7:27 PM
My dad emailed tonight, pointing me toward a recent Zippy the Pinhead strip that mentions the town of Mondovi, Wisconsin, not far from my hometown of Prescott.

As I told Dad:

Bill Griffith must have some sort of connection to Mondovi. When I worked at Tomahawk, one summer the ranger was a guy named Bill Sandve. He was from Spring Valley and was the son of the Sandve who runs (ran?) the Sandve Music service that fixed all our instruments at school. (Bill later helped found the Boy Scouts of Uzbekistan, but that's a different story.) Somehow, Bill got mentioned by name as a part of Zippy's prospective presidential cabinet when he 'ran for president' in the strip around 1992.

One western Wisconsin reference in Zippy might just be a shout out to a fan. Two very specific references must mean that Griffith has family around there or something.

To expand on what I said in the email, Bill left Wisconsin when he joined the Peace Corps, and went over to Uzbekistan. He was back for a while when I met him, a cool, cool guy who was teaching me a word or two of Russian each day that summer. I had heard from mutual friends that he had gone back to Uzbekistan, helped founded the Scouts in Uzbekistan, and even got married and had kids.

Googling around doesn't turn up much recent news (or what Bill Griffith's connection to Wisconsin might be), but it's interesting to see that at least as of 1999, it looks like Bill is still in Uzbekistan. Maybe he'll do a bit of vanity Googling at some point and come across this entry. It'd be good to hear from him again.