When I was in elementary school, I had learned that on Groundhog Day, if the groundhog saw its shadow, we were in for six more weeks of winter. I was much older before I learned that six more weeks of winter was bad news. We routinely still had some snow on the ground on April 1.
DC Calendar of Super-Spectacular Disasters April 1978
But this April was warming up nicely, and it was decided by our class sponsor, Mr. Salling, that our 7th grade class would have our very first dance. Now, bear in mind, what we called a dance then is very different than a middle school dance now. This was our chance to dance with a partner of the opposite sex, something many of us dreamed about and just as many feared. I was both.
My dad was excited by the prospect of me going to my first dance. He considered himself quite the lady’s man, and his three marriages by age 34 seemed to confirm that. He told me exactly what to do. He said that most of the boys would be too “chicken shit” (his words) to ask anyone to dance, and if I acted boldly and simply went up to ask someone, she would probably say yes, because so many boys would be lined up on the opposite wall, afraid to go over. He made sure I had my appearance and hygiene correct. My clothes were clean, I had showered and washed my hair, and had applied a generous amount of deodorant. We’d had conversations about that before. I was ready.
When we got to the dance, we self-organized into our usual cliques. I was with the jocks who’d played basketball together in the winter. We had sloppy joes to eat, prepared by Mrs. Salling, who taught elementary school and was our advisor’s wife. I had eaten a moderate (for me) two sloppy joes and a handful of potato chips. I didn’t want to look like a pig, after all. But at the end of the eating portion of the evening, there was a lot of sloppy joe mix left. Mr. Salling bellowed out, “Stacey! McClain! Get over here!”
Dan Stacey and I had resolved our differences earlier in the year and no longer hated each other. It turns out that when he took pictures of me in my underwear in the locker room, there wasn’t even film in the camera. And our reputations as big eaters had certainly preceded us, and Mr. Salling didn’t want to let the food go to waste. So, he organized an eating contest between Dan and me. I told him I didn’t want to participate. I was already nervous enough about asking someone to dance as it was. But he wouldn’t hear of it, and he goaded me into the competition. And one thing I had at age 13 was a competitive streak, because I was constantly trying to prove myself to gain the respect of my peers.
We began eating. One each. Two each, Three. Four. Five. Ten. We didn’t even start slowing down until we had each eaten 12 Sloppy Joes apiece. The thirteenth went down slowly, and Dan had just finished his 14th. My buddies were cheering me on, and about three-fourths of the way through my 14th Sloppy Joe, I puked. I mean, it all came up. I managed to avoid getting any on my clothes, but it was all over my plate and the tables we used in the home ec room. A collective “EEEWWWWW” erupted from everyone. And yes, there had been girls watching, too; the ones I was supposed to ask to dance. Without thinking, I put the last quarter of my Sloppy Joe and my mouth and swallowed it whole. After all, my stomach was empty now. That made the next reactions of grossed-out girls even worse.
I was mortified. I don’t think there’s a description of the level of embarrassment that quite captures how I felt at that moment. I just knew I was never going to find a dance partner, not just that night, but maybe ever. How was I going to go home and face my dad? I felt like such a failure.
I couldn’t brush my teeth, but I rinsed my mouth out and bummed a piece of gum (or two) from one of my friends. When the dance started, Mr. Salling encouraged me to go ask a girl to dance, but I just meekly shook my head and stayed where I was. I was afraid of rejection, the same kind of rejection I had felt from my mom’s husband when I had tried to be a son to him. I couldn’t take it if the same thing happened to me in my new school.
About a half hour into the dance, I just decided to go home. I lived a 10-minute walk away from the school, and I didn’t want to call for a ride. I would walk home in the dark. Just as I got up to leave, a pretty little blonde girl named Jenny Harris asked me to dance. I looked skeptical. “Are you sure?” I asked. She smiled at me and nodded yes, and she took my hand and led me out to the dance floor, also known as the high school gym. It was a slow dance, and in those days in seventh grade, that meant putting your arms around each other and swaying back and forth, maybe even going in the occasional circle. As we rocked back and forth, I almost cried because I was so grateful to Jenny for having pity on me. And it felt like a colossal weight had been lifted from my shoulders. After the song ended, I thanked her, and she just smiled and nodded again.
I would discover much later that Jenny was in fact Mr. Salling’s pet and spy. She was a friend of the family, and she babysat their new son. Mr. Salling had seen what I was going through and said in his gruff tone, “Harris! Go dance with McClain.” And she had obliged him.
“Jenny,” or Jen as she goes by now, is still my friend to this day, 45 years later, and I always respected Mr. Salling because of this kindness. I related this story at his memorial a few years ago with Jen at my side, and I don’t think there was a single dry eye in the house, including mine. That’s the kind of teacher he was. That’s the kind of man he was. And having these types of people in my life at that age, both Jen and Mr. Salling, made all the difference in the world.
After Star Wars dominated the box office for virtually the entire last half of the year, it seemed like the things I enjoyed were beginning to catch on. Television became a pretty dominant part of my evenings, once my dad procured a television for us. As I recall, he ordered it on credit through the Fingerhut mail-order catalog. It was a 9-inch panasonic black and white TV, and it was perfect. The TV had the benefit of having a cigarette lighter adapter, so I could actually watch it in the back of the Ford van while we were on the road!
The Panasonic 9″ black and white TV
What you have to bear in mind about this time is that we had no cable or satellite dishes in our little town. You got your choice of three stations, CBS, NBC, and ABC, which came in fuzzy half the time because it was a UHF station.
The networks shows that I enjoyed continued, for the most part. The Six Million Dollar Man was limping into its fifth and final season. Its spinoff series, The Bionic Woman, made the move from ABC to NBC. This was weird because they actually had a crossover two-part episode, that started on one network and concluded on another. Wonder Woman, a television show very important to most 12-year-old boys, moved from ABC to CBS for its second season and changed the setting from the 1940s to modern day. Charlie’s Angels actually remained on ABC, but continued with its second season without Farrah Fawcett-Majors. Most of my discerning friends and I regarded Cheryl Ladd as an acceptable substitute, but did not hold a candle to Lynda Carter. This was a topic of long conversation and much debate.
Lucan was a show about a 20-year-old who had been raised by wolves for the first 10 years of his life. No, I’m serious. I loved it, but it was cancelled after only 12 episodes. Logan’s Run made the leap from the big screen to the small screen, which was often done in those days. With a bunch of Star Trek writers behind it, it was also cancelled after one season of 14 episodes. Gregory Harrison played Logan, if you can believe that!
Man from Atlantis, starring Patrick Duffy as an amnesiac water breather with enhanced strength, which had four TV movies beginning in March, began a normal series run in September, but was also cancelled after one 17-episode season. Are you starting to see a pattern here?
The Amazing Spider-Man started with a 90-minute TV movie featuring Nicholas Hammond, who didn’t look a thing like Peter Parker, but it was another superhero show about one that everyone knew. Spider-Man was featured on The Electric Company when I was younger, and this show really didn’t do anything to enhance his image.
I generally liked CHiPs, a show about motorcycle police of the highway patrol in California. I would often watch that one in color at my grandma and grandpa’s house, because Hawaii Five-O came on immediately after it, and that show was my grandma’s favorite.
Perhaps the most important shows to debut in the fall of ’77 were The Love Boat and Fantasy Island. My dad was always out on Saturday nights, and often overnight. You can use your imagination figuring out what he was up to. This was the first time I was left alone to take care of myself. I felt so grown up. The Fingerhut TV had the advantage of being portable, and on Saturday nights, I took it into my tiny bedroom and put it on the floor of my recessed closet, which was about eye-level if I were lying in bed. I would watch The Bionic Woman, then the two new shows. Both The Love Boat and Fantasy Island did their very best to put their female guest stars into swimsuits, and back then, there weren’t the same options for adolescent titillation that there are now. The best we straight boys could hope for was the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue.
At 11:30, after the news, came the best show of all time, Count Zappula’s Horror House. Count Zappula was a sci/fi horror host played by Don Melvoin, a local celebrity who hosted old movies during the day. Along with his dog, Lover, who was renamed Igor (pronounced “eye-gore”) for the Zappula show, Melvoin introduced me to countless classic horror and science fiction movies. Count Zappula became famous for this mishap that happened on his show:
Count Zappula gets famous!
Don Melvoin had been an actor in the late 60s and early 70s, guesting on The High Chaparral, Bonanza, Night Gallery, and a few other shows. He was also Deputy Don in the 1950s AND the 1980s, hosting a kids’ show, but I knew him as Count Zappula.
The problem with watching Count Zappula was that he was up against Saturday Night Live, which was going into its third season, and I did my best to watch both shows at the same time, flipping back and forth between them. I got to see Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin doing Weekend Update, and Steve Martin hosting a number of times and doing the “Wild and Crazy Guys” routine with Aykroyd, and so much more. I was actually relieved when SNL was in reruns because I could devote my full attention to the Count. This show helped cement my pop-culture interests, with classics like Gargoyles, and THEM!, The Blob, and more. I had my generic corn chips and Meijer-brand pop and spent late Saturday nights as I wished.
The same channel showed classic Flash Gordon and Commando Cody serials as a weeknight program at 11 PM called Hot Serial. I can’t even find an image for the show on the Internet, but the intro had a floating bowl of oatmeal hovering on the screen. My dad would watch those with me and reminisce about going to the movies in the 50s when he was a kid. Later, when the serials would be ridiculed on Mystery Science Theater 3000, I was already well-versed in classic movie serials. Watching Radar Men from the Moon, my dad giddily pointed out his hero, Clayton Moore, playing the heavy. Clayton Moore, of course, was the Lone Ranger, whose adventures my dad and I had watched together in reruns on Sunday mornings, before the divorce. It was just another great way that we bonded.
Despite the difficulties I was facing in school, I still enjoyed life with my dad. On Fridays, even when we didn’t go to the football game, I got my allowance and was able to make a few minor purchases at the local grocery store.
DC Super-Stars #17
This was one of my favorite comic books, featuring the first appearance of a character called The Huntress. I had always been a sucker for origin stories, and this one also had the origin of the Legion of Super-Heroes, and Green Arrow’s origin drawn by one of my favorite artists, Mike Grell.
There had been a book that I had coveted for a long time that I saw in the Cadillac bookstore, but with a cover price of $10.95 (over $50 in today’s money!) no one in my family would ever consider spending that kind of money on a “funny book.” But every time I visited a bookstore that had it in stock, I read it, until I had practically memorized it cover-to-cover.
Secret Origins of the DC Superheroes trade paperback
And a few years before that, my grandma had bought Jeff and me another one of the oversized “treasury” comics with the origins of super-villains!
Limited Collector’s Edition #C-39
I think what appealed the most to me about these origin stories was seeing how tragedies shaped the heroes and villains. I had just suffered five years of physical and emotional abuse. I hoped that if something as tragic as seeing my parents killed would make me a hero, and not a villain. I had my doubts, mostly because I had spent five years being told I was worthless, lazy, and stupid. When I saw the origin of Luthor, who blamed Superboy for the loss of his hair and swore revenge, I thought he was being petty, compared to what I had gone through. These were some of my most private thoughts, because at that time, I still had never confided in my father what had happened to me and what was probably still happening to my brother, Jeff. Steve had threatened me when I left to live with my dad. He said that if I ever told what he had done to me, he would kill my brother, and I had no reason to doubt him. Carrying this burden was never easy, and even now, some of my dearest friends from that time tell me that they had no idea what I had experienced. It’s because I feared what would happen if I revealed that information. Looking back, it’s no wonder that I escaped into comic books as much as I could.
The day after Labor Day was always the first day of school when I was growing up in Michigan. So, on Tuesday, September 6 was my first day at Mesick Junior High School.
This would mark the 11th time that I was starting in a new school. I had started school in Hastings, Michigan. I went to Mesick Elementary for part of Kindergarten and the very beginning of first grade, then after the divorce I was in Elk Rapids. We didn’t stay there long and I was in Traverse City for the last of first grade going into second grade. Then for the rest of second grade, all of third grade and the beginning of fourth grade, I was at Northeastern Elementary school back in Hastings. It was not the same Hastings school in which I had started Kindergarten. From there I went to Delton for about a month, and then onto Bentheim Elementary in Hamilton, Michigan, where I finished fourth grade and started fifth grade. I went to part of fifth grade in Allegan, and then we moved to the upper peninsula, where I finished fifth grade and started sixth grade at Engadine Elementary. I got halfway through sixth grade there before I went to live with my dad in Tustin, which is where this story began.
Mesick Junior High was a very different experience. The junior and senior highs were in the same building, with the exception of two mobile classrooms just outside the main building. So, here I was, at age 12, walking the same hallways with high school seniors. It was more than a little intimidating.
