You are the greatest writer of our time.

Thank you.

guymontag:

You may want to go to the NEW Ray Bradbury website: http://www.raybradbury.com

ALSO:

If you go there, find the 'INSPIRED BY' section, and find in the forums listed in THAT section, a place where you can send your greeting for Christmas and New Years to Ray Bradbury. All posts made by December 20th, wil be sent to him at his home in larger format... You can also post a photo at this new website...

NOTE:
(You'll have to re-register in this new Bradbury website in order to post. But you can keep the same user 'name' you currently have...)

I just signed on to this site, so pardon any ignorance on my part regarding what else might be going on here . . .

To introduce myself to the rest of you, I lived in downtown Los Angeles from the time I was born until 1962, when I was 17 years old. It was in the spring of that year that I figured out a way that I could meet Ray Bradbury personally. I'd been reading such stories of his as "Kaleidoscope," "The Veldt," and "And the Rock Cried Out" for two or three years earlier. I already wanted to be a writer, and I'd begun consciously imitating Ray's style, trying to catch a ride on his coattails into publication.

I arranged with him, over the transom as it were, to come to my school, Los Angeles High on West Olympic, to give a talk to as many of the students as might be interested. This worked out better than I ever expected. About a thousand other kids thronged the rather large hall to hear me introduce Bradbury, then listen for almost two hours while he held forth on every topic under the sun.

Afterward, Bradbury said he was willing to let me go on seeing him. He sent me a special invitation to join him at East L. A. State College for several evenings of lectures on writing, given by him, Leon Surmelian (host of the event, the Pacific Coast Writers' Conference), and "Twilight Zone" writer Charles Beaumont, who at age 33 was dying at the time of severe premature aging, and looked 80 or 90 years old . . . but that's another story.

Between then and 1965 Ray took me to lunch every time I went to see him in his Beverly Hills office. He introduced me to his agent Harold Matson, and let me sit in his office, a cubbyhole crammed with memorabilia of his career, then let David Wolper (who later put on the L. A. Olympics) film me with Ray in his half-hour TV series "Story of a Writer."

Later, Bradbury and I began to drift apart, as I got my first regular job at the Hollywood Citizen-news, after buying my first car (as is commonly known, Ray always hated automobiles) and began drinking beer and smoking cigarettes.

He still signed several of his books for me, including "Fahrenheit 451" and the brand-new hardback of "Something Wicked This Way Comes," that on the day of its publication. He sent me a congratulatory telegram when I graduated from high school, and got my whole family tickets to see a set of three plays performed live onstage in Hollywood.

In 1970 my own collection of stories, "Santana Morning," was published as a paperback by Powell Publications, containing mostly those imitation-Bradbury stories I'd written years earlier. It didn't do well - Bill Trotter, Powell's founder and publisher, may have been good at marketing paperbacks, but he had bad luck in finding a distributor, and ended up with Kable News, Inc., which distributed mostly porno books to adult bookstores in the late '60s.

In 1971 I made my first trip to Colorado. In 1974 I designed and began to build a house here. The town I live near, two miles away, is miraculously like Green Town, Illinois. Having spent more than 30 years here, working as a newspaper reporter and writing a humor column, I've come to know Bewnie, as we call it, as well as Ray's characters in "Dandelion Wine" must've known their town, the ravine, the trails through the woods, the shops and stores along Main Street, the library.

Salida, the other town in my adopted county, located thirty miles south of my home, resembles Green Town even more. The houses which still stand along F Street, its version of Main Street, are exact matches for Joe Mugnaini's houses, in his illustrations for "The October Country." (I also wanted to be an artist-illustrator as a teenager; I was given a scholarship at age 15 to study under Joe Mugnaini himself, at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles).

With all this, I'm glad to see there's still so much interest in Bradbury's best stories, the ones he wrote when he himself was still only in his twenties. My life has been a 60-year-long realization of those stories, leading toward a world where I can literally walk through my own October Country and distill my own Dandelion Wine, year after year. And, after sunset, here in these mountains, I can even look up and see Ray's Kaleidoscope sparkling in the sky, and his starships heading away toward the nameless planet in "Here There Be Tygers."

B

Jack Michaels:

There's some sort of way to transfer your most interesting posting to the NEW Bradbury website. This one here has mostly been abandoned in favor of a latest version...and there are a few thousand registered posters on the new one...

I'll get in touch with the moderator, 'dandelion' and see how that can be done...

In the meanwhile, Welcome!!

____

First met Ray in person at his office on Wilshire, 1970, summer, and we walked down Wilshire to an outdoor cafe about a block or two away from his office. Later it became a car lot for exotics, like Aston Martins and the like... It was a pivotal moment in my life... See: http://www.catchaway.com

____

[This message has been edited by Nard Kordell (edited 12-22-2005).]

Mr. Michaels,

Thanks for sharing such a fascinating post. As Nard mentioned, this is pretty much an abandoned site now. There is a brand new message board dedicated to all things Ray, accessible through raybradbury.com. Some of us still wander around here, though.

You are truly privileged to live where you do. For most of 1981-82, I lived in Woodland Park and worked in the Springs. Economics forced my return to Illinois, but one of my best hopes is that I can retire somewhere "out there." In the late '80s, I probably drove through your town taking the Independence Pass way to Aspen.

Somewhere around 7th grade, I picked up a paperback Martian Chronicles and have been hooked ever since. You're among friends here.

This
'forum'
needed an updated 2006 date on the front page.

_______So There!!!________

quote:

Originally posted by Jack Michaels:
Later, Bradbury and I began to drift apart, as I began drinking beer and smoking cigarettes.

You sinner, you!

quote:

Originally posted by guymontag:
You are the greatest writer of our time.

Or anybody's time!

quote:

Originally posted by Nard Kordell:
Doug!
Your 3-word postings seem to have overtaken me in number of your postings, at least here in this old forum.

Aha!

(I'm in the old forum?)

Ha! I deleted my posting thinking, well, a new posting gives the updated posting. Yes! This is the old forum transferred to the new forum.... Check the number of postings on my previous posting...

quote:

Originally posted by Nard Kordell:
Ha! I deleted my posting thinking, well, a new posting gives the updated posting. Yes! This is the old forum transferred to the new forum.... Check the number of postings on my previous posting...

What?!

quote:

Originally posted by Doug Spaulding:

quote:

Originally posted by Nard Kordell:
Ha! I deleted my posting thinking, well, a new posting gives the updated posting. Yes! This is the old forum transferred to the new forum.... Check the number of postings on my previous posting...

What?!

Don't ask.

Nard has a way of slipping between dimensions, so he can be both here AND there simultaneously.

quote:

Originally posted by philnic:
Nard has a way of slipping between dimensions, so he can be both here AND there simultaneously.

I thought I was in the twilight zone there for a minute, or at least the Ray Bradbury theatre!