The writing bug bit me early, so to speak. As you may have read in my 1980 diary entries, in February we joined the Sons of the Desert tent in Springfield, the Towed in a Hole Tent. It didn’t take long before I tried to make a name for myself as a Laurel and Hardy super-fan. My writing skills weren’t as polished as they are nowadays, so my idea was to create one of the greatest puzzles in the history of man and contribute it to our tent’s newsletter. With any luck at all, it would be published, and my name would become a household word to all who received the newsletter.
I took a piece of graph paper and carefully and strategically plotted out the names of many of L&H’s film titles and then surrounded them by a batch of unrelated letters. When I was done I had created the ultimate word search, something that had probably never been done before.
Oh, I was immensely proud of my creation. My mom took it to work and typed it out for me. I brought it to school and showed Mrs. Deets, my teacher. She made photocopies of the puzzle and handed it out to all of my classmates to solve for extra credit. The road to fame and fortune was not all paved with gold, as I soon found out when I threatened not to pass out my puzzle to a girl named Beth who I didn’t like very well. Mrs. Deets said that she made the copies and they were hers to pass out and not mine.
But this minor stumble from atop my pedestal was forgotten when the Vol. 1 – Issue 3 of Towed in a Hole, the tent’s newsletter edited by Chris Cottrill (distribution 25 – maybe) hit the newsstands. The best part of it was that my name was displayed in these great, fancy press-on letters. I had been published! There was no stopping me now.
In early 1981, I attempted to reclaim my position as famous-word-search-maker and did another puzzle in early 1981 for the Vol. 2 – Issue 1 edition of the newly christened Fresh Fish newsletter. I took a different spin on the puzzle and gave it a specific theme: the L&H film Swiss Miss. This time there wasn’t so much fanfare. We didn’t make any copies to distribute, but I did have my friend Rob Bradford come over and see it and he promptly sat down and started to actually solve the puzzle. So my only copy of this one is littered with blemishes.
It would be a while, but I would eventually come up with some meaningful L&H writings…
More on 1980 later…
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