When I got to seventh grade, I did know a few people. There were several kids that I had been in Kindergarten with. I re-introduced myself to them, and made a few new friends as well. I had always made friends fairly easily. I didn’t have much choice since I was constantly changing schools. One of the advantages that I had was that I was always the tallest person in my class, no matter where I had gone to school. Almost immediately, I was friends with Steve Coger and Kenny La Fountain. I knew Steve from Kindergarten, and Kenny was his best friend.
I had been a dominant athlete in Tustin, but Steve and Kenny were better than I was. Picking teams in phys ed always ended with each of them going to separate teams as first picks and then whichever one I ended up on would inevitably win whatever game were were playing. Phys ed was also traumatic for us seventh grade boys because we were required to shower…at school. Seriously, our grade, given to us by Coach McNitt, was made up of two things: participation and whether or not we showered. We used the same locker room as the high schoolers, as the varsity and junior varsity sports teams. The showers sprayed hot needles all over you. The water pressure was insane. Once everyone got over the initial weirdness of seeing each other naked, it was fine, but the tension leading up to it was high. I still remember asking for soap on a rope for Christmas.
It was actually very good that I was forced to take a shower after phys ed because puberty had hit me like a freight train. I was constantly sweating. My hair would be almost instantly oily, and I regularly pitted out my shirts. This caused all kinds of grief for me.
My math and English teachers were married. Mr. and Mrs. Neahr taught out in the mobile classrooms outside the building. Mrs. Neahr taught English and was like a second mom. She was generally encouraging, but she was discerning about what we were reading.
Batman #291. H-E-double hockey sticks!
I had tried to show Kenny and Steve my copy of Batman #291 from the summer, but Mrs. Neahr snatched it right out of my hand and threw it away, calling it “trash.” I mean, look at it, it has the word “Hell” right on the cover! I was horrified, and never brought a comic book to school again.
Mr. Neahr taught math and terrified everyone. He always wore a jacket and tie, and had this cool fifties haircut with horned rim glasses. He addressed us as Miss or Mister, or simply by our last names when he was feeling jovial. A lot of people struggled in math with Mr. Neahr, and I hated his class. Not because of the material, but because of a bully. It was the first time I had been subjected to bullying.
Margaret Saxton sat next to me in the back row of the classroom, and she reveled in punching me. Every time Mr. Neahr’s attention was diverted, she would punch me in the left arm as hard as she could. After about five punches, I was near tears. There was nothing I could do. She constantly called me “greaseball” and said things like, “You’re a real hunk; a hunk of shit.” I could not do anything about this abuse. I was always taught not to hit girls, but I was seriously tempted to put that rule to the test. I would go home, barely able to lift my left arm. There were other tormentors as well. Dan Stacy constantly made fun of me. My aunt had bought me my first pairs on non-tighty whitey underwear, and he made fun of me in the locker room when we changed for phys ed. One time he even brought a camera in and said he took a picture of me. The camera, as it turned out, didn’t have film in it. But the thought of someone passing around a photo of me in my underwear terrified me. Seventh grade was turning out to be a nightmare.
I tried to find a way to fit in. I was getting desperate. Then, the solution appeared to me. There was a kid named Denver Liabenow that got everyone’s approval by being a class clown. He would do the craziest stuff, like crawling around the room like a spider. Everyone loved Denver. So, I decided to be funny.
While I couldn’t be funny like Denver, I had my own ways. My grandparents had several comedy albums that we had listened to for years. We listened to Bob Newhart, Andy Griffith, Jonathan Winters, Homer & Jethro, Bill Cosby, and my personal favorites, the Smother Brothers. I got them all out, and listened to them using headphones so I wouldn’t disturb anyone else. The Smothers Brother appealed to me with their biting wit. They often made fun of the establishment, using sarcasm and subtlety in a way that other comedians didn’t. I took a lesson from them and started retaliating against the people who bullied me. When they would say something like Margaret would do, calling me a “hunk of shit,” I would strike back by saying something like, “And I’m still out of your league. What does that say about you?” It worked. People around us laughed and she stopped talking to me.
Dan Stacey took a lot more effort. If I insulted him, he would just beat the crap out of me. So, I appealed to what I noticed about him. He could really eat a lot. So, when we were in a situation where there was food, I was sure to engage him with a matching appetite. This would come in handy later.
