I Loved Those Paper Drives

     During the 1950’s when I was a kid, local community organizations periodically held “Paper Drives” as fund raisers.  At our church the Boy Scouts would do it, and the elementary school’s “Community Club” would do it on the school grounds.  A big truck freight trailer would be pulled in and parked, with the rear doors unlocked, so people could bring in their old magazines, and stacks of newspapers to throw onto the paper pile in the trailer.

    Back in those days, there were plenty of newspapers.  Our middle-sized city had both a daily morning newspaper and evening newspaper, with a thick Sunday edition.  People would save stacks of the old newspapers, to donate to the paper drives when they happened.

    There were a lot of magazines around also.  My parents rarely got magazines, but being a Cub Scout, I did monthly receive “Boy’s Life”.   My grandparents often had copies of Life magazine, Look magazine, and Saturday Evening Post.  All in all, there was a lot of old publications that could be recycled to make more paper.

    My love of those paper drives had nothing to do with recycling paper, although that seemed like an intelligent thing to do.   What excited me was some of the other publications that could sometimes be found in the giant pile of paper:  Comic Books!  

    Although my sister and I loved to read comic books, my father took a dim view of them, and discouraged us from buying them.  “Don’t go wasting your allowance buying comic books” was a line we often heard.  We still did buy a few, but when I discovered that paper drives could be a readily available source of comics, I was excited every time I saw a paper drive trailer in our community, and could hardly wait to go rifling through the giant pile of newspapers and magazines looking for comics.

    I found comics of cartoon characters (Donald Duck, Scrooge McDuck, etc), super hero comics (Superman, Batman, etc), mythical character comics, like The Phantom, Turok, (Son of Stone, an Indian who fought dinosaurs),  and I always really treasured the Classics Illustrated Comics I sometimes found, that featured the classical stories by Jules Verne, Mark Twain, and Robert Lewis Stevenson.

    At one point in my paper drive searches, I came across a Mad Magazine, and when I got home and started reading through it, my life changed forever.  I loved the amazing comical art, the really clever humor, and the satirical social comment.  Mad Magazine put an end to my desire for comic books, and set me looking instead for more Mad Magazines.  Unfortunately, they were an extremely rare commodity in paper drive trailers, so much to the chagrin of my father, I started to spend my money buying new ones, as they were printed.

    Mad Magazine did have a profound affect on my life.  Not only did it give me a more cynical  and questioning view of the world and introducing me to a higher form of humor, it was in trying to draw some of the characters I saw in Mad, that I later in life, ended up as a local cartoonist.

You can see my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca