As reported by The Comics Reporter, Mark Evanier, The Rutland Herald, and others, Tom Fagan died on Tuesday at the age of 76. Tom Fagan was a comic-book fan who founded the annual Rutland, Vermont Halloween parade back in 1959, an event which later drew many fans and pros, was featured in both Marvel and DC comics of the ’70s, and even led to an unofficial crossover between the two companies.

I got a chill when I heard the news, because even though I haven’t spoken to Tom in at least a decade, he was the first person to make an impression on me at my first comic-book convention. Which means that my acquaintance with him extends back as far as Phil Seuling’s July 4th weekend Comic-Con in 1970.

I was only 15 when I found myself sitting next to Tom in the audience at that year’s auction. When a pristine copy of Action Comics #1 failed to make the minimum bid of $325, the seller then brought it over, removed it from its frame, and allowed Tom to page through it. He reached out to me in kindness and allowed me to peer at it with him. I was in awe of this artifact, and amazed to see that not all of the stories inside were in full color, something I hadn’t known about early Golden Age comics. Not everyone would have been as welcoming to a twerp like me, and I appreciated that fact.

Tom and I always ended up spending time together at Phil’s con’s, and he mentioned me frequently in the con reports he wrote up in the early ’70s. In 1971, I told him I planned to attend the Rutland parade as Cthulhu by covering myself with a drop cloth and hanging squid from it, but at 16, I didn’t quite have the stuff to pull it off. In either 1972 or 1973, when I looked much like this, I said that I would attend the parade dressed as Big Bear from the Jack Kirby comic Forever People. Since I hung around with a bunch of other fans whose body types matched the other members of the group, we thought we could make it work, but building the team’s Super-Cycle proved too much for us, and that idea ended up being abandoned, too.

By the time I did actually make it to one of Tom’s famed parades, Irene and I were already married, she went as the Thor character the Valkyrie, and I’m ashamed to say that all I did was don a store-bought werewolf mask. Sorry about that, Tom! If I was home instead of traveling today, I’d scan in a photo of us just to further humiliate myself as a form of penance.

In any case, I always had a fun time when I was around Tom, and wish that those times had been more frequent. Let that be a yet another lesson (and there have been far too many of them lately) to not let circumstances stand in the way of staying current with friends and acquaintances.

Thanks, Tom, for being one of those who opened the door and let me in so that I could become who I am today.