You would have thought that I’d get at least one decent art teacher during my years in high school. No dice. And so I continued my bizarre attempt at artistic cultivation. I developed my own comic book characters, illustrated home-grown stories, and advanced my “Wanted Posters” into a state that was clearly an attempt at pushing my facial skills as far as I could handle without proper training. Nobody had ever told me about anatomy or life drawing. I absorbed the daily comics (I hated “Dondi” but studied the drawing). The unique intro to The Wild Wild West and the long-forgotten Lone Ranger animated series fascinated me. I became more and more interested in animation. I poured over the drawings of political artists—Herblock, Hugh Haynie, and Paul Conrad. I entertained the notion that I wanted to be an editorial cartoonist, and wrote letters to prominent exponents of the art form. But then something happened that would change everything. I saw an an advertisement from the Famous Artist School and responded. A representative actually paid a visit to our home and I begged my parents to let me give it a shot—the correspondence course that would give me the art instruction that I’d never managed to acquire. They said, “Okay,” and I will forever be grateful for this simple consent to expose me to legitimate art educators. I acknowledge now that the home-study “Course for Talent Young People” was an experiment, an attempt to market the successful adult course to a younger market. That meant nothing to me at the time. This was the school endorsed by Norman Rockwell! How could they deny me this opportunity? Well, they didn’t, even though my Mom had to cajole me into keeping up with the lessons. But a sea change had occurred. I was formally introduced to the world of art at last, fine and applied, and I was soon ready to make an informed decision about the direction of my artistic development. When my grandmother gave me a bulletin of classes from the University of Cincinnati, I was ready to choose a course of action—commericial art. No surprise. This was it! Everything else fell to the wayside…