what I read

I may have been reading Dickinson at 12 but my taste in fiction then was centerd on authors who wrote for children. I was 10 when I wrote my first fan letter to an author to Lois Lenski. by 12 I had a regular correspondence with Jean Bothwell. at abt that time I was also writing to Pearl S. Buck & Robert Lawson.

altho we all read comics as well   I was never addictd to them. my favorite was Classic Illustrated. of the action heroes I was most fond of Wonder Woman. & there was a comic which featurd fashion designs that children sent in.

but my favorite reading material as a child was movie magazines. Photoplay   Modern Screen   Screen Stories. usually in the front were the gossip columns of Hedda & Louella   Mike Connolly & Sidney Skolsky. then came the stories   many by sister team Reba & Bonnie Churchill. & all those glorious photos. George Nader in the tightest jeans ever made. Denise Darcel & Tab Hunter on a date. Robert Francis playing golf in Palm Springs.

I clippd these magazines & preservd my favorite images & stories in a series of scrapbooks. I've already written abt this in a series of poems which appeard in the inaugural issue of Court Green.

& my first publication (not counting an early drawing which appeard in a booklet of the Elyria schools) was a brief letter to the editor in the june 1957 issue of Screen Stories.

I miss the old movie magazines. today we still have celebrity publications but they lack the look & feel of the magazines of my childhood with those beautiful movie ads & studio portraits of Ava Gardner & candids of Rock Hudson getting a massage at Finlandia Baths & stories abt the men in Mamie Van Doren's life.