All About Chester
As the story goes, it was during an overnight shift or what we would have called a "mid shift", I was doodling during my lunch break. I had been trying to create a new comic strip for the base newspaper and wasn't having much success.
Then I drew the character to the left and it was an immediate feeling of striking gold. This was my comic strip character, I knew it.
There was only one problem, I didn't know his name. So I did the only thing that could be done, I taped the drawing to the fridge and asked for help naming the character.
The next night when I came in, there were three names next to the drawing and one of them said it all. And just like that Chester P. Omally was ready for the printed pages of newspapers everywhere.
Of course I was in Greece and in the Navy and had no idea of how to even go about getting him into any newspaper except the base newspaper.
The dream was to get into real newspapers all across the U.S. but that just never happened.
I did take the time to have Chester legally copyrighted, just in case. One never knows what may happen and one day, maybe one day...
Not to worry though, Chester enjoyed being in the base newspaper as any public display of himself he was quite fine with, well as long as the attention was somewhat squarely focused on him.
His first big journey came when I attended a 6 week class in Rota, Spain.
I was in Micro Miniature Soldering School. No seriously, that was a class but there was and wasn't much to do after class was done each day.
I started to create a comic strip about the class and before we knew it, Chester had his very first series. All about his time in Rota, Spain. The strips were created on basic 8.5 x 11 paper with simple pencil and pens, and a bottle of white out!
I left Greece and headed out to the USNS Waccamaw, TAO 109. An old
fleet oiler, basically a floating gas station. Chester of course went along for the ride and on our way to the ship, we made a stop in Norfolk VA for our first Xerox copier class.
After the Navy, I continued on with copiers and soon found myself working with Canon copiers but, the first BIG class I went to was actually on a Kodak copier branded for use by Canon.
Life can imitate fiction sometimes!
Long classes lead to a lot of hotel time and that lends itself to creating a story to go along with the class.
Over the years Chester has found himself in multiple series based on our travels. And his adventures have introduced some pretty crazy side kicks along the way.
