Fright Night Horror

Picture by Bill Stank When did you first become interested in writing? That question takes me back a long way. When I was a boy, not yet ten years old, I started messing around with an old typewriter I found in the attic. It was one of those big old back jobs, with a two-color ribbon (red and black). I was already a big reader, and although there was a dedicated children’s library in my home town of Fairfield, CT, I loved to go to the main library with my mother, who was a big reader. These trips were almost weekly. I wasn’t old enough to get a library card from the adult library, so I would load my mother up with things like SCIENCE NEWS and James Thurber’s books, and Robert Benchley, and books of Al Hirschfeld’s theatrical caricatures. (The library didn’t have any Charles Addams cartoon books, but a family friend had some, and I loved them.) The Hirschfeld stuff led me off into books about Broadway and plays, so I read things like Moss Hart’s autobiography, Act One, and so...

Picture by Bill Stank When did you first become interested in writing? That question takes me back a long way. When I was a boy, not yet ten years old, I started messing around with an old typewriter I found in the attic. It was one of those big old back jobs, with a two-color ribbon (red and black). I was already a big reader, and although there was a dedicated children’s library in my home town of Fairfield, CT, I loved to go to the main library with my mother, who was a big reader. These trips were almost weekly. I wasn’t old enough to get a library card from the adult library, so I would load my mother up with things like SCIENCE NEWS and James Thurber’s books, and Robert Benchley, and books of Al Hirschfeld’s theatrical caricatures. (The library didn’t have any Charles Addams cartoon books, but a family friend had some, and I loved them.) The Hirschfeld stuff led me off into books about Broadway and plays, so I read things like Moss Hart’s autobiography, Act One, and so...

Picture by Bill Stank When did you first become interested in writing? That question takes me back a long way. When I was a boy, not yet ten years old, I started messing around with an old typewriter I found in the attic. It was one of those big old back jobs, with a two-color ribbon (red and black). I was already a big reader, and although there was a dedicated children’s library in my home town of Fairfield, CT, I loved to go to the main library with my mother, who was a big reader. These trips were almost weekly. I wasn’t old enough to get a library card from the adult library, so I would load my mother up with things like SCIENCE NEWS and James Thurber’s books, and Robert Benchley, and books of Al Hirschfeld’s theatrical caricatures. (The library didn’t have any Charles Addams cartoon books, but a family friend had some, and I loved them.) The Hirschfeld stuff led me off into books about Broadway and plays, so I read things like Moss Hart’s autobiography, Act One, and so on. All th...

Picture by Bill Stank When did you first become interested in writing? That question takes me back a long way. When I was a boy, not yet ten years old, I started messing around with an old typewriter I found in the attic. It was one of those big old back jobs, with a two-color ribbon (red and black). I was already a big reader, and although there was a dedicated children’s library in my home town of Fairfield, CT, I loved to go to the main library with my mother, who was a big reader. These trips were almost weekly. I wasn’t old enough to get a library card from the adult library, so I would load my mother up with things like SCIENCE NEWS and James Thurber’s books, and Robert Benchley, and books of Al Hirschfeld’s theatrical caricatures. (The library didn’t have any Charles Addams cartoon books, but a family friend had some, and I loved them.) The Hirschfeld stuff led me off into books about Broadway and plays, so I read things like Moss Hart’s autobiography, Act One, and so on. All th...