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.
I almost missed an issue of Justice League of America.
We were shopping at Jack’s Market in Mesick when I hit the magazine stand. There were TWO issues of Justice League of America! How did I almost miss one? Obviously, the magazine rack in Mesick was not as reliable as the spinner rack in Tustin. I would have to keep a closer watch!
JLA #146-147
The first of the two issues saw the second return of the Construct, who had resurrected the previously deceased Red Tornado. Now, I didn’t know anything about the Red Tornado, but the great thing about comics in the Bronze Age was that they would summarize any old events succinctly in just a few panels. Since The Construct could inhabit any electronic system, the android’s body proved a fertile nesting ground for the villain. But after he was defeated for once and for all, something sparked in Red Tornado, bringing him back to “life!”
The second of the two issues was the beginning of the annual crossover event between the Justice League of America and the Justice Society of America. I knew about these annual summer crossovers from previous stays at Grandma and Grandpa’s house. Jeff and I had read one before, but had missed the second part because we went home before it hit the stands. This time, it couldn’t have been better as the crossover included my second favorite super group, the Legion!
My grandma started taking me with her on Sundays to the Copemish Flea Market. Copemish was about a 15-minute drive away, right up M-115 from Mesick, and every Sunday, they had vendors galore show up, selling all kinds of wares, as well as fresh produce. Grandma liked to get her lettuce and tomatoes from the flea market because they were always fresher there. But what I found there was even better. I found a comic book vendor. He had stacks and stacks of comic books at prices less than their original cover prices. They were 15 cents each, or 10 for $1.00. I’m sure you can figure out how I bought mine. I found hordes of comics there that I wanted! And when I didn’t have any money with me, he took comics in trade, two for one.
One of the first ones I bought from him was Super-Team Family #7. It had only come out in the previous year, and it featured two of my favorite groups, the Teen Titans and the Doom Patrol.
Super-Team Family #7
I didn’t realize at first that both stories were reprints, but that hardly mattered to me. I had never read either of the original stories. I just thought it was a heck of a bargain to get a 50-cent comic for 15 cents! I would find all sorts of things at the flea market, like a tip for a frog spear, just what every 12-year-old boy needs! I was also able to find paperback books, and that helped me to satisfy my newfound hunger for science fiction.
At the same time, my aunt was feeding me Logan’s Run. I had remembered seeing newspaper ads for the movie in 1976, but I’d never had the chance to see it.
When I read the novel, it was obviously very different from the movie, or the parts I had seen from previews. In the 1967 novel, written by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson, people were only allowed to age to 21, not 30! And though the movie had some cool-looking guns with multiple gas jets flaming out of the barrel, in the novel, the Sandmen’s weapon was called a Gun, with a capital G. The Gun had six kinds of ammunition: Nitro, which exploded; Ripper, which ripped a body apart; Tangler, which entangled its target; Vapor, emitting a knockout gas; Needler, which is self-explanatory; and the Homer, which sought out body heat and then ripped the body apart. There was no carousel, like in the commercials. People voluntarily went to Sleep, where they knew they were going to die, painlessly. Runners were hunted by Deep Sleep men, also called Sandmen. The Sandmen were trained from age 14 when their flowers (life-clocks) turned red, signifying adulthood. They learned a martial art called Omnite, which encompassed several different martial arts. This book sounded super cool. When I eventually saw the movie, though, I was quite disappointed. I knew there would be differences, as I had already learned, but this was quite a departure, and not in a good way at all. The whole Carousel thing didn’t make any sense at all, because the whole idea of Sandmen was to help one find Deep Sleep.
This was a time in my life when my critical thinking skills really started to sharpen. I looked for inconsistencies in theme and style, and often found them. This never made me very popular, but that’s a whole other long story about to be told.
Living with my grandparents was interesting. They had a schedule that they kept, with very little variation. My grandpa was up and out of the house early in the morning. He almost always got up around 5 AM, and went down to the restaurant for coffee and a roll. Notice that I wrote, “the restaurant.” There was basically one in Mesick besides the one in the hotel, and at that time, it was called Bob & Carol’s. In comparison, there were two small grocery stores, two bars, two churches, a hardware store, a bank, a post office, and a phone company. There was a rescue squad, but no real fire department, and no police presence. It was (and is) a small town. How small? My grandparents’ phone number was 885-1148. I only had to remember the last three digits, 148, because every phone number in Mesick began with 885-1. There were fewer than 1,000 phones…and people. We didn’t have cable TV, and since Mesick was in a valley cut by the Manistee River, line-of-sight signals tended to bounce right over us. We had access to a CBS TV station, and NBC station, and an ABC station that came in fuzzy at night and cleared up as the night progressed, because the UHF (ultra-high frequency) signal would bounce off the sides of the valley.
