This was the best era of stock car racing. Every car was homemade, there were no factory built cars. I was able to rub elbows with some of the top Short Track drivers in the Southeast: Buzzie, Emil and Wayne Reiutmann, Will Cagle, Bill Roynon, Dave McGinnis, Dick Pratt, Pete Folse, Dave Scarborough, Buzz Barton, Maynard Troyer, Bobby Allison, Cush Revette, Possom Jones, Larry Brazil, Jack Arnold and many others. Although I was having a ball at Golden Gate Speedway, my time at USF was not productive and this fascinating experience was not what my parents had in mind for my future. They decided that a smaller campus would be the turning point for me so in 1965 I was shipped to Rome, GA and enrolled in Shorter College. When I left home, I had 22 boxes in my closet. They were loaded with all the comic books, pulp magazines, paperback books, movie magazines, sports publications and racing programs, and photos that I had accumulated up to that point.
When I used to tell people I went to college in Rome they thought I was really cool until they found out it was Rome, GA. The city was located midway between Atlanta, GA and Chattanooga, TN. Don't get me wrong, while the culture was a shock for me, the geography was fantastic. Mountains, hills, streams, caves, rivers, dirt roads, and woods provided lots of fun for someone who had spent his life near the beach. Many of the kids at Shorter were there for the same reason as myself—they did poorly at their first school and this was a sort of "last chance" school. Everyone wanted to maintain their student draft status and still have a large dose of fun. I got involved with the Phi Delta Tau fraternity and was the president for my final two years in 1966 and 1967. A lot of crazy things went on—things that will never appear on this web site—but we will include a few of the more tame photos.
During my last term in college I had to take a job and the only thing I found was a position with a magazine distributor. It is strange how things work out. My responsibility was to strip the logos off the comic book covers so they could be returned to the publisher for credit. Now if you have been wondering who it was that stripped all those comic book covers, it was me. The guy that ran the place let me have all the three-quarter cover comics I wanted. I took them to my dorm room and although I did not get the same excitement from reading them that I had a decade earlier, I was intrigued by some of the classified ads in the Marvel titles. People were actually advertising to sell back issue comic books, pulp magazines and movie posters. There was even a collectors fan magazine, the Rocket's Blast - Comic Collector, advertised in the classified section of the Marvel comics titles. Robert Bell, Howard Rogofsky, Passaic Book Store and Grand Book Center all offered catalogs featuring old comics for sale. I sent away for all of them. Rogofsky's catalog was the best as he actually gave detailed information about which characters appeared in each issue. His price for Superman #1 was $15.00 in 1967. My thought was that while I was pleased to see an interest in the old comics, I would never be able to pay $15.00 for one comic book. Boy, was I wrong.
Go West, Young Man
Graduation finally arrived. Man, did I want to get out of Georgia. It was fun for a while but got stale after a couple of years. A few of my fraternity brothers and I decided we should head to California. We heard so much about California in the 60s—hippies, hot rods, rock music, movie studios, etc.—that it made me feel like I was required to go there.
Hollywood Boulevard was one of the first places to see when you went to California in the 1960s. Cool cars, unusual people, strange stores, comic book and movie poster stores—this was like heaven! I really got back into comics at the end of the1960s. I had my 22 boxes of comics and collectibles shipped out from Florida and placed some sales ads in the Rockets Blast - Comic Collector. As soon as the ad broke I got responses from collectors who wanted to buy and sell. Over the next couple of months, I maxed out my MasterCards buying collections. I realized I was either going to have to get in the business full-time or file for bankruptcy.
In the late 1960s, Hollywood was the center of comic book and movie poster collecting on the West Coast. You could find over half a dozen big collectors stores in the Hollywood Boulevard area. The original was probably Cherokee Bookshop, a rare book store that opened a comic book department that eventually had the largest selection of Golden Age comics in the world. They built their inventory up before most people knew comics had a collectors value but did not maintain their inventory and by the late 1970s were surviving on past glories. Collectors Book Store, also known as Bennetts Book Store, had a massive selection in the early years of high grade Golden Age comics and an incredible movie poster inventory that had depth from the silent era through the 1950s, all in high grade. They ran a series of auctions in the 1980s that devoured their inventory and were never able to build it back. Of all the Hollywood area stores, they had the widest selection with a huge amount of pulps and original art, in addition to comics and movie material. Larry Edmunds Cinema Book Store had tons of movie material as did Hollywood Poster Exchange. Everyone who collected was in Hollywood on Saturdays going from store to store and meeting with their buddies on the street. It was almost like a collectors convention every weekend. Those few years were probably the most fun of all my years of collecting. There were no reference books or price guides in print. You had to live by your knowledge and experience. If you could tell the style of the publishers and individual artists, you were way ahead of the game. I had a knack for spotting artists' styles ever since I first saw comics as a child. Many stories were unsigned so the ability to identify artists became important.
In 1970 I saw an ad for the first San Diego Comic Book Convention, so I loaded my books and drove to the El Cortez Hotel in Downtown San Diego. I was one of about 35 guys who took a dealers table at that inaugural event. It was a wild, wild trendsetting event and is remembered today as a landmark weekend in the history of west coast comic book collecting. There were probably around 150 people at that first event and it really took off. The 2007 show had an attendance somewhere north of 125,000 rabid comic book, film and animation fans. It is now held in the new and large
PRODUCTS 
College photo of David T. Alexander
College photo of David T. Alexander
David T. Alexander in his 1939 Ford