By Craig: I have been collecting things since I was a small boy. My twin brother Jay was the same way. We collected baseball cards, stamps, coins, running medals and ribbons and of course, comic books. I can remember the excitement of waiting for the next issue of The Unexpected, or the House of Mystery to be released. We would ride our bikes to the next town where there was a small bookstore and check to see if the latest issue had arrived. We would also canvass the local flea market (Rietta Ranch in Hubbardston MA) and sometimes find old back issues of comics for a nickel or a dime. Some of these comics were in rough shape, with detached staples or simply missing the covers completely. We did not care. We were interested in the content inside of them. We would read anything that we could get our hands on that was interesting to us. Sometime during the summer of 1979, Jay and I found a table at the flea market that had a box of old comic books that peeked our interest. Inside the box were two old comic digests from the early 1970s. One of them was Boris Karloff's Tales of Mystery and the other one was Ripley's Believe it or Not! Of course, we had to have them and I do not even remember how much we paid for them. A quarter a piece perhaps? We were only 10 years old and in those days, a quarter was worth a lot more than it is today, especially for a kid. I can remember the day well. We brought them back to our house and took turns reading them.
At some point, I don't remember when, the Boris Karloff digest disappeared. It must have been years ago, as I do not recall having seen it since I was a kid. My brother Jay kept the Ripley's digest until his death 3 years ago and it now resides with the rest of my comic books on a bookcase in my bedroom. As you can tell from the image above, this comic is well read. In fact, it is so well read that it appears that we almost devoured it! I picked it up just recently and read it again. The back cover is gone, swallowed by the ravages of time, or perhaps my brother mixed it with his oatmeal and ate it. Surprisingly, I still remember most of the stories in the book. There is the tale about old Simon who carry's his weighted sins in a large bag on his back. He is the subject of ridicule by the townspeople who throw rocks at him and mock him as he passes through. He is eventually murdered by a scoundrel named Langley who believes that Simon is carrying gold and silver in the bag. What Langley does not realize is that he is now destined to carry the bag weighted with his own sins. Another tale tells the story of Mary Walker who is murdered by two men in 1631 and convicted on the testimony of a ghost! Then there is the story of a French officer named Steingal who is warned of his impending death in battle by a dream. The last few pages of this story have been torn out of the digest. Did my brother add those to his oatmeal? I can still see my twin brother pedaling down the road in front of me, sometimes standing in the stirrups as he coasts down a hill with his wavy red hair blowing in the wind. He turns around and smiles.
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