When I was about six, I got totally hooked on the "Buck Rogers" comic strip. I couldn't wait for the next Sunday's funnies to see what was going to happened, so I grabbed pencil and paper and drew what I figured was going to happen. A few years later, I was drawing my own characters and doing my own stories. I had a fair-size collection of possibilities, including a masked and costumed crime-fighter ("Batman" influence) and a fighter pilot who practically won World War II single-handed (he bore an odd resemblance to Steve Canyon). When I was thirteen or fourteen, I could draw various aircraft such as the P-51 Mustang or the B-25 Mitchell right down to the last rivet. In my early teens, that was going to be it: I was going be another Milton Caniff, Hal Foster, or Alex Raymond and make my livelihood drawing comic strips.

Once my stories got a little more sophisticated, I learned the hard way to write up a synopsis of the story ahead of time, otherwise I could waste a lot of time, ink, and paper getting my hero into a pickle I couldn't get him out of. I wrote the stories up like a movie script: dialogue plus a description of the illustration. But soon I found that I was writing the stories way ahead and not getting back to do the strips themselves. By that time, I was in high school, and I took an English elective:   a creative writing class. The teacher liked my stuff and she was very encouraging.

In the meantime, I had taken up fencing (one Rafael Sabatini novel and one Errol Flynn movie too many), and in order to find more people to fence with, I got permission (over some faculty members' misgivings regarding safety) to teach an after-school intramural fencing class. Over a couple of years, I had several dozen pupils. Becoming a "fencing master" had a nice ring to it, but there were already a couple of good fencing teachers in Seattle, and they taught for free, because they were active in competition and they wanted to keep their amateur standing. Couldn't make a living at it.

I entered the University of Washington with the idea of writing Great Literature (and science fiction when nobody was looking).

Then I fell in with rampaging gangs of folk singers, including Sandy Paton, Walt Robertson, and Bob Nelson (Deckman). The next thing I knew, I was playing the guitar and learning songs. Some desperate televison producer from the local educational channel dragged me in front of a camera to do a series on folk music, and in the resulting local notoriety, I found myself singing in a coffeehouse and doing concerts—and strangely enough, getting paid for it. That sorta thing can hook a guy! The Great American Novel (or the Great Galactic Novel [if nobody was looking] would just have to wait until I got this folk singing aberration out of my system.

Since then, I've taken various "day jobs." I've worked as a production illustrator (draftsman) at Boeing, a radio announcer and news director, a telephone operator, and a technical writer (for the Bonneville Power Administration—so I've worked for the same company that Woody Guthrie worked for back in the Thirties or so). But I've kept singing off and on all this time—and I'm still doing it.

So it's not out of my system yet. But I am writing a lot these days.

I still draw and sketch a bit from time to time. The occasional irreverent cartoon.

Don Firth
(Still trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up. If, that is. . . .)