Keep in mind that we didn’t have any way to record video back then. No DVR, VCR, not even BetaMax. You watched your shows when they were on, and there were reruns all summer. But that was all right, because the night time was for watching the Detroit Tigers. Both my grandparents loved the Detroit Tigers. My grandma used to describe listening to the Tigers on the radio with her father in the 1930s. They would read the box scores in the newspaper if they were playing too far away to hear them play on the radio. Being a Tigers fan was one thing that my stepfather Steve and I had in common. It was probably the only thing we had in common. I used to be allowed to stay up as late as the Tigers played in the summer. I remember one game going until 2 AM when I was between third and fourth grade. It was made more memorable by seeing the Northern Lights, even though we lived in the southern part of the lower peninsula. During the school year, I listened to them on my clock radio, letting the tones of Ernie Harwell, the Tigers’ radio announcer, put me to sleep.
I had followed the Tigers for as long as I could remember. I know, I begged to go when Mom and Steve got tickets to go to an actual game at Tiger Stadium. I dreamed of going to Tiger Stadium. I didn’t get to go, but they did bring me home an authentic Detroit Tigers cap, with the Olde English D on the front. I wore that thing every single day from fourth grade until 5th grade, when a 6th grade bully named Brent Vallier took it from me on the school bus and tore the bill away before throwing it out the bus window. I was miserable. They had also brought back a yearbook, which I studied over and over again, reading about some of my favorite players, like Bill Freehan, Al Kaline, Aurelio Rodriguez, Mickey Lolich, Eddie Brinkman, John Hiller, and Mickey Stanley. It was hard to choose an absolute favorite, although Bill Freehan was the catcher and that’s where I had wanted to play.
There was almost a whole new roster by 1977, and there were some new players to emulate. Since I had played first base for the summer in Tustin, the new Tigers first baseman, Jason Thompson, became my new favorite. I really wanted to see Mark “the Bird” Fidrych pitch again. He had been the 1976 Rookie of the Year, going 19-9 for the Tigers, and people saw him as the next great pitcher of our time. Unfortunately, he hurt his knee in spring training and by the time July came around, he had a case of “dead arm” and was never the same pitcher again. But that didn’t deter me from loving these mediocre Tigers. I knew every name, every uniform number.
Since the Tigers were in the American League, I only got to see them play against other American League teams. Unless you were watching the World Series, the American League never played the National League. My only chance to see other teams during the regular season was on Saturday, when NBC would broadcast This Week In Baseball, followed by the Game of the Week. That’s the only way I ever got to see Willie Mays or Pete Rose play on TV until the playoffs.
I still remember arguing with my grandfather over baseball, when a runner advancing from first base took out a second baseman trying to turn a double play. My grandpa yelled, “That’s dirty pool!” so I got to learn some new phrases, that’s for sure. He was also fond of other terminology that I will not repeat here, referring to black players. He was not a tolerant man.
My dad didn’t care about the Tigers at all. He had gone to Detroit to see a game in 1961 and got his pocket picked, losing his wallet. From that moment on, he was not a fan of the team. I thought that was short-sighted, but I kept quiet. I didn’t want to disagree with him.
I was also a Detroit Lions fan back then, but football was really not that big a deal, only playing on Sundays with the exception of Thanksgiving Day, which was a Lions tradition. I had never seen a Pistons or Red Wings game, so I had no idea about the NBA or NHL. For me, it was all about the Tigers.
Star Wars had been in the news for a while by the time I saw it in the summer of 1977. With all the traveling and baseball, I didn’t have an opportunity to see it until my aunt insisted on taking me to see it. “It’s no big deal,” I said. “I’ve already read the book.” But she persisted, and off we went.
