Daily-Dilly

[Martin Hash]

People used to keep diaries. I remember getting one for Christmas when I was in grade school. I wrote childish things in it and still have it to this day. In fact, I have various diaries written in calendars and notebooks throughout high school. My grandfather always wrote in a diary. He would sit at the kitchen table and fill in every line of every page; that’s what I learned to do, and I still do: every line of every page, even if I have to get creative to come up with something: original song lyrics, clever original aphorisms, sometimes even a quick sketch of something. I’ve wondered if I was copying my grandfather’s writing practices or maybe that’s just an expression of minor autism? If so, Grandpa had it too.

My grandpa’s diaries were salacious for us kids because his were called “Daily-Dilly” and they had a dirty joke on every page. I can vaguely remember trying to figure out what was funny about the jokes as a kid and not being able to. Soon after I got married, Grandpa started giving me Daily-Dillys for Christmas. By that time I understood the jokes; mostly bordering on tame but at least some were somewhat funny. I looked forward to every joke and never missed one; part of the autism I guess? Unfortunately, Daily-Dilly quit printing in 1995. Now I write my diary in daily planners.

This year, as a New Year’s resolution, I was going to try and draw some cartoon panels. I thought about it for a while and decided I wanted to draw in the style of the Daily-Dilly. When I got my old ones out of the attic and was going through them, a heavy sense of nostalgia washed over me. I loved the Daily-Dillys humor more as an old person than the person who wrote in the diaries half a century ago. I still have all of my grandpa’s diaries; the Daily-Dillys start in 1968. At the time, he was ten years younger than I am right now. I didn’t know what to think about that; I tried not the read anything he’d written but some old names got through to me. The nostalgia was debilitating.

What I did know was that theses Daily-Dilly cartoons were a national treasure and couldn’t be lost! I looked up the company but it hadn’t been in existence since the books went out of print. I looked up the trademark and it had expired from disuse. I guessed it was up to me to ensure the Daily-Dilly legacy, so I took pictures of the jokes in chronological order and combined them 20 at a time into 2-minute videos which I posted to YouTube. I’m going to do them all, starting started from my grandfather’s 1968 edition but when it gets to my era, I’ll use my diaries as source material.