Leonard Cobey & Lila Bondy - CO-PUNSTERS OF THE YEAR 2007-08

LILA

 LEONARD

CO-PUNSTERS OF THE YEAR 2007-08
Leonard Cobey & Lila Bondy - CO-PUNSTERS OF THE YEAR 2007-08

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.