We arrived at the newer theater in Traverse City, one that is sadly no longer there. It was in the Meijer parking lot, in a section to the northeast of the store that is now overgrown with vegetation. By July, you didn’t have to stand in line for hours, but as we arrived, the movie had already started. I got a big bucket of popcorn and a Coke, and instead of waiting for another hour and fifteen minutes, I thought we should just go in. After all, I’d already read the book and she’d already seen it. There weren’t going to be any surprises. We got to our seats during the trash compactor scene and from that point on, I was absolutely enrapt. When Han fires the blaster and it ricochets in the novelization, it reads, “The bolt promptly went howling around the room as everyone sought cover in the garbage.” That doesn’t even begin to cover what I saw. Lasers and energy weapons were common in science fiction, but they didn’t move like that! I think my jaw dropped into my popcorn and from that moment on, I couldn’t look away. Compared to every film that came before it, the movie was paced like lightning. Where starships were usually lumbering giants on screen, the X-Wing fighters darted this way and that, pursued by the screaming TIE fighters. I was not prepared in the least by reading the book, and watching the movie simply overwrote the entire story in my brain. Shot by shot, Star Wars gave us things no one had ever seen on screen before.
After it was over, I did not move. I could hardly wait for the movie to start again so I could see it all from the beginning. Some of the book was still staying with me, like in the cantina scene, when Luke gets knocked down and Obi-Wan has to intercede. In the book, Luke falls back, “shattering a large jug filled with foul-smelling liquid.” There was no mention of it or reaction to it in the movie, but that was seriously the last thing about the book I thought about for a long, long time. I knew there was always a difference between books and visual media from my lessons with The Six Million Dollar Man, but this was crazy.
We stayed through the entire next showing as well, so I got to see the second half of the movie again. I wanted to stay and watch it yet again, but it was getting late. When we got back, I had to describe for my grandparents the entire movie with enthusiastic detail. I talked on and on about it. When my dad got home, he got the same treatment. I told him that we HAD to go see it together as soon as possible.
The next day, I went out to Grandpa’s garage while he napped, and started work. I had to make my own lightsaber. Strangely, there were no Star Wars toys to be had at any store. Action figures wouldn’t be seen for almost a year afterward. There were no lightsabers to be had, either. I sawed, I grinded, I taped, and I painted. And after a few hours, I had built my first lightsaber. I had an old army duffel hanging from the rafters out in the small garage, and it was filled with rags. I had used it for a punching bag for a long time, but now it took the place of Darth Vader and I cut him down about a thousand times.
When I got my dad to take me to see the movie again the following weekend, he was just as enthusiastic about it. He took me to Burger King for lunch afterward and I got the first of the Star Wars glasses to go with my King Kong glass.
Burger King Star Wars glass
The next day, I built my dad a red lightsaber out in the garage, so he could be Darth Vader, and he indulged me with a few duels.
I would see Star Wars two more times in theaters. The final time I saw it was at a drive-in, again with my dad. I had never seen a movie twice, let alone four times before! But seeing Star Wars was a mass experience. Everyone saw it. Everyone talked about it. It was on magazine covers everywhere. And although there weren’t any toys out in stores, there were print products like trading cards. And suddenly, trading cards became part of my collecting habits. Although I wasn’t getting fifty cents for behaving in church anymore, I still earned an allowance of fifty cents a week. And some of that money went to buy the little blue-bordered cards at 15 cents a pack, which I didn’t arrange by number, but instead arranged in film chronology. In doing so, I could recreate the movie visually in my mind. If I failed to remember the sequence of events (not likely), I could rely on the novelization to help me put them together. I even chewed the gum, horrible as it was. It never occurred to me that there was a comic book adaptation of Star Wars. And by the time I did see an issue of it at Jack’s Market in August, it was #5!
Star Wars #5
Naturally, I bought it anyway, making it only the second Marvel comic I had ever bought. Suddenly my focus began shifting, from superheroes to Star Wars. I would sit down at the dining room table and draw the adventures of Luke Skywalker.
When it was time to go back-to-school shopping, I had a Star Wars folder.
Mead Star Wars two-pocket folder
My back to school wear also included a T-shirt that looked a lot like this, but new:
Vintage Star Wars T-shirt
To say that Star Wars changed the way I saw the word would be understating things dramatically. I started expanding my reading beyond comic books and books about Star Trek and began delving into more varieties of science fiction. My aunt had a book about Logan’s Run, a science fiction movie that had come out the year before, and I dove right in to read it. More on that later.
