I think the first character I ever drew was Fred Flintstone. Why? Who knows? You would think as a child I would be more into Bugs Bunny or Tom and Jerry, but I was always a Hanna-Barbera fan and for some reason, I would draw Fred all the time. I wish I had some of those original drawings, maybe my mother has them stashed away somewhere, you know how mothers save all that stuff.

I loved the tv show The Flintstones and also so many of the Hanna-Barbera cartoons – Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear, Magilla Gorilla, Peter Potomus, Touche Turtle and so on. I vaguely remember them being on tv early evenings, something like 7:30 pm and each night was another show – Mondays was Huckleberry, Tuesday was Quickdraw McGraw and so on.

One of my earliest memories was maybe when I was two or three years old, I remember my mother chasing me around our Brooklyn apartment, trying to get me into the bathtub and I remember Huckleberry Hound coming on tv. The theme song was playing as I was running around, trying to get away from taking a bath!

But even with that early memory, it was all about Fred Flintstone. And did I become a Hanna-Barbera fan because of my mother? I mean, I’m assuming she put those shows on tv for me, so she chose them rather than other things like Bugs Bunny. I remember our house was full of Hanna-Barbera toys – I remember life sized cut outs (at least for a three or four year old they were life sized), I remember a Dino mechanical toy. I remember that at my grandmothers’s house. I can literally see that in my mind, walking on her kitchen floor. I looked it up on Ebay and found this. This is it. It’s going for over $800! I saw one cheaper, about $44, but it isn’t in mint condition like this one.