Accidental Careerist

I’m not one of those people who went searching for a career in life. I’ve had two careers and they both happened because of a chance meetings. They were more like accidents than opportunities. I don’t know if it is possible in today’s world to be an Accidental Careerist.


Growing up in the 60’s and 70’s I wasn’t a very ambitious kid. My first love in life was drawing. Some of my earliest memories are being in kindergarten drawing elaborate scenes of Spiderman webbing his way across skyscrapers fighting bad guys like the Green Goblin and Doctor Octopus. If I wasn’t drawing Spiderman I was drawing scenes of war mostly involving tanks and jet fighters blowing up palm treed jungles. What I didn’t know then but can clearly see now my early life was heavily influenced by television as the psychedelic Spiderman cartoon was my favorite tv show and I must have been catching glimpses of the Vietnam War on the evening news, I don’t know how else to explain my obsession with drawing military hardware and burning jungles at such an early age.


In grade school my drawings became influenced by R. Crumb though at the time I had no idea who he was but I liked his art because drawing the “Keep on Trucking” guy became my trademark. I probably liked the Crumb stuff because it was forbidden for someone of my age. I can remember stopping into the Altadena Record store to look at the Crumb posters with the Keep on Trrucking guy and the buxom women. In the R. Crumb style I began drawing guys with huge afros, bell bottoms, and handguns, no doubt influenced by films like Shaft and Cotton Comes to Harlem. I was big into drawing motorcycles and choppers probably because of the film Easy Rider and the long forgotten tv show Then Came Bronson. Mad magazine was also a heavy influence for me. Mort Drucker and Sergio Aragones were the first artists I knew by name. Most of my drawings were in my spiral notebooks I used for school and the front and back of my PeeChee folders so nobody other than my friends saw my drawings. I never showed stuff to my parents, teachers, or other adults. In my mind they weren’t interested in my drawing skills, they were more concerned with my grades, completing household chores, and being good at sports.


As I approached junior high school I began to exclusively to draw Marvel comics superheroes. My younger brother Kenny started collecting comic books. Being the cheapskate that I was I didn’t collect too many comics, I just read the ones Kenny and his friend Marc bought. The Hulk and the Avengers were my favorites. I was always drawing the Hulk, Thor, and Conan the Barbarian, trying to emulate the style of legendary Marvel artist John Buscema. I was really good at reproducing comic book pages and even created my own comic book called Atomic Man that I made with typing paper and a stapler. Issue number one was an epic battle between Atomic Man and the Hulk. Up to this point in life the only thing I had dreamed of becoming when I grew up was a football player in the NFL. Now I was starting to dream of becoming a comic book artist. The only problem was that I knew nothing about how comic books were made and I didn’t know any adults who worked as a professional artist. My parents, their friends. and my many aunts and uncles were mostly blue collar workers working in factories or like my mother, a professional working for a large company like Pacific Bell. My mother started out with Pacific Bell as an operator but by the time I was in grade school she had moved up to an office job. I don’t know what she did but whatever it was it required her to dress professionally because she always went to work looking sharp in dresses and heels or the occasional smart looking pants suit. My father worked for Lockheed and I didn’t know what he did but I knew it was blue collar work because of the way he dressed and the tool box he carried in his van and truck. When I was in high school my father made it to the engineering level because he started dressing nicer and his wrenches and screwdrivers were replaced by a calculator, slide ruler, and a Commodore Vic-20 computer.


During my high school years I outgrew comic books and soon discovered Heavy Metal magazine. The incredible artwork and the mature stories and naked women made Marvel comics seem like child’s play. The artwork was beautifully done, less like comic book pulp and more like the fine art of Da Vinci and Michealangelo. In addition the stories were more inline with what I liked on a literary scale. Even though I loved comics and pop culture for drawing it was a different story when it came to reading. For written material I preferred science fiction, fantasy, horror, and mystery. Comic books were soap operas with simple good guy vs. bad guy story lines but Heavy Metal had stories of incredible fantasy worlds, metaphysics, philosophy, existentialism, cyberpunk, and sex. Since most of the artists were Europeans there was also an air of mystery about the artists. Moebius quickly became my new favorite artist but I also loved the artwork of Bilal, Phillip Druillet, Milo Manara, Liberatore, Richard Corben, and Frank Frazetta. The art was so good it was intimidating. I’d give my left arm to make art like Moebius but I didn’t have that kind of confidence in my ability. In my mind I had to be as good as these guys to make it as an artist and I wasn’t so I put becoming an artist out of my mind. I was really naïve about doing art. For my whole life I drew everything free hand. I would sit down with some paper and just start drawing. It was only much later in life when I was working as an artist did I realize that it was par for the course for artists to use references such as photographs, anatomy books, sculptures, live models, and tracing to create illustrations and drawings. In my limited view I thought that was cheating. I worked in a vacuum. I didn’t even consider myself an artist, I was just somebody who enjoyed drawing as a hobby.


