John A. Mozzer interviewed Hal Kinney in 1974
“I was a senior at Glastonbury High School (Hartford area) when I published this fanzine. Too bad that I published only this one issue. Least anyone is confused, I grew up primarily in the Reading, Pennsylvania area (where I knew Jim Steranko, and interviewed Jack Keller.) But my family and I moved from Pennsylvania to Connecticut during the summer of 1973, just in time for my senior year of high school. This meant leaving my comic book collecting friends in Pennsylvania. I found new comic book collecting friends in the Hartford area, but it was never really quite the same because I wasn’t there for as long.”
-John A. Mozzer
John A. Mozzer:
I’m talking to Hal Kinney of The Bookie in East Hartford, and Hal’s going to tell me how he got ownership of the store and from whom.
Hal Kinney:
I bought the store in 1969 from a fellow named Phil[?] Rollins who handled literally only used books, and we were selling magazines, used books, stuff like that. Literally, no comics. And Dan Lewonczyk came in, got me interested in comics, put me in line with what comic collectors were thinking about, what they were looking for. And I started to go out of my way to look for this stuff, to keep the comic collectors happy. And of course, I’ve mentioned this before, it started out naturally as a commercial venture. But when I found out what nice people comic collectors were, it got to be more of a hobby than a money making bit.
John A. Mozzer:
First, the store was on Broad Street, then you moved from Broad Street to New Park. Why?
Hal Kinney:
I don’t know if I should put this in the tape. The store on Broad Street was in a neighborhood that was dominated by small children, and they used to drive me crazy, come running in and out. They were very undisciplined kids. The kind that said, “If you don’t let me in, I’ll break your windows tonight.” Of course, you know why I moved over here? Because the roof leaked like a sieve over in New Park. And now, with this gas thing, I’m much closer to home here, so that’s better too.
John A. Mozzer:
And Jeff Rudolph too, came in?
Hal Kinney:
I’d say the three people that got me going were Armstrong and Jeff Rudolph and Dan. So those are the first three collectors that I met. Surprisingly, they had nothing to do with the financial success, because all three were comic collecting for literally years. So there was literally nothing that I could sell them that they needed. The three of them together, although they didn’t benefit from it, they were the ones who brought comics to everybody else from out here, because they were unselfish enough to want to share their hobby and their love of comics with everybody else.
John A. Mozzer:
When was your first convention?
Hal Kinney:
’70.
John A. Mozzer:
You said you had some problems there with the table.
Hal Kinney:
Oh, that was a beaut. I was ill-prepared for the convention.
John A. Mozzer:
That was Seuling’s con, right?
Hal Kinney:
Oh, yeah. That was the only con then.
John A. Mozzer:
Was it? In New York.
Hal Kinney:
Well, I wasn’t going out to San Francisco, that’s for sure. Jeff Rudolph had bought a table for the con. He was selling some of his own collection, some comics for a dealer in California. Since he didn’t have a tremendously big stock, he said, “Want to split the table?” I’ll go down for the day, see what it’s like. And I just managed to pick up 20 or 30 golden age comics that I had no market for at all in Hartford. So it was curiosity to see what conventions were like and a desire to get rid of those comics, which I really didn’t need here and spend them on comic fans who could use them.
Hal Kinney:
We get down in New York, early in the morning, and Dan came with us, and he had a small group of comics to sell. So the tables were six-feet wide. You could put, I think, eight or 10 lines of comics. So Jeff had one half of the table, and I had the other half, and then we let Dan go in the middle of it. Right? And we got the table all set up. And a dealer from California came, that Jeff was selling the comics for, and he wanted part of the table too. So we had four dealers on one lousy table, and we were crawling all over each other all day.
John A. Mozzer:
What about your radio interview with William Shatner? What’s the story behind that?
Hal Kinney:
It came about at one of the conventions. I was interviewed by a reporter, and he wrote a story, which was picked up by the wire services, and it went in papers scattered all over the country. I know it came out in Miami and Des Moines, Iowa, Los Angeles. I got a call from a radio station in Los Angeles, asking me for a radio interview. And he made an appointment for a Saturday afternoon, I believe it was. It was two or three days hence, and that was all it was to it. I didn’t know anything about it. I was just going to be interviewed over the radio and being asked questions about comics. Didn’t think nothing of it.
Hal Kinney:
Saturday afternoon, I got the call, right on time. The fellow whom I’d been talking to said, “Mr. Kinney, you ready to go ahead with your radio interview?” I says, “Sure. Shoot.” He says, “Well, at the sound of the time, you’ll be on the air.”
Hal Kinney:
He says, “The interviewer is going to be Bill Shatner. And the other guest is Ray Bradbury.” Ding. There was literally nothing you could do there. You had to push right through. It was like Moses when he come through the Red Sea, there was nowhere else to go.
Hal Kinney:
If he had told me that Bill Shatner was going to interview me a couple of days before, I think I would have psyched myself out, and I would have got on the radio and said, “Uh, duh, um.” But as it was, I think it came out pretty good. I tried to get a tape recording, but they never sent one.
John A. Mozzer:
But Shatner put you down, or something. “What do you want to read comics for?”
Hal Kinney:
Shatner put every comic fan down. He couldn’t understand, and a lot of people can’t, what people see in comics. Ray Bradbury, on the other hand, had collected comics and newspaper strips since he was a small boy. He was especially a Prince Valiant fan, if I remember correctly. In fact, he had a whole run of Prince Valiant pages from the beginning on.
John A. Mozzer:
Buck Rogers too.
Hal Kinney:
Yeah. I don’t know if that was brought up or not. Shatner couldn’t get it into his head, the reason for comic fandom. And one of the questions he asked was, “What is the aesthetic value of collecting comics?” And what can you say to that?
Hal Kinney:
Well, he pinned me to the wall with this question, “What is the aesthetic? Come on, Mr. Kinney.” You know how intense he is. I answered in a saying that I had heard from another collector, Jeff Rudolph for that matter, that comic collecting is making a hobby out of your childhood. And Shatner, it kind of cooled him off, and he said, “Well said.” That was about the end of the interview, I guess.
John A. Mozzer:
Shatner said, “Well said.”?
Hal Kinney:
Yeah.
John A. Mozzer:
Okay. Good enough.
Hal Kinney:
Thank God.
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