Do you remember how in 1940s movies they would sometimes show the passage of time by having pages fall off a calendar? It might be pages with the days of the week or months or years – 1942, 1943, 1944, etc. For those not in the entertainment industry, that process is called a montage.

It was like that when I got back from Cleveland. Care Bears was running like clockwork. Jean was happy, Andy was happy and Lori was happy. One of the numerous values that I offered them all was time – as in: If I was doing my job, they didn’t have to take time out of their schedules to oversee me.

Andy was making deals, Jean was analyzing the creative aspects of new opportunities and Lori was supervising story editors and an army of artists who labored on a number of DIC series. With everything going smoothly, me and Howard writing Care Bears scripts, and scripts coming in from Jack Hanrahan, Eleanor Buhrian Mohr and other writers, calendar pages fell off one after another as weeks and then months passed with ease. 1984 turned into 1985.

But in the back of my mind I knew we were approaching the end of the season. I was out of the business loop so I didn’t know if we’d get picked up for another season of Care Bears and, if we didn’t what would I be doing then?

I kept bearing down on the scripts, but I felt like I needed a distraction. It came late on an October afternoon when Lori walked into my office with an impish look on her face that I’d come to know well.

“What?” I asked. “

?!”