Public, Subscription and Academic Libraries in Washington Territory, 1853-1889.

This paper was hammered out on a manual typewriter before the Internet existed. It was probably produced for some class at the UW, but I cannot recall the details. This document currently resides in the McCleary Museum files.

Postcard - Seattle, Washington

"Seattle, Washington, looking north towards the downtown business district with Interstate 5 in the foreground."

In 1980, which was about the time I acquired this card, I worked right about dead center in this photo at Seattle Public Library. What a great city.

Morty Comix # 2459

 

 Morty Comix # 2459 was left in a seam on a stairway between two floors at Seattle Public Library

Morty Comix # 2458

Morty Comix # 2458 was left under a box of pencils in some kind of computer lab room at Seattle Public Library

Phone photo 2043

Seattle Public Library

Phone photo 2042

Hallway in Seattle Public Library

Dogs

Dogs was a regular digest size book designed for the earliest of readers and published by the Olympia School District. The connection was through my mother, Jeanette Willis, who was a teacher and sometimes administrator for OSD.

This was my first published work of the 1980s, printed in either January or February 1980. At the time I was working at Seattle Public Library as a low level clerk. In fact, my desk was way down in the basement, and that's literally low level.

Dogs was also the last of several books I drew for the Olympia School District, all of them constructed for beginning readers. I was given a list of words and letters thought to be the easiest for children to read, and then I used what they gave me to invent a story.

In 1980, this was my only solo book. My other nine published cartoons of that year were all in The Cooper Point Journal, campus newspaper for The Evergreen State College. The weird part about that-- I was no longer a student there. I had bequeathed a huge stack of unpublished comix to the CPJ when I left, and they spent a few years publishing more of my work after I graduated than when I was enrolled. Their August 7, 1980 issue was the first published appearance of "Mortie" the dog, but the panel was probably drawn in 1978.

Anyway, you can see how Odd Dog is a Morty prototype. Odd Dog first showed up in his own Olympia School District book in 1976.