In my quest to locate a letter I once wrote to Jimmy Carter for the purposes of a memorial column about the recently deceased 39th president of the United States, I found an old steno pad instead.
When I was a boy, my mother used to regularly gift me with stenographer pads filched from work. Rectangular with coarse brown cardboard covers and a sheaf of lined spiral bound paper sandwiched between them, as the name suggests, they were intended for stenographers to take notes at meetings. Young Greg used them as sketchbooks for the hordes of characters I dreamed up. Each one given to me was dutifully filled with all sort of drawings: robots, monsters, cyborgs, aliens and superheroes.
I recently found one of those old steno pads among my various books and papers. It is the last survivor of a small army I had thought vanished long ago. I chuckled as I flipped through it. Yes, the drawings are crude and many of the character concepts are either silly or derivative, but they still have a certain charm to them— if their creator can say so without sounding full of himself.
Ultra-Boxer. Kilogun. Shock Sentry. Brainwave. Admiral Freeman. Dr. Cyberg. These guys mattered as much to me as Batman, He-Man, Snake-eyes and all the other real heroes. Back then, I didn’t understand all of them were imaginary. The only thing that separated my creations from the “real heroes” I saw on TV or in comics was they had large companies producing and promoting their material.
More than old childhood fantasies were captured in the pages of that battered steno pad. The images serve as mental touchstones to certain times and places. Flipping through it, I dredged up a distinct memory of drawing in it while sitting in the foyer outside my dad’s office in Ft. Hood, Texas.
My parents had divorced and my father, sick of civilian life, decided to try the Army instead of the Navy this go around. In the summertime, I would fly to Texas and stay with him. I can’t quite pinpoint where the change over occurs, but some of the characters were distinctly drawn “back East” and others were drawn in Texas.
Those memories led to still others I have not examined in a long time. I had a buddy in Texas (and later Korea when both of our fathers were stationed there) named Jim Flora. He was my best friend in Texas and as I said, also later in Korea. I recall us sitting on top of a power transformer watching riot police clash with students in the streets of Seoul, but that is a story for another time.
Jim and I used to read comics and draw comics featuring characters of our own. I can’t recall those creations quite as well, because they were in one of the many steno pads that never survived the years in between. Something about an electrical vampire called Kilowatt? No, a ninja called Kamikaze.
I’m surprised I remember even that much. Until I flipped through that steno pad, I hadn’t thought about Jim in years. Briefly, I considered tracking him down on social media, but that would be an odd conversation, wouldn’t it?
“Hey, Jim? This is Greg. It’s been three decades and change since we last talked. We used to draw comics together when we were kids, remember that? Kamikaze and the Assassins Guild? No, you don’t? Oh, well, sorry to trouble you.” Click.
Of course, who knows? Maybe squirreled away in a box somewhere in Jim’s garage is an old notebook like mine, filled with the summertime creations of a simpler time, just waiting for him to flip through it and take his own trip down memory lane.
For all I know, Jim could be looking at a picture of Kamikaze right now and thinking, “What was that kid’s name? Greg something?”
