Youthful Creativity
The earliest act of creativity that I can remember came in the form of a comic book. I was by no means a talented artist. The characters I created were the stereotypical products of an eight year old mind. For example my villain was big, bald and ugly. I dubbed him Butch Meaney. It’s a little disconcerting how much I now resemble my early ideal of a bad guy.
My parents, aunts and uncles have ribbed me for that character ever since. My Uncle Carl went so far as to give the name to an especially ugly family pet. For reasons that I can not recall, the subject of the story was boxing. I would draw mugshots of each boxer and line them up in a tournament formation. A roll of the dice would determine a winner. I summarized the results in comic book form using pictures and captions to clarify the details. God only knows how many hours I spent drawing pictures of tiny boxers.
It wasn’t long before I realized that certain people would pay for my creations. The comics were converted to plays and with the help of my cousins I began putting on shows. We charged a dime a head and made a killing clearing nearly three dollars a show. This was a huge revelation to my budding entrepreneurial mind. That I could create something out of thin air and people would pay for it was beyond amazing. Even better was the fact that I was just having fun. To this day I enjoy nothing more than coming up with an idea and developing it. Sadly, not all of my ideas have caused people to line up with wallets in hand. I’ve spent most of my life trying to come up with that perfect combination of interesting and profitable. I am still searching.
This website serves as a sort of haphazard living autobiography. I would like to state that it is written for an audience of one, me, but that would be a lie. I suffer just enough from megalomania to believe that others might be interested in my ramblings. Practically speaking this website is a platform for documenting my ever evolving interests, ideas and life experiences.
Erik Craddock