Sunday, September 4th, will be our 35th wedding anniversary, which Irene and I will celebrate at an undisclosed (for now) location. As you might expect, that’s made us a wee bit nostalgic, and sent us back to our photo albums to look at how all began.

So here are a couple of pics from when we were but tadpoles, back in the mid-’70s when we both worked in the Marvel Comics Bullpen and would have first met.

Can you believe that cutie ever took a second look at that doofus?

Many years ago, my brother and I made a movie to show at the surprise party we threw for our parents’ 25th wedding anniversary, which was 31 years ago today. That’s them below, in the Bensonhurst apartment where Irene and I lived at the time, just before they cut the wedding cake.

At the time, I was 23 and my brother was 19. We ransacked our parents’ photo albums, trying to be surreptitious about it so they wouldn’t suspect what we were doing. Lee, who at the time was taking film classes at Brooklyn College, did most of the hard work—he shot the film and cut it together the old-fashioned way, by hand, and did all of the animation himself in those difficult days before digital. (more…)

Irene and I have turned into LPs today—we are now 33 1/3. To translate that, we were married on September 4, 1976, which means that as of today, January 4, 2010, we’ve been married 33 years and four months.

Here we are many, many (many, many) years ago on that date in a photo taken in Irene’s Mom’s backyard in Bethesda. This is the photo that has resided in my wallet ever since that life-changing event.

Irene and I will celebrate the day by locking ourselves in our respective offices and working like dogs, occasionally blowing kisses up and down the stairs.

Back in 1978, Irene and I celebrated our second wedding anniversary with a big blowout. I’d just gotten a massive freelance paycheck—for The Captain Midnight Book of Sports, Health and Nutrition, I think—and I decided to spend almost all of the proceeds on our special day. In the evening, we had a rented Rolls Royce, orchestra tickets to the then-hit Broadway show On the Twentieth Century, dinner reservations at the reopened Stork Club, and a suite at the Plaza Hotel overlooking Central Park.

But the fun had actually started earlier in the day, when we picked up the Best Man and the Maid of Honor in a stretch limo and took them for lunch at … Windows on the World, the restaurant which had once operated on top of the north tower of the World Trade Center.

This photo was snapped during that lunch. I see it whenever I look up my computer screen. And when I do, I remember that we can never go back.

And I remember why.