Dedication & Foreword

Above is the dedication from my father to his “mom & dad.” I don’t understand this dedication.

When OTD! was published, my father did not have a wonderful relationship with his dad and especially not his stepmom. Their apartment was not a happy place, and my father left for the military to get away.

As for his birth mom, he didn’t even know where she was.

My father wasn’t 10 years old when the Great Depression began to take its toll on his family. For a time, they were forced to live in the back of my grandfather’s frame shop, which very quickly transformed the Great Depression into very real depression for my grandmother Shirley Wenger Kantz. In what seemed like an overnight coup, she was committed to an institution based on a charge of a “nervous breakdown,” and suddenly a new woman, Anne, was moving in with her own kids. 

My father has no memories of his mother beyond that period, although when he and my mother moved into the house where I grew up in 1962, they would occasionally receive a dime in an envelope with no return address. Was it a reminder of the dimes my grandmother used to give to my father to see a movie or get some candy when he was a boy? It was a bit of a Twilight Zone moment in the early lives of Sandra and Phil Kantz, and it was a mystery that was never solved. Records show Shirley Kantz died in 1977, but we can find no record of where she was buried.

My father does have memories of Anne and her sons, the invaders taking over his home. The sons were bullies, and Anne rarely missed an opportunity to let my father and his sister know that they were second-class citizens in the same apartment. A hierarchy was formed, and my father and his sister literally ate lower grades of meat than their stepbrothers at the dinner table. Anne threatened to kick my father out of the house on multiple occasions, and the Air Force provided him with the best of both worlds: leaving and a chance to see the world.

A Little Too Forward Foreword

The foreword to OTD! conveys my father’s silly sense of humor, something that will surprise nobody who knows him, my brother, or me. In fact, OTD! cannot be divorced from this silliness. Some of it—sorry dad!—is entirely silly while not being very funny. A lot of it contains out-of-date sight gags and wordplay. 

My dad refers to babes, or one “babe” in particular. As a heads-up, all interactions between men and women in these cartoons are straight out of the 1950s. I believe these attitudes were more about understanding his male-dominated audience in the armed services than the way he viewed women at the time. But let’s face it: back then most men treated women as sex objects back then. (As if we don’t now?) These were sex-deprived men living together in military barracks, and what else would they have to focus on in their early 20s? 

I have also never known my father to draw graffiti or otherwise deface property, but I didn’t know him before I was born. Maybe that was Phil Kanz, not Phil Kantz.