Yesterday's Papers - Wizard and, "The day I scored the winning goal for Cardiff City in the FA CUP"

I don't remember The Wizard comic book at all - a quick visit to Wiki tells me that it originally ran from 1922 until 1963 and was then relaunched in 1970 and went on until 1978, in total 1,970 issues. I wasn't even born for the first run and I didn't pick up any of the relaunched comic. In those days the only D C Thomson title I read was Warlord as I always preferred the IPC titles.Or was it Fleetway in those days?

In fact I've only ever seen two issues of this comic and those are the ones sitting on my desk as I write - one dated August 22nd 1970 and the other Mar 21st 1970. It's still great fun to look through them, though.


Wizard was billed as ,"the paper with the football special" and the sport is highly featured inside both issues. One nice bit for me was discovering a page devoted to Cardiff City - my local team and of course I can quite often drop into coversations about the team, that I scored the winning goal against Arsenal in the 1927 FA Cup.

CONFUSED!!!!

It's simple really - a few years ago I appeared in a drama/documentary that was shown on the Welsh television channel, S4C. The programe Clwb Caerdydd was about Cardiff winning the FA Cup back in 1927 and I played the goal scorer, Hughie Ferguson. And believe me making me look like a world class player took some camera trickery.

The letter's page in Wizard provides another excellent snapshot of the times. The comic offered prizes for letters published with either a transistor radio or Raleigh bike going to the top letter of the week. There were lesser prizes for other letters used.

Reader A Thom of Edinburgh tells of a farm fire where the fireman didn't have a hose long enough, so what they did was push the fire closer to the fire engine. Apparently it was a caravan on fire.

Gosh! Kids collectively uttered across the nation.

Another reader, D Noon of Manchester tells of a bizarre sport that he claimed is huge in America. Dustbin fishing (surely, trashcan fishing) in which fishermen fish out at sea from a floating dustbin. The reader claims the fishermen were often towed for miles by their catches.

I wonder if any of these letter were ever made up?

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