When I was a pre-teen my father, in addition to his job at City Hall, brought in extra money as a freelance architect. One day I happened to pass by the big walk-in closet he used as his “office” as he was working on a drawing of a front elevation of an apartment building he had designed. He called out to me. He was having trouble making the windows look like glass. Did I have any suggestions?

Since my parents didn’t approve of my comic book reading, I was hesitant to, but after a moment I told him that in those comics glass in windows was normal indicated with three or four parallel lines drawn at an angle. He extended his mechanical pencil toward me and said “Show me.”

With my brain practically exploding I took the pencil and sketched what I had described in one pane. Dad took the pencil back and tried it himself. “Perfect,” he said, and added “thanks!”

A few years later, when Dad stopped freelancing, I inherited all his draughting equipment, including that pencil. I would eventually use it on all my comic work until around 1985 when I switched to a thinner lead.