Marvel Comics moved downtown from its well-used offices on Madison Avenue to the shiny new ones on Park Avenue South! Oh… ‘bout 82, I reckon. But old Ralph—we called him Old Ralph – he wasn’t so sure he liked the idea of change. Not that change was bad—well, maybe it was, but not all change. Okay, most change…
Well, anyway, downtown we moved and come the day we all showed up at the 28th Street train station, came up to the sunlight and found 387. Well, it had an awning back then, knocked clean off one night when a big, big crane came around the corner… but that’s another story…
So Old Ralph comes along with the rest of us to our spiffy, brand-spanking new offices, feeling like St. Peter should be waving us in past the glass walls, the stinky carpets, the glistening ceiling lights… We all just eased into the great, clean new space. Everybody had names on their doors. We all settled in like the true pioneers we were. When came a wail, a sound more inhuman than human (if you know what I mean), a sound like the tearing of a soul, “But where’s my office?” It was Old Ralph, crumpled on the floor, looking tossed aside like yesterday’s Marvel Two-In-Ones. Where was Old Ralph’s office?
Old Ralph couldn’t find it. Looked high and low, we all pitched in—‘cause that’s what us comics folk do, we pitch in, especially copies of Adventures On The Planet Of The Apes. And we looked back by the freight elevators and the mail room. We looked around by the second conference room almighty close to Executive Territory up towards the Park Avenue side. We looked over by the copier corner in the other side of the freight elevators.
No office for Ralph!
That stoic stoic man was as close to tears as that as I’d ever seen him.
Then his youthful Assistant ran up, shave tail whippersnapper, the rising star Bob Harris, all out of breath… He had found it!
We all ran off in a bustle to get Old Ralph to his new office…
