Fun Facts About
the Shows You Love
by Michael Karol
& Craig Hamrick

Trivia Tidbits

Quizzes

Features

NEW!

The TV Tidbits Books
Available now in bookstores and online!

More info -- including links to buy the books.

Originally posted August 31, 2006

TV Tidbits was a collaborative project by authors Craig Hamrick and me, Michael Karol. The first printed volume of TV Tidbits was Funny Ladies, published in 2003 and recently revised as Sitcom Queens: Divas of the Small Screen. The companion website was launched by Craig in November 2003. I've kept many pages from this website live as a tribute to my best friend, fellow author and TV maven.

Craig Hamrick

Please note: Craig passed away on September 24, 2006, after a long and courageous battle with colon cancer. He wrote this bio of himself, and I've left it up as a tribute. For my personal remembrance, go here.

When I was a kid, one of my favorite TV shows was Lou Grant -- the Mary Tyler Moore Show spinoff about the staff of a daily newspaper in California. Each week the reporters got involved in dramatic situations that looked like a lot of fun.

I was also a big comic book reader, and my favorite character was Superman's girlfriend, Lois Lane. She juggled romance with the man of steel and a career as a crime-fighting, time-travelling, adventurous newspaper reporter -- and looked fabulous while doing it. I understood that real-life journalists didn't have quite the same experiences these fictional characters did, but pretty early on, I decided I wanted to follow in their footsteps. Fortunately, journalism was also the "family business," so it wasn't difficult to get started.

When I was 15, my parents owned a weekly local newspaper in Coffeyville, Kansas, called The Village Vanguard. It was a mom-and-pop-and-son operation. We all performed various tasks, and besides being the main paperboy (tossing papers onto lawns from my dad's Chevy Citation), I was also the man-in-the-street reporter. I'd approach people in the parking lot of the local Wal-Mart, and ask a burning question like "What makes Christmas special for you this year?" I took their photos, wrote up their answers, and just like that, I was a professional journalist.

During my senior year in high school, I was editor of the school newspaper, the Tornado Times, and the yearbook, the Twister. (Our mascot was also a big storm -- a "golden tornado.")

I went on to study journalism in college--first at Coffeyville Comminty College, where I was editor of the Coffeyville Collegian; then in Manhattan, Kansas, at Kansas State University, as the features editor for the Kansas State Collegian.

After college, I stayed in Kansas, where there weren't many media-related jobs.I was managing editor of a couple of livestock publications -- The Arabian Horse Express and International Exotic Livestock & Wildlife--but by 1994, I realized if I ever wanted to write about something besides horses and llamas, I'd better get out of the Midwest, so I moved to New York City.

I worked steadily as a freelance editor and desktop publishing specialist, and eventually I took a full-time job at BBDO Advertising, working on one of the biggest ad accounts in the business: Pepsi-Cola.

Craig at a book signing with Diana Millay, star of the soaps Dark Shadows and The Secret Storm.

I enjoyed my work at BBDO, but I missed the magazine-office atmosphere, so after a year I left the agency and went to Ziff-Davis Publishing as Assistant Managing Editor of Computer Shopper magazine, which was weighing in at 1,200 pages a month while I was there. (That's where Michael Karol and I first worked together. He was Shopper's Copy Chief.)

I moved within the company to work at FamilyPC magazine, as Copy Chief, then like a lot of New York journalists, I got caught up in the dot-com frenzy and went to work for website. I left there in less than a year, returning as a freelancer to a branch of Ziff-Davis that had been purchased by CNET Networks.

Since April 2001 I've been dividing my time between managing special issues there (including two issues of The Fortune/CNET Tech Review in association with Time Inc.), and working in my photo studio in Tribeca. I've also written several books about the TV classic Dark Shadows -- most recently, Barnabas and Co., about the show's cast [which is scheduled t come out in an expanded 2nd edition in 2009.]