[mckee]

My name is Jeff McKee and, as you might have inferred, my family and I reside in Richmond, Va.  I can't tell you how, but the story goes that my mom taught me to read almost two years before kindergarten.

I wasn't knocking down War and Peace, or Kafka, or even simple fiction such as Camus, Hesse or Proust.
I was reading comic books.  Even a decade after World War II, the economic facts of life in my neck of the woods were still dire. Consequently, we lived in 2 family apartment, with 4 admittedly small, single child families sharing everything.  For me, that meant that I had access to my oldest cousin, Marcy's mind-blowing stash of comic books of every imaginable genre. 

My grandmother ran our neighborhood bodega. It differed from the little shop a block away, or the one across the street, in that Grandma was a comic book freak.  I have almost no memory of that time, save for her shop - one and a half of her 4 walls were loaded with comics, from the floor to the ceiling.   Marcy was 7 1/2 years older than me, an eternity in those days.  I wasn't allowed to violate her stash, but if I asked my grandma or my aunt, or Marcy, I was free to sit in the middle of her bedroom floor and look at the pictures until one day, (most likely with a lot of help from my mom) it all began to make sense.

All these years later, and my love for comic strips, comic books and Mad are the longest direct line from me as a little kid to me as a big kid. 

My career was defined by my other passion: (actually, there are several ohers, but let's not waste time discussing them) Rock and Roll - I couldn't play an instrument, so I went the route that allowed me to share music with my audience.  Radio led to TV - for several years in the Orlando area, I had a TV show called Late is Great.  I ran it like radio with pictures - we tossed in a format similar to Saturday afternoons at the movies - we'd start with a short such as the Little Rascals, Our Gang, Behind the 8 Ball, Laurel & Hardy etc.  Then we ran a cartoon or two.  My station had a huge cartoon library and we  did our homework and put the cartoon into some sort of context, be it historical, sociological, etc.

I look forward to sharing many good times with you here at this wonderful place.       

[JVJ]

Welcome, Jeff.
Rock and Roll infects my life, too. I can remember lying in bed on the third floor of our house in Pittsburgh, PA, in 1956 with my tiny crystal radio shaped like a rocket ship. It had an alligator clip that you attached to the metal bed frame and you tuned to the stations by lifting the metal "nose" of the rocket up and down. I used to pick up far away stations playing Presley and Fats Domino and other raw, raucous music makers. I was 10 and growing up fast.

Peace, Jim (|:{>

[narfstar]

Enjoyed the chance to get to know you with the life snip-it Jeff. I was raised in poverty in PA. We at least had electricity but no running water and used an outhouse. Not fun in PA winters. I had an older cousin also who was "rich" she passed her comics on to me. I was in a single mom household with four kids she had a working dad. I had a mom who gave me lots of love but not much education. It was school that taught me to read. It was when I started getting my cousin's comics in second grade that infected me for life. The Archie and Harvey titles were there but it was the Superman Family titles she passed on that hooked. Most especially Adventure Comics with the LSH. What could compare with that to a seven year old in 1964. By 5th grade I was the classroom dictionary thanks to my comic book reading.

[JonTheScanner]

Reminds me of something from my youth.  My parents didn't really like comics.  Oh they'd let me get some, but it was not encouraged.  I too learned a lot of reading on my own. I'd never ask my parents hat a word was in a comic as they might tell me to stop reading and go do something else so I had to figure out what a lot of them meant on my own.  At age 5 to 8, I'd read the comics out loud to my 2 1/2 year younger brother.  There were words I knew that I didn't know how to pronounce. Two of them, from Superman, were invulnerable and solitude (as in the Fortress of the same). I can still recall pronouncing them invunerable (with no "l") and for some strange reason "soliTUday"  Perhaps I thought the latter was French -- though at that age I doubt I knew how any French was pronounced.