As I mentioned before the only thing I dreamt about becoming as a kid was an NFL football player. Baseball was my first sport. My Dad coached Little League and I have many fond memories of spending Saturday’s at Loma Alta Park playing in games and consuming snow cones and hot dogs afterwards. Football though was my true love. Me and my brothers and neighborhood friends were obsessed with football. We all played Pop Warner football for the Pasadena Bulldogs and spent countless hours playing pick up games in the street or at the local parks and schools. When we weren’t playing real football outdoors we played electric football indoors. I don’t know of any other kids on the planet that went to the lengths we did in playing electric football. Our local toy store and hobby shop Henry’s sold electric football teams. We’d save our money and buy our favorite teams and we would have tournaments all day Sunday while watching real NFL football. We would usually meet at someone’s house and bring at least one extra football field so we could have multiple games going on at once. We bought model paint to modify our players so they looked like the real thing. We’d paint on wrist bands, elbow pads, high white socks and white shoes. We used small strips of foam to add neck braces behind player’s helmets. We stripped the paper off the wiring used to tie loaves of bread and made face masks. We made sure all of our players had the correct jersey numbers. We cut the letters off the decal number sheets to put names on the backs of player’s jerseys. It was a game of one-upmanship to see who could make their team look most like the real thing. I even made a locker room out of a shoe box for my teams. We also were rabid collectors of football cards. Me and my three brothers had shoe boxes full of football cards. We knew all the players in the NFL because we had their cards. We didn’t buy them for collecting, we bought them for the love of football. Little did we know that these cards would be worth major bucks to collectors as the years went on. Most of our cards ended up in the garbage, thrown out as we left adolescence for adulthood.


By the time I reached high school my fantasies of being an NFL football player began to fade. With each new level of playing the stakes became ridiculously higher. Up to high school I played football strictly for fun but once in high school football became ultra serious and practice was like boot camp and the team was like a military outfit. I played football for St. Francis High School in La Canada which at the time was known as a football school with a grand tradition of winning and uniforms that resembled the Notre Dame Fighting Irish. At St. Francis you were a nobody if you didn’t play football. I knew I wasn’t going to be an NFL player. I didn’t have the religious devotion to the sport that was required to reach that level. The game was no longer fun to me. After my freshman year I quit playing football much to the dismay of my father and the coaching staff. They were counting on me being a key figure on the team for four years and possibly going on to play college ball. I was a pretty good football player. I was a two way starter at defensive end and wide receiver but my heart wasn’t in it. I switched to basketball and track, two sports that received little respect at St. Francis. I was good enough at basketball to be considered college and NBA material. We made the playoffs my senior year after years of being a perennial loser and in track and field I set the league record in the triple jump and medaled in the CIF southern section finals.


By the time I was 17 my views of myself and life started to change drastically. In my community growing up being good at sports brought more respect than anything else. If you were good at sports you were known, people spoke of you, girls liked you, other guys thought you were cool. If you were good at something besides sports it was like nobody even cared. You could be a straight A student and you could still be a nobody. It was the same thing at St. Francis. Honor students were just students while athletes walked the school grounds like they were the gods of Olympus. As a black athlete at a white school all that was expected of me was being good at sports. In the minds of much of the student body that’s what I was there for, to help bring the school more football glory. I rebelled against this notion. I wanted to show that I was more than just an athlete. I wanted respect for my intelligence more than my athletic prowess. Little did I know had a rebel spirit in me. I began to rebel against expectations others had of me, including my parents. I declared myself an atheist to the priests at school. They wanted to counsel me like I was a troubled youth but I was having none of that. I was kicked off the basketball team for not seeing eye to eye with my coach and speaking my mind. I was no longer part of the “in” crowd at school so I started hanging out with the marginalized students. I began to question sports as my future and my ticket to a college education.


I didn’t realize I would be writing this much for the set up part of this particular blog entry. This was supposed to be a writing about how I got started in my careers and I haven’t mentioned anything about that yet. I’m going to end this entry here. I’ve laid down the foundation and I’ll get to the meat of the subject in the next entry. Stay tuned!


… to be continued