One of My Earliest Writing Campaigns...

Last Update: July 07, 2012
Parochial school, 1967. First Grade

My campaign proposal:

Deliberately misspell the word "cat." I probably used the 'k' ...this did not fool the nun. She knew I was better than that and was not impressed with my humbleness.

All campaigns that fail the marketing test need further research...

She made me write the word out 500 times on a yellow line-ruled paper in rows and columns. With the wide lined-penmanship paper we had, it probably took several leaves of paper to finish the task. At the end, I wrote it out in big letters on the last page.

Great campaigns come with controversy...

I will tell you how I got my mother to that school and bawling out my teacher nun and the Mother Superior...

When I got home, as if to say, "Hey look what I did in school today!"

"Cat cat CAT CAT cat CAt cat Kat Cat"

I went into Raymond's room with a red indelible (they were called 'Magic Markers,") and wrote the word in all different forms, all over my brother's furniture and walls.

That got the message out ...even though by this time, we had the furniture and walls pretty banged-up.

Thus my very first writing campaign!


...and my very first keyword!

My graphics studio was right in the next room...my bedroom, where I had promptly drawn representations of life all over the wall above my bed with the big hole through the mattress.

One of my sketches, I do remember, was a church building.

The Advertising Department...

I left pretty a pretty compelling advert on the wall in the hallway between the bedrooms...

A big caricature of Raymond "eating" flies. I had smashed a fly on the face (for graphic enhancement) and wrote in big letters down the side:

FLYS

Raymond
eat
the
Head
of
the
FLYS


This work of art was found under the wallpaper during renovations in the 1980s.
Join the Discussion
Write something…
Recent messages
Labman_1 Premium
I bet that was a conversation starter during the renovations..:)
Actually it didn't get noticed. I was the one who stripped the wallpaper. I didn't have a camera at the time so I drew it scaling it down in a grid. Since, the notebook has been lost.

Actually, things I did when I was young did get discussed in future conversations (like having previously turned the bathroom lockset around because we were playing 'jail,') and consequently locked my uncle in the upstairs bathroom and took off. He had been in there, hot July. I did not want him to sleep until 2 pm, thus was my way of keeping him up. I do remember getting punished for something like this when my mother brought it up as a conversation piece.My mother wasn't too amused by any of this when I did it. I thought it was a good Saturday thing to put up today.
garethb Premium
Great story.
I sure did some naughty things when I was young, like draw a basketball court on my grandmother's new wall-to-wall carpet and realized that this could not be undone.
Top