Friday, December 18, 2009

Blast from the Past #261: Moving to New Hampshire "Tag Sale" sign

This is a somewhat whimsical, quirky little piece whipped up in a hurry back in 1982, for a tag sale I was having in my apartment prior to moving to New Hampshire with then-girlfriend Jeannine. I can't really remember how successful it was, or how many people actually made the trek up to the third floor to go through my stuff.



But as light-hearted as this little sign is, it actually signified a very big and serious change in my life. I was leaving a comfortable life in Northampton -- a town I'd lived in pretty much since graduating from UMass in 1976. I had a great studio apartment right in the middle of downtown Northampton -- low rent, heat included. I wasn't making a lot of money with my illustrating, but I had the steady gig with the "Daily Hampshire Gazette", and my expenses were pretty low. And I had never lived out of state -- in fact, I'd always lived either in my home town of North Adams or no more than sixty miles away from it.

Yet here I was, ready to drop all of this to move to another state, away from family and friends and work, to live in a town I'd only visited once (on a trip to find a place to rent), with a woman I'd been dating only a few months. I can't stress enough how unusual this was for me -- I guess it is a pretty good indication of how head-over-heels in love with Jeannine I was.

The fact that this move would bring me geographically closer to my new friend Kevin Eastman, who I had met the previous year in Northampton before he headed back to Maine, was a minor detail, and one I didn't think too much about among all the preparations for the move. But, as students of TMNT history know, it would turn out to have hugely significant consequences for us. -- PL

7 comments:

Unknown said...

That was a fun entry to read. Feel's like hearing about the start of something big (or at least a path to the start). Pretty bold move you made there. Young love is great (I know because I'm only 20 ;))

Adam Riches said...

Very very cool historical bit there. I think I'm gonna need to make it a point to bring this up in every response I write on here till you actually do it...this needs to be compiled in book form! This is all very interesting material and I have a gut feeling that interest would span beyond just TMNT fans if marketed correctly.

Few people have such a great paper trail of their life to assemble a book from. Yours would practically write itself it seems.

PS: I wish I could have attended that sale! I can only imagine the cool things I could have potentially obtained.

mikeandraph87 said...

As the late great Paul Harvey would say,"And now you know the rest of the story".

Cool entry!

Brookslyn said...

What comics were for sale?

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~ tOkKa said...

-->> That's pretty damn hilarious.. a spot ad tho' -

more trademark LAIRD humor.

Tyr Germanic said...

thats actually a really cool poster
like the way the pictures mix with jokes and drawings.

and of course,pacman and the enterprise!
i recently found old toys that appear to leonard kirk and raph "bones"mccoy..yeah
dont know if theyre officially liscensed but thats cool they were made.