Every once in a while, I came up with a swell idea. Here’s one of them: I had purchased a half-dozen Three Stooges comic books that were distributed by Gold Key in the mid-to-late 1960’s. I’m not sure where exactly I picked them up, but if I had to guess, I’d say I found them at a memorabilia show at the Dayton Mall. So I decided to marry my comic book fascination with my autograph collecting habit and thereby shipped off four of these colorful Three Stooges comic books to Curly-Joe DeRita, one of only two of the then-surviving members of the classic comedy team.
These were mailed out on December 13, 1985 as part of my Christmas celebrity request onslaught. I also sent requests on this day to Ray Bolger and Mickey Rooney. The Rooney autograph that was returned (on an original 11 x 14 frame insert from the 1940’s) was a secretarial. Bolger sent back a signed portrait of himself out of the Scarecrow makeup (seen here). This arrived on Christmas Eve of ’85.
Curly-Joe was a pretty reliable signer, so I found these back in my mailbox on December 28, the last arrival of the 1985 collecting season. Curly-Joe also signed two more notecards and dropped a little unsigned photo of himself in the envelope as well. Unfortunately, these arrived postage due. I simply hadn’t calculated the heavy weight of the comic books correctly. I always felt bad wandering if Curly-Joe had had to pick up the tab on the other end.
I still have three of the four comic books. The only one that Curly-Joe didn’t inscribe was given to my friend George as a gift a couple of years later. Nearly ten years after that, I traded a Jackie Gleason signed notecard to get the comic book back…and then promptly traded it with Steve Cox for another batch of signed photos. Always wheelin’ and dealin’ I was…
For more autographs of the Three Stooges, click here…
Continue with autographs of December 1985…
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