An autobiograhy of James Arthur Casey (Part 3)

 An autobiograhy of James Arthur Casey (Part 3)

originally written on September 18, 1995

Slightly revised on August 19, 2021

I mentioned in the last segment that our new house was located directly behind the cement plant and Panell's Lumber Yard...in the lot east of those buildings was the first convenience store ever built in Prague. It was also the first "self service" gas station and it was called Mom's Minit Mart. This monumental structure was completed in the late 70s and as far as I know the whole c-store idea was a new thing across the country. Mom's was typical with it's gas pumps, microwave oven and sandwiches to microwave in it...microwave cooking had only recently arrived in our little town, it was amazing to see food cooked so hot in under a minute. 

Mom's had a walk-in refrigeration unit for cold beer, soda pop and other food items that might come in handy for the happy traveller who stopped in regularly or the truckers using Hwy 62 on the way to 99 and on to I-40. As a service to their customers they kept a stock of periodicals. Any magazine you could think of and a few, hidden on the shelf above the bottom row that you won't see these days with it's politically correct view of erotic magazines (Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler and a few other titles I called "dirties"). They wouldn't sell these to minors, ostensibly, although they did lose a lot of them to shrinkage (people stole them). I once obtained a huge bag of these treasures by stocking the walk-in for an older friend who happened to work there and didn't feel like going into the walk-in and freezing his ass off stocking cans and bottles of various drink and lunch meat and whatever else that was there to refill. 

My favorite thing in that store was a wire carousel comic book rack, well-stocked with new stuff arriving at least once a week, or so it seemed. Comics only cost a quarter (they'd raised the price by a nickle at the same time we moved into our new house) and it was a very short walk across the lumber yard to buy them at "the Minit Mart". Dad always had a spare quarter he would give me so I could amass a truly remarkable collection of these educational and entertaining books. 

I preferred DC comics. I liked the Justice League of America congregation and would buy lots of Batman and Superman titles but my true interests lie in much darker fare. House of Mystery was always a great cover-to-cover chill inducer. There were also specialty titles like Weird War Stories and Weird Sports which I would pick up with the rest. Marvel comics just didn't do it for me at the time and EC was badly drawn and written (though I must say I've read people proclaim EC as the veritable king of horror comics, I never saw it).

I had 'em all though.

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I always figured that all kids enjoy MAD magazine. I don't think they even publish it anymore so the youth may have moved on to something else but then again MAD wasn't just for the young 'uns. As a pubescent punk-rocker-to-be I identified with MAD's satirical style, poking fun at current movies and television shows as well as deflating cultural mores, etc. Much of my dark, cynical sense of humor was born in the pages of MAD.

I was also a regular reader of Cracked, another black and white large size comic magazine that never pretended to be anything more than a witty, slightly less virulent version of MAD. MAD had it's mascot, the toothless dork Alfred "What Me Worry?" Newman and Cracked had Sylvester P. Smythe. I think there's still a website based on Cracked though I don't imagine it has a whole lot more in common with the magazine than the font of the masthead. 

When I got a little older, an aging 15 or so, I switched from the cartoon style humor of MAD and Cracked to the slightly more literate National Lampoon, which I read faithfully for several years before growing out of it. The Lampoon had something that interested me at the time - photographs of naked women and the shop owners didn't seem to understand how much "adult content" was in the so they would sell them to pre-teens. 

Before long the few naked breasts in National Lampoon's Foto Funnies just weren't enough and I moved on to seriously reading Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler, High Society, every title that would get me in trouble with the state of feminine women today...but in my own defense I have to say that my time spent learning to enjoy reading was done with the Playboy Interview, their Advisor, their Forum (which indoctrinated me for better or worse with the "Playboy Philosophy" that Hugh Hefner dreamed of) all the cartoons and party jokes...of course I looked at the women...I was a teenage heterosexual, it was in my veins...but that photography was art and the models were each and every one a Venus de Milo, I felt no guilt as my collection of what puritans would call "pornography" began to rival in size my box of pulp comics. I was learning a lot of valuable lessons in those magazines.

But enough of that, in Part 4 I will introduce my good friend Randy Blemmel as he introduces me to the Warren magazines Creepy, Eerie, Vampirella and the big daddy of them all, FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND.