COMING SOON FROM FATHER GEEK!!!

Ola, Fellow Geeks, welcome to The Ain't It Cool Museum from your curator Father Geek (aka Jay Knowles). For close to 30 years now my friends have been saying, " You need to open a museum." Well, I just never have had an extra 50,000 square feet or so of space to do it, but now due to the miracle of the micro chip I can do just that and share it with the world free of charge thru the internet. This site will be growing daily and will be very visual. A year from now it's hallowed halls will be crammed with artifacts of the pop culture; posters from movies and concerts, toys from the golden ages of radio, television, and the motion pictures, cigarette, gum cards and their bastard offspring, comic books from the 1930's to the present, magazines, paperback books, hardbacks, pulps, science fiction, horror, fantasy, cowboys & Indians, war, mysteries, suspense, thrilling adventures, it will all be housed here awaiting the click of a mouse and an inquiring mind.

Now, exactly what won't this museum include? In a word, PRICES. This is not a price guide. It is not a for sale list. Don't ask. Don't make offers. Please no begging. While we do collect examples of all pop culture items, this is not to be interpreted as an offer to buy all your excess treasures. We have too much already, piled in boxes stacked as high as 8 feet in more than one room of our overly stuffed Geek Headquarters. Please do not fill my E-mail with such offers. If you have cool stuff you must get rid of, send the lists and photos by snail mail in hardcopy form with the prices you want to our Post Office Box. If we're interested we will get back in touch with you. If you don't hear from us we don't need or want it. Don't call or E-mail about it. I know this sounds crass, but we get 1000+ E-mails a day and it's hard enough going through them for the news & reviews, so understand I'm not being rude we just can't handle alot of lists & photos added to what we currently receive.

Just who is this Father Geek who is to be your guide thru the labyrinth of paper and plastic, brass and tin, ink and paint that will overflow these electronic pages over the coming weeks, months, and hopefully years. Well, I was born into a middle class family of 4th generation Texans 8 months before we dropped the bombs on Hiroshima & Nagasaki. My father was an officer in the Army Air Corp and I spent most of my first 2 years in the backseat of a 1940 Chevy traveling the great American west from one air base to another. At 3 we set down roots in San Antonio, home of the Alamo and the Buckhorn Saloon, the headquarters of the 4th Army and the "West Point of the Air". I led that storybook, 50's TV family life, joined Boy Scouts and earned my Eagle with a bronze palm. I played every inning of every game thru 4 years of Little League. My mother was president of the PTA and I made pretty good grades. I played in the band and drove a 58 Chevy my senior year. I was the 1st of my friends to have a TV (1951), and I went to alot of movies in SA's giant single screen film palaces and at the many drive-ins around town in the days of 50 cent admissions, 5 cent bus rides, & 10 cent hot-dogs.

In 1965 I enrolled at the University of Texas in Austin and it's been my home ever since. I had vague thoughts of becoming a lawyer and I was a member of UT's varsity debate and public speaking teams. Like most of my generation I was politically active. In Texas at that time the power had rested with the Democrats since reconstruction so the revolutionary thing to do was be a Republican. I joined their youth wing. I majored in Sociology, then Advertising. I became a professional political underling, working for candidates and in the PR dept. at Republican state headquarters. I was on Nixon's staff at the 68 convention in Miami. Harry's mother was the social chairman of the political club that I was the PR man for. We started to hangout, and watch movies together. We enrolled at the UT Film school and our politics started to shift to the left.

In 1969 we formed a high-octane, mind-numbing lightshow performance company, working with all the pop rockers of the day, and shooting some commercials & short musical films in 16mm for clubs around the state. We began collecting posters & comicbooks as we traveled throughout the south. Harry arrived at the end of 1971 and we opened a pop culture collectibles store. We crisscrossed the country doing festivals and collector shows 25 or 30 times a year until Harry started public school in 2nd grade, we had begun to collect movies, cartoons, and trailers on 16mm. I bought a VCR in 1977 and Harry's sister came on the scene in 1981. In 1984 we divorced after 18 years together. She got the kids. I got depressed. Life goes on and in 1989 Harry moved in with me. Then in 1992 Helen died in a tragic fire out on the North Texas plains and I suddenly had both my kids back. What is it that Goldblum says in that big dino flick? Oh yeah, "Life finds a way."

Well, that's a peek at the primal ooze that formed the bio-hard-drive that is to be your host on these pages as you journey thru the refuge of the 20th century popular culture mirror that it has been my pleasure to document. Strap yourself in, keep your arms in the windows, and shootup some history, you'll never know what's just a key stroke away.

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This site is © 1998 by Harry Jay Knowles