22-VI-1962.

Rainy day. I reconstructed the date only by the episode of Flash Gordon which was on the front page of Zabavnik that day, as I went to that kiosk at šećerana to buy it (and NIN and Politika - dad had the party duty to be informed, which meant buying one daily and one weekly...). By this time, they ran Džoni Hazard, and four Disney's movies as comics - I remember Polyanna, Swis family Robinson, Parent trap and a few others.

The kiosk was selling newspaper and cigarettess mostly, plus tax and postage stamps (though there was the little post office next to the gatekeeper's room, but it was slow and probably had to handle lots of official registered mail from kombinat. I did use that many times in the latter years, until they moved it into Lesnina, the other end of the street.

The cigarettes were sold by pack of 20 or by eaches (stupid english). While waiting my turn, I'd often see someone buy five cigarettes, sometimes just three, sometimes even a dozen. The clerk would wrap them up halfway in clean paper, and would just wrinkle the loose end of that paper - enough to keep them together in an upper pocket. By the time the package would unravel, the cigarettes would be gone. The cigarette filters didn't exist yet, they'd appear by the end of the decade, so the cigarettes were short, 80mm jobs, not quite cylindric but slightly flattened.

She also sold flintstones, also counted and wrapped into a slip of paper, or one-time gasoline bulbs for lighters. The bulbs were made of soft rubber, so to fill a lighter one would have to pinch it at one end, or make a hole, and squeeze it.

The episodes of Flash Gordon those years were written by Dan Barry*. Which is probably what got me into SF in the first place. Many decades later I discovered Alex Raymond's original series and just didn't like it. All those princes, kings with daughters who'd confuse the plot by hitting on Flash, monster beasts he'd have to fight - that just wasn't SF to me. This year it wasn't just one 13-week episode after another, it was the long Skorpi/Dhreen line starting by end of march, and there was this dreamy character of Ellta who wakes up from hibernation when Flash finds her. The print in Zabavnik didn't color her skin green, as I've seen in some spanish-language editions later, so she was just the perfect blonde for the seven-yer-old me to develop an imaginary crush on. I thought it passed after a while, but then at some point, beyond the age of sixty, I realized that almost all the girls I was interested in, or hitting on, were blondes. Natural blondes. Apart from that one quasi courting with E in 1968 and one episode in 1978... dang, all of them. And natural blondes are a bit of a rarity here, perhaps one in ten.

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* Though later I found that Harry Harrison wrote them, mostly. There's even a self-mocking episode with a time machine where in a future, very soilent-green-like setting he is venerated as Hari Hari, a deity.

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Mentions: kombinat, Lesnina, šećerana, in serbian

4-III-2020 - 6-II-2026