Late Word Comes to Us

of the sudden death at the age of seventy of the former publisher of Editorial Humor/The Boston Comic News, R. Dean Wallace. Dean gave me and my co-writer Jon Haber our first steady columnist gig and largely stood aside and allowed us to jabber on and on about anything under the sun...sans renumeration of course. What HE got was a column with a pronounced affinity for the Masterworks of Steve Reeves, the scientific mischances of Percival Lowell, The Fall and Rise of Elmer McCurdy or the subtle genius of Earl K. Long. What WE got was a priceless opportunity to perfect our craft, all the writing I have to date was the consequence of lessons I learned for better or worse under Dean Wallace's aegis. Dean was a visionary, only a visionary could have stubbornly hung on in the face of a market less and less friendly to small periodicals for nine long years. He was also supremely eccentric, difficult to negotiate with and prone to flights of fancy as the Victorians would say. But quite literally, he presided over the last Great Newspaper Adventure in the Boston Metropolitan Area, he was never a breaker of proverbs and he will give the Devil His Due. Peace to his Ashes...He will be missed.