Kids Kounty

I thought maybe I would share something a little different for a couple of days. Back when my grandson was a toddler, I use to fool around with his photos. It gave me an excuse to learn to use photo editing software through problem solving and I would try to come up with something humorous. As I remember it, getting the laser beams to look like what they were suppose to be was the biggest challenge in this photo.

Over a period of a couple of years of goofing around with his pictures, an idea developed for a newspaper feature where readers could send in a picture of their kid/kids and I would try to create something humorous for a future issue of the paper. I pitched it to the general manager of the county paper and he liked the idea. The paper had a circulation of ten or eleven thousand and they did a little write-up to "launch" the feature.  I called it, "Kids Kounty." For the first panel, I used my grandson. This was 2002. Brad Pitt was pretty "hot" at the time.

I had fun with it. It could be challenging when a parent would send a picture that had absolutely nothing humorous about it. A decade later, most of these kids have attained adulthood and would not be recognizable by anyone reading this blog, so I don't mind posting them here.

I was talking to a woman in my neighborhood one day. She had a daughter who looked like a young girl who was doing a lot of commercials on TV at the time. I told her about the feature and suggested she should submit a photo. She said her husband would never allow it and when I asked why, she said he would be concerned about kidnapping. That is a whole different world than I live in, but you know, in this day and age, I guess it is a real concern.

After about a year, the feature did what the general manager of the paper called, "Died of loneliness." It was very difficult to motivate people to send in pictures. Most of the pictures I used were kids of people I knew personally. One thing that did come out of it, however, was it lead to my being hired by the newspaper to work in the graphics department. After working there six or seven years (70 for the paper), the paper also died of loneliness.