No, not me! The real Daphne!

Daphne Sets the Record Straight

The four of us met during our first semester of college in the fall of 1964. We were all big fans of mystery stories. It wasn’t the only thing we had in common, of course. Fred and Shaggy were both on the track team. Velma and I were both big fans of Bobby Darin. The sort of stuff that teenagers bond over. But the mystery thing ended up being what we became notorious for.

We started “Mystery Inc.” as kind of a lark during the spring semester. We had a couple of lost-and-found type cases…helped an elderly lady who lived near the school find a lost cat…kid stuff, really. Then, that April, we fell into a real case. Velma noticed that a couple of artifacts at the county museum looked fake to her. She convinced the rest of us to look into it…and next thing we knew, we discovered that Jeremiah Wickles, the museum’s director, was selling items out of the museum’s collection. That got us a lot of local and state news attention.

By that time Fred had traded in his old woodie station wagon for a used Volkswagen Microbus. We started riding around in it together. Then Fred got this wild idea for us to spend the first part of the summer working to save up money, and then spend the month of August riding around the country together. To this day I can’t figure out how we talked our parents into letting us do something like that without anybody to serve as a chaperone. Unless you count Shaggy’s Great Dane that we took along. Yes, that was the one, the only, original Scooby Doo.

So, somehow we convinced our parents that we were reliable, dependable kids, and we got to spend four weeks in late summer 1965 touring the country. We saw the Grand Canyon, the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde, Carlsbad Caverns, Santa Fe, Silverton and other real western towns, went up to Seattle and Portland. I think we counted up that we’d covered over six thousand miles.

Mostly we camped out. You know, we didn’t have a lot of money! Sometimes we stayed in designated campgrounds, and sometimes we just found a spot and camped. You could still do that pretty easily in those days. Once a week we’d treat ourselves to a pair of motel rooms—we did NOT have co-ed arrangements, in case you’re wondering!—so we could have a real rest and a real shower.

We never stayed in one place for more than three days. But somehow we managed to bump into mysteries in several different places. And we solved them! We even caught a few crooks.

During the ’65-’66 school year we continued taking the occasional local case. And we found a couple more real cases. We got our names in the papers two or three times that year. There was the business at Funland amusement park, I remember, and that house that was supposedly haunted by “phantom shadows.”

In the late summer of ’66 we did another grand tour. This time we headed east. We put even more miles on the old “Mystery Machine,” as we’d come to call it. We called it that, but we never painted a name or any cool designs on it. Actually I remember being kind of embarrassed by the fact that we never got around to repainting it. The old van showed its age and mileage! We became mixed up in more mysteries along the way. We just couldn’t seem to help running into them!

“Mystery Inc.” became less active during our last two years of school. We were getting deeper into our studies and had less time for things like that. And Fred and I had become an “item.” We were engaged our senior year. The group did undertake one last tour in the summer of ’67. We ran into our last cases on that one.

In our senior year our main activity together was collaborating on a book about our experiences. We all helped write it, too. Fred and Shaggy mainly drafted it. Shaggy did the illustrations. Velma fact-checked it. I did the proofreading. I was also the one who picked the title—Scooby Doo, Where Are You? Oh, we had a lot about Scooby in it. He had a way of getting into the funniest situations, and of course people often had funny reactions to this huge dog we had with us.

We published it in the spring of ’68. We were stunned by how well it sold. By year’s end it had gone through several printings. We got interviewed by Dick Cavett and Johnny Carson. We were actual celebrities! I don’t know why we were such a hit. I suppose people needed something to take their minds off of all the bad things that were happening that year.

We were so successful that we started getting TV offers. And that’s when we made our big mistake. We could have had a prime-time TV series deal. But we let a certain literary agent who will be nameless talk us into a deal with that cartoon studio for a TV cartoon. To this day we can’t figure out how we ended up taking that deal. We were all out of school by then, and starting our lives as adults, and Fred and I were newlyweds and had trouble staying in touch with the others. Maybe we were just too distracted to realize what we were doing.

Anyway, to make a long story short, we made a deal to have a TV cartoon produced using the title of our book. That wasn’t our mistake, though. The mistake was that we found out that our agent was so eager to make a sale he ended up giving away virtually all the media rights to our book! And we didn’t realize what we were doing until it was too late. Even Velma failed to read the contract closely enough to sniff out what was happening. So we lost control of how our story would be told.

Of course the rest is history. The show was a Saturday morning cartoon hit. It ended up with many sequels, and tons of merchandizing spin-offs, and eventually even live-action movies. We never really saw anything from all that, since we’d signed over all the rights. We have had some fairly successful re-issues of our original book, especially as a tie-in with the 2002 movie. Eventually we got together on a follow-up book that did moderately well.

Obviously the cartoon turned the story into a total fantasy, what with Scooby “talking” and all. Believe it or not, though, many of the cases in the original cartoon were loosely based on our actual cases. Very loosely, that is. We did indeed uncover some fake ghosts. But they were usually pranks, not crooks trying to hide something. We did catch some actual crooks—sometimes drug smugglers, which a kids’ cartoon of that time couldn’t mention. There was that one case where we solved an eighty-year-old disappearance that might have been a murder. I think they turned that one into a story about us finding a treasure or something. All the sequels and movies were one hundred percent fiction.

Although we’re disappointed in ourselves for having been so naïve, we’re not bitter about how things turned out. Life’s been good to all of us. Fred and I will be celebrating our fiftieth anniversary in a few years. He’s had a good career in engineering. I’ve had the opportunity to do some rewarding work in civic and church service, and some part-time teaching. We have four wonderful children—Frank, Casey, Stephanianna, and Heather. Eight grandchildren so far—Heather’s working on another.

Velma also has a wonderful husband and two children, Don and Nicole. She has had a long career as an archivist. Shaggy has always been happily single. He fell in love with New Mexico on our 1965 road trip, and has spent most of his life there as a painter and sculptor. Each of our children—and now our grandchildren—has received his or her very own lovely original work from “Uncle Shaggy.” And Scooby? He died in 1976, at the ripe age of fourteen.

Yes, our children each watched “Scooby Doo” growing up. We always limited their Saturday morning TV viewing to a couple of shows that they really wanted to watch. Each one really wanted to watch “Scooby Doo” at some point. I’d watch the show with them, to tell them what things were really like. I’ll never forget the day when Casey asked me, “Mom, did you really keep falling through trap doors?” And I told him, “No, sweetheart, that only happened to me once in real life.”

That's great!

Thanks, Jeff!

I can't believe this story has had 40 hits in only 24 hours.

The real mystery? Who names their kid Stephanianna?