When I was a kid, MEAD came out with a line of notebooks featuring what they saw as useful information in the back. Most of the information was how to convert numbers from the imperial to the metric system, how to measure things, and for some strange reason, famous quotes.
As I feasted my eyes on my new notebook, I turned to the back to see what this new thing was. There in print, “In the future everybody will be world famous for 15 minutes.”-Andy Warhol.
Paranoia set in.
Who was this Warhol guy? Yeah you’re probably thinking, “But you’re an artist! You should know!” Yes, I declared myself as an artist at a young age but I didn’t really study other artists except for the ones that were taught to us in school. In other words, I had no clue who this guy was. All I knew is what he said, and if it was in print in a MEAD notebook, I should heed the advice and take it seriously.
Ever since the age of 8 years old I had my heart officially set on being a world famous cartoonist. The only problem was, since 3rd grade my class had been featured in the local newspaper at least once a year. Had I eaten up some of my 15 minutes? Or worse, my ENTIRE 15 minutes?
In 3rd grade my class was featured for “Hillbilly Days” by the local paper. My school would occasionally have fun days where the kids could dress up as a collective. I guess that year my class had the most kids dressed up, so our picture was taken as part of a local interest section. During 4th grade my class was featured again for having the most students dressed up as characters in our favorite book we had read that year. In 5th grade along with other fellow students in middle school, I was in the paper for winning 2nd place in the Science fair in my grade. 6th grade a lot of us were in the paper for medaling at the local music competition in Aurora.
You can imagine, me at 11 to 12 years of age, holding this stupid notebook trying to calculate if I had officially used up my 15 minutes yet. I figured at least a minute for everyone to read the column and the names, so that would calculate 1 second for every person who glazed over my name to get to the kid they knew.
Then panic set in.
The paper was in wide circulation, we were a small town, but then you figure a lot of families had more than just two or three people. Then my brain short circuited from all the math and tucked that information away in a deep dark corner.
MEAD in addition to the imperial to metric conversion, should have also printed a “15 minutes of fame calculation chart.”
What silly quotations did you believe to be true as a kid? What theories or philosophies made you think when you were younger?
This was pretty funny
I didn’t have Mead … mostly Trapper Keepers or Pee Chee folders 
Thank you for the compliment!
Never heard of Pee Chee but definitely heard of Trapper Keeper! The Mead one was just a basic lined notebook with dividers that had pockets. (Really it wasn’t anything fancy, completely made out of paper! Ha ha ha!)