Mr. Neahr did see that I was struggling to fit in and that I didn’t seem very happy in Mesick. He ran a club for kids just like me, who were the “oddballs” of the school. They played a new game called Dungeons & Dragons after school, and they even had a club. I looked at some of the stuff they were doing, and it looked cool, but I didn’t want to be in the “oddball” club. I thanked him but declined.
My dad really wanted me to become a part of the whole school community, so on Fridays, after he got paid, he would take me to dinner at the restaurant (remember, there was only one), and then we’d go to the high school football game. He had no interest in high school football, but I think he just wanted me to connect somehow. At the very first game I attended, Steve Coger was there and we ran around together. Steve had the job of raising the flag during the national anthem, and I asked if I could help with that. So, every week, that became our thing. It was a rocky start, but things started to turn around fairly quickly.
When the football team was away, my dad would take me to the movies. We saw some great ones like Smokey and the Bandit and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but some not-so-great ones, too, like Starship Invasions. More on those later.
When I lived in Mesick the first time, I had a long and spectacular summer off from school between Kindergarten and first grade. During that summer I met Matt and Kellie Amidon. The Amidons had a cement business and they lived on the other side of a small woods from us. Matt was going into 6th grade and Kellie was a year ahead of me, going into second grade. We spent our summer days tearing through those woods, riding our bikes, digging holes, and reading comic books. We had a great time. When I came back to Mesick in the summer of 1977, so did they. Apparently they had moved to Oklahoma, but now they were back, and they built a brand-new house at the end of a road that ran alongside the field adjacent to my grandparents’ house. They were selling lots along the road, and my dad surprised me by getting us a mobile home to live in on one of those lots. I don’t know if he bought or rented it; I never asked. But it was our home, his and mine.
The two-bedroom trailer was humble. Dad had the room at the end of the hallway. He had a queen-size bed and a dresser. My bedroom was tiny, six feet long and about five feet wide. There was just enough room to drop a twin bed in it, with enough room for me to stand next to it. My room had a recessed closet with four drawers underneath it. I had literally no clothes to hang in it except my shirt and pants that I wore to church when we lived in Tustin. We had abandoned the practice when we moved to Mesick. Everything I owned fit into the four drawers. And naturally, I nailed the 1977 Marvel Memory Album to the wall.
Marvel Memory Album September 1977
We started with nothing. I mean, we even took the swivel chair out of my dad’s van to put in the living room and supplemented that with Grandma and Grandpa’s lawn chairs to start. A few trips to the Copemish Flea Market got us some plates and silverware, and my Star Wars and King Kong glasses were our drinkware. I had a set of sheets and a bedspread for my bed, but I preferred to use my sleeping bag. That way I didn’t have to make my bed in the morning. I didn’t mind any of this. I had my dad all to myself with no step-family to make things weird.
Looking back now, I can’t imagine how my dad must have felt to have to move in with his parents at age 33, divorcing for the third time, with a 12-year-old son. He seemed to take it in stride, though, and that made me happy. He was genuinely determined to make the best life for me that he could.
I spent the last week of my summer vacation helping the Amidons finish work on their new house. I learned a bit about construction (enough to know that I didn’t want to do it for a living), and I also discovered something incredible: Mountain Dew.
Mountain Dew can, circa 1977
When we were hot and thirsty after installing insulation, Matt and Kellie gave me a can of this magical elixir that I had never tried before. It was sweet, refreshing, and addictive. Each day that I came back to work with them, I got another can. We generally didn’t have this sort of fancy stuff at home, instead settling for Meijer-brand foods, so this was a rare treat.
Mmmm, Meijer brand!
This was one of the great lessons of my life. I had to learn how to economize when margins were razor-thin. Meijer brand mac and cheese was 19 cents. Kraft was 23 cents. We always went with the Meijer brand, at least until the generic unbranded brand came out:
Generic (unbranded) foods
Does this packaging look familiar? When I saw the Dharma Initiative labels on LOST, I almost busted a gut laughing at the memory. Some producer had to have grown up poor like I did!
Dharma Initiative foods from LOST
Generic brands were even cheaper than the store brands and you could try any number of products. My favorite: Chicken hot dogs. I don’t even want to think about what parts of the chicken went into their processing but I’m sure my DNA has been altered to adapt to digesting just about anything because of it.
My dad said that we would plant a garden in the spring to supplement our stingy choices of food, but we just had to make it through the winter with what we could afford. The bottom line is, I didn’t care. As long as we were living in the same house and I was treated well, it was like a dream come true for me.
