During the two years he attended Journalism School at the University 
of Missouri, Leonard Cobey submitted puns and joke to the humor 
magazine, "Showme." In his senior year he became the business manager 
of the magazine. This experience honed his skills with puns such as, 
"I used to be a Westerner until Fleischman's brought me yeast" and two 
students conversing:  "Her necks dirty".  "Her does?"  And "I didn't 
know my girl friend smoked til she pinched my butt".   These were 
pretty racy in 1942 when I graduated with Honors---Sam Honors, our 
class VP.

Lila Bondy never really thought of herself as a punster until she got 
hold of a copy of John S. Crosbie's legendary monthly newsletter, THE 
PUNDIT. She so enjoyed reading it that she was inspired to submit a 
few for publication. To her surprise, Crosbie published them all. She 
also admired a writer for the Chicago Sun-Times who closed each of his 
columns with several puns. She sent some to him and he published those 
too! (Apparently she's what psychologist call "an enabler.") In her 
spare time Lila enjoyed a respectable career and raised a family, but 
wordplay has become a powerful draw and distraction for her. In the 
late 1980's she and her friends formed a "Pun Club" for such kindred 
spirits which still holds lively monthly meetings where they share 
stories and play a variety of games. Out of this group also grew the 
PUN AMERICAN NEWSLETTER, a quarterly publication similar to Crosbie's 
Pundit.

Through their print forum over the past 20 years Lila and her fellow 
editors, Leonard Cobey and the late Bob Aitchison attracted and 
entertained hundreds of faithful subscribers and became known for 
their excellent punmanship and their prey on words. In the dark days 
when a news medium was rarely well done, PAN readers were still able 
to share and enjoy each other's witty offerings without risking viral 
inflections or miss inflammation. One of their recent entries was "The 
great explorers, Vasco DeGama, Leif Ericson, Pizzaro, and others had 
their weekly poker game in Heaven but they could never beat the 
Straights of Magellan."

Sadly this 20th anniversary year will likely see the last issue of the 
P.A.N. sent through the mail. Printing and postage rates, coupled with 
the internet's instant access to all things humorous, have made 
dinosaurs of many such small "zines." Over all the jeers these 
intrepid survivors from the windy city have been able to weather rain, 
snow and hail but nobody can overcome obsolete.