Returning home to my dad’s house on the Night Bus was a transition. I felt like a different boy. And to be certain, I was. I went from being a timid kid who thought he was lazy, worthless, and stupid, to a kid who was coming out of his shell, beginning to gain confidence in who he was and his place in junior high and the greater world. I was able to dress and wear my hair like the other kids in my class for the first time in my life, and I no longer feared getting beaten every day.
My dad being out of work meant that he was home a lot, when he wasn’t out plowing driveways or doing the odd construction job. My aunt Nancy, his younger sister, had moved in with us, which helped with expenses. We only had a two-bedroom trailer, but we converted the dining room next to the kitchen to a small bedroom for her by putting a curtain across the full width of the trailer. Nancy was closer to my age than my dad’s age. When I was 13, she was 22. My dad was 34. She worked in Traverse City, a half-hour drive away, at Grand Traverse Auto. She was a secretary, and she would come home, telling us stories about working in “the city,” And to us, Traverse City was just that. Mesick had a stable population of 376, according to the 1970 census. Traverse City had over 18 THOUSAND people living there!
We travelled to Traverse City fairly often, especially when it was time to do laundry. My grandma had a small washing machine, but no dryer, and in the summer, she would do the wash and hang it all on a line outside. It came back in smelling like fresh Michigan air. But in the winter, we would make weekly trips to the corner laundromat at the end of 16 Road to use the coin operated machines. But about once a month, we would go to Traverse City to do laundry at one of the big laundromats. There was one on the south side of town, right next to a 7-11. While the loads of wash were running, I became introduced to the Big Gulp. I would have an occasional can of Coke at home, or Mountain Dew if I was working for the Amidons. Otherwise, I was allowed two 12-oz. cans of Meijer-brand soda per day. But on laundry day, I got to drink 32 ounces of whatever I wanted! I was high-energy by the time the wash was ready for the dryers.
These trips were also fun, because they would include lunch at a restaurant. My grandma, my aunt, and I would settle in at Chicken Coop quite often, which was just down Hammond Road. We could eat our whole lunch while the wash was in the dryer. But it was a special occasion when we ate Chinese food.
What you have to understand about the 1970s is that Chinese food in America was less Chinese than it even is now. La Choy was a brand that you would find in stores, and my mother had been a fan of La Choy Chicken Chop Suey. There were even painful commercials that sang, “La Choy makes Chinese food swing American!” But there was a Chinese restaurant in Traverse City that served food closer to what we have now in American Chinese restaurants and my grandma loved it. Born in 1914, my grandma had dropped out of school after 10th grade to help support her family. She worked in a Chinese-owned restaurant in Battle Creek in 1930, which of course was during the Great Depression. She had a special affinity for the culture and the food, but she had never made any in my presence because my grandpa and dad, I’m sorry to say, called it “Chink food,” They were pretty free with their racism against the Chinese, and every other non-white race, for that matter. My dad claimed that he had tried Chinese food but it “tore him up” and would insist on a cheeseburger. So, when it was my grandma, my aunt, and me, we were free to get what we wanted. That patriarchy thing ran strong.
My first love was egg rolls. Mind you, I hated cooked cabbage. HATED it. Whenever my mom made it, it stunk up the whole kitchen. But in an egg roll, I found it delightful. And when I discovered hot mustard, I was done. I could live on egg rolls for the rest of my life. I tried everything they put in front of me, but I always ordered egg rolls. This tradition helped me bond with my grandmother even more, if that was possible. It was legitimizing something she loved that the other males in the family made no secret of despising.
Coincidentally, a comic book that had been released at about the same time as my return from my mother’s house put quite a different spin on race. All-New Collector’s Edition C-55 came out in January, and it quickly became one of my favorite comic books ever. Once again, it was one of these great treasury-sized comics, and the cover, to this day, is still my favorite of all time.
This cover, by artist Mike Grell, was something I studied for hours. As you can see, it’s a double cover, illustrating on both front and back, and on the front cover, you see Superboy in the sweet spot, as he should be, as the titular character. But the composition also puts Lightning Lad, Saturn Girl, and Cosmic Boy, who I knew were the three founding members of the Legion of Super-Heroes. Oh, sure, Karate Kid is in the background there, too, but I assumed that was because he was popular enough to merit his own short-lived title back in those days. Now, the problem is, all those yellow guys they’re fighting? They’re Lunarites, and this is going to get a bit ugly.
In this comic, the future has been altered so that the United Nations disbanded in 1978, and various nations went to war. The “Chinese Empire” left for the moon and over the next thousand years, became the Lunarites. The writers of the Legion books had long had a whitewashing problem, as just a few years before this, they explained that all the Black people in the future had gone to an otherdimensional island called Marzal that was only sometimes on Earth, off the coast of Africa. DC Comics was going a long way to explain why there weren’t any people of other races depicted in the 30th century setting of the Legion of Super-Heroes, and they did it poorly. I’m hoping that this coloring was supposed to be understood as some kind of evolutionary change, but it’s possible that it was just laziness.
Regardless of the racial undertones, the cover of this book was a textbook in anatomy, perspective, and inking, especially feathering and hatching. I learned a lot while studying it.
