While all of this was going on, I was as busy as a panda at a bamboo buffet. My band director Harry L. Dinkle’s star was still on the rise. Norman Lee Publishing had continued to bring out collections of the band strips from Funky, which helped spread the word to even those culturally deprived areas where Funky wasn’t in the local paper. Pretty soon Harry and the strip began being honored with awards from a number of music organizations and with honorary degrees from a number of schools. As a result, I was doing a lot more traveling around the country as I spoke to various state and local band organizations, along with the occasional Cub Scout pack or two. Cartooning is something of a hermit-like existence, so one nice aspect of this was that my wife Cathy and my son Brian, who was now old enough to join us, got to go on some de facto vacations together as I traveled the country to give talks.
From The Complete Funky Winkerbean Volume Six
