Grandpa Jim WAR HERO

I went back through the 3 years of strip archive and the monthly letters on the For Better or For Worse website and found very little about Grandpa Jim and his war record. In the monthly letters, Jim seems to be more concerned with a pickup social band he used to play in rather than the actual war effort. It made snarking on Grandpa Jim and the war difficult and my post about his military record rapidly turned back into a “Grandpa Jim the lecher” piece. I did however enjoy looking up what the Royal Canadian Air Force actually did during WWII and found a flying ace that lived reasonably close to Jim in Toronto to use as an famous past associate.

One of the monthly letters from Jim and Iris talked about how they liked the British science fiction TV show “Doctor Who.” The earliest this show played was in the early 1960s. I am not sure when it was imported to Canada, but in the U.S., it arrived during the 1970s. The show discontinued production in England in 1984, but it has recently been revived. Assuming a similar time for the Canadian import as the U.S. import, this means that Jim’s exposure to the show would have been at the earliest when he was well into his 4os. I presume Jim and Iris are watching the newly revised show. I have seen no evidence that either Jim or Iris is a sci-fi geek, so the letter was very curious. I have the feeling that, more than any other of the monthly letter-writers, the Jim/Iris writer takes a lot of liberties with the character. This is probably due to his extremely limited number of appearances in the strip. Most of the stories he tells in the monthly letters are unconfirmed by the strip itself. Even recently, Jim’s pro-Becky stance in his letter did not match his own actions in the strip in which he was definitely pro-April.