Well, growing up in rural Michigan in the last 70’s, things were so much simpler. There were no big superstores of art supplies for example. Crayola made crayons. That’s all they made. You had the 64 box which was awesome, or 128, with the little sharpener in it and you could sharpen the crayons. That’s all Crayola made. But now they make a million different kinds of things.
All different kinds of stuff. When I was a boy, when I was a young artist, that didn’t exist. If I wanted to make something like a pop-up, there was no Staples to go into the store and get card stock to make a pop-up. I had to find that material on my own. My mother was a secretary at Ford Motor Company and she worked in the personnel department there. She worked there for many years.
Being originally from Michigan, everyone’s connected to the automobile industry there. She was a secretary at Ford Motor Company in personnel. When somebody got fired she would dump out their manila filing folders and then bring them home to me and I could cut them up and make them into pop-ups. It was great because it was just the right consistency, the right weight for making pop-ups, and they were blank so I could color them, make any kind of picture, make any kind of story that I wanted to on them at all.
It was really very much a make-do kind of creative time for kids in the 70’s.
