place in Dayton, Ohio, I opted to utilize this film title as the name of my tent. One of the main characters in this film was Dante the Magician, so I made a wordplay on his name and titled the newsletter Dante’s Info – an obvious play on Dante’s Inferno.
In the early Summer of 1992, I went to work on assembling my very first issue. I used same layout as I had used on Told in the Whole, in essence just sticking the new title directly on top of the old on my front cover template. (This was achieved by cutting and pasting in the literal sense in those days). I had already chosen the cover, had this ended up being issue #5 of TITH, and also had the Virginia Karns tribute fully written.
Filling in the blank pages (which totaled 16 pages, doubling the size of each issue of TITH) was a lot of fun. I wanted to make the information meaningful and fun to read, and would concentrate on comminicating a blend of both ‘national’ Laurel and Hardy news and research, with local tent coverage. What I came up with – the issue in its entirety – is displayed below.
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I printed up about 150 issues – which was quite ludicrous. The goal was to bring them along to the convention and to give them to about half of the delegates, naturally hoping to pick up some subscriptions to my new masterpiece. I also sent Dwain Smith a letter, requesting any info on fans from the Dayton area who may have requested information about the Sons of the Desert. Yes, you could say that I was very committed to the cause and well-poised to head-up a successful tent in Dayton, Ohio.
Although I don’t think that I quite got the reaction and fanfare that I had hoped for, eventually responses and a small handful of subscriptions did trickle in. I scheduled my first meeting to be held on August 30, which would be about six weeks after the conclusion of the Las Vegas convention…
…which will be coming up next…
“…spending lots of time with my first girlfriend Christi…” – I thought Jill Geaslen was your first girlfriend??!!
Peter
June 15th, 2011
OK, you caught me on a technicality. First real girlfriend, not one-week (or less) girlfriend.
Brad
June 15th, 2011