Peter Costanza

The Wiffle Kings and the Orbies Peter Costanza

Dante Benedict and his cousin, Butchie Marlowe, were the Wiffle Kings. Alfred Benedict, Dante's bother, and their cousin, Ricky Valentine, were the Orbies. No, these weren't teenage gangs, these were two-man wiffle ball teams. This Fearsome Foursome spent their summers during the late 1950's and early 1960's in rural New Jersey, where their families had a three-home compound bordering on the Musconetcong River. Each summer they played a lot of wiffle ball, played a lot of teenage pranks, socialized with the girls down the road, swam, fished, and tubed in the river, hiked in the woods, and after Dante could drive, got into even more mischief. But on top of that they made fun of everyone and everything they encountered. They would record some of these observations on a tape recorder, but mainly they created and produced their own satire comic books. The entire collection, included in the Appendix, gives you a glimpse of their fertile and offbeat minds.