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.
One of the hardest parts of having divorced parents for us was arranging visitation. My mother had the right to have me for two weeks, the same as my dad had the right to have Jeff for two weeks, and so that we had time to spend together as brothers, they decided to make them consecutive instead of concurrent. So after Jeff had been with us for two weeks, I went back to the upper peninsula of Michigan to spend two weeks with my mom. That meant missing little league, but nothing could be done about it.
We all piled into the Ford Econoline van and headed for the U.P. The idea was to camp out on the way there, to break the trip up a bit. My dad had built a bed in the back of the van for him and Peggy to sleep on, while my brother, both stepbrothers, and I would share a tent. We had an old canvas army tent that always smelled musty. For this occasion, though, my dad bought me my very first sleeping bag. It was super comfortable, because nights up north, even in July, can get pretty chilly. My stepsisters stayed behind to take care of the dogs and the house.
We found a campground in Mackinaw City to spend the night, and it was just a blast. They had a trout pond that you could fish, and you paid by the inch for however big the trout was. Then they had a restaurant where they would cook your own fish for you. Or, obviously, you could cook it yourself at your campsite. Now, that was way too fancy for us. We had to settle for feeding the fish. If you put a dime into a machine that looked like it would dispense gumballs, it would spit out a handful of fish food. Then you would throw it into the pond and the fish churned up the water like piranhas. It was great entertainment to us. But looking back on it now, what a racket it was. People paid them to feed their fish!
When we crossed Cut River Bridge along US 2, we stopped again and walked down the steps below the bridge. It’s a gorgeous valley, especially when fall colors are out. But it was still nice in summer, when everything was green.
When we got to my mom’s trailer, I was so happy to see her. I hadn’t seen her in over six months. She gave me a big hug and had me bring Jeff’s and my stuff into the house to our old room. Although it was a mobile home, it was a 14′ x 70′ with a pop out extension. It was still around 1200 square feet all told. They had a lot right along the shore of Lake Michigan, where they someday planned to build a house. Mom and Steve always had big plans, and were constantly looking for happiness with the location of their home and work. At this moment, they were both working in Newberry, about 27 miles away, a 40-minute commute one-way. My mom worked for the Department of Social Services and Steve worked at the state liquor store. Back then, the Michigan Liquor Control Commission handled the distribution of liquor to bars and stores and also kept a retail outlet in the front. At least they could commute back and forth together that way. It wasn’t always the case, because they would try to get transfers to their newest destination, and one would get the transfer and the other wouldn’t, causing them to both commute to different places.
Jeff and my sister Wendy had a babysitter that they went to during the day, but I didn’t have to go. I’d been staying by myself in Tustin for some time. But just to break up the monotony, I went to work with Steve at the state liquor store a few times. I got to wander fabulous downtown Newberry, which took about 20 minutes down the street and back, but it was still much larger than Tustin. It was then that I decided I would try an experiment. I bought a comic book just to see if Steve would take it away from me. I bought Detective Comics #472.
Detective Comics #472
In this comic, Batman had been subdued and replaced by a guy named Hugo Strange! I’d never heard of Hugo Strange, but there was a panel that referred to the last time Batman had tangled with him…in Batman #1! The art style of this comic was completely different than any other I had seen. It had elements of old Batman stories, like starting a paragraph of narration with an encircled colored letter. It looked like the older reprint stories, when Batman didn’t have the yellow oval around his insignia. But further, it was cartoonier than Neal Adams and Irv Novick, but still appealing to me. The artist’s name was Marshall Rogers, and to my surprise, the writer was the same as my favorite Justice League of America comics, Steve Englehart! That was so cool. I really hoped he wouldn’t destroy my comic.
There was a scene in which Robin ripped his tunic open, and for a little bit, it modernized Robin’s look a bit. It made it look like he was wearing an open shirt, which was quite in vogue in the 1970s.
This was the first time I really started to see Robin as being grown up. In the comics, he had been away at college for almost eight years at this point, but Englehart wrote him as pretty much an adult. Since I had identified strongly with Robin for a long time, I could sort of feel that way, too. And much to my surprise, Steve didn’t do anything about the comic book. He didn’t say a word.
The two weeks went by quickly, and it was time for me to go back. But I was in for quite a surprise, because we weren’t going back to Tustin. Mom and Steve dropped me off at my Grandma and Grandpa McClain’s house in Mesick. While I was gone, Dad had moved us out of Peggy’s house. All of my stuff and Ladybug were at my grandparents’ house! My aunt had had a huge room in their basement, the size of the entire footprint of their house, and for now, my dad and I shared that space. I was shocked. But Dad explained to me that there was stuff going on over there that he didn’t want me exposed to, and so here we were. He had sacrificed his marriage to protect me.
The first thing we had to do was to build Ladybug a dog house. She could not stay indoors all night. Grandma and Grandpa were taking care of my aunt’s dog, Nikki, who was part Samoyed and part Malamute. She slept outdoors, and so would Ladybug have to. We built her an A-frame doghouse out of extra plywood from my grandpa’s scrap pile. We painted it red, with the leftover paint from the two garages, which we had painted when Grandma and Grandpa moved there in 1970. I drew a cursive L on the front over the door, and we filled it with straw, which “Bug” could nest in. My dad assured me that it was only temporary, and that I could keep her indoors when we got our own place.
I could scarcely believe what had happened. I was now going to live with Grandma McClain, my favorite person on the planet? It was like a dream come true. I tried to do my best to be helpful. I mowed their lawn, trimmed the weeds around the house and both garages, helped with the gardening. I wanted my presence to be a positive one. I spent time with my grandpa out in his mysterious garage, that I never really felt welcome in, until then. He taught me about tools and how to use them and let me use anything in his shop that I wanted to, with one rule: that I put everything back where it belonged when I was done. I learned how to measure, cut, and fasten wood. I learned how to sand, grind, and sharpen. I could tell that he loved having someone out there with him; it had been a long time since he had taught my dad.
It was then that I took what I consider my first step into the adult world. I started drinking coffee. Usually, my dad would sit at the table with Grandma and Grandpa, and they would drink coffee and tell stories. I would drink milk and eat cookies. But now, I wanted to try their coffee. I took it with cream and sugar, but my dad did too. I felt so grown up.
I got to go back to Tustin to finish the last few Little League games that were left in the season. It was bittersweet, because I knew I wouldn’t be seeing my latest friends anymore. At that last game, my dad and Sherman bought packs of the brand-new grape Bubble Yum for us. It was enough for everyone to have their own pack. Naturally, we stuffed our mouths with bubble gum. How we must have looked. We had our team dinner at the end of the season at the Cadillac Big Boy (where else?) and I said goodbye to my friends, and finally, to Tustin.
I was used to moving around and making new friends. I had gone to nine different elementary schools from grades K-6. But when we moved in with my grandma and grandpa, my dad promised that even if we moved, I would graduate from Mesick High School. I would not have to change schools again.
With summer vacation in full swing, one of the things we enjoyed was swimming at Diamond Lake. It was a local hangout, with lots of people around kids and adults alike, and a great place to cool off. There was an old inverted metal barrel several yards out into the water that kids would dive off. I was never the strongest swimmer, but I usually did just fine and took my turns diving.
When I was younger, I was late to swimming. I always had a floatie of some kind, whether a duck or some other animal. When my parents split and we went to live with my stepfather, he would not allow a floatie. I had to wear a full life jacket until I learned to swim. I never learned how to swim with him because I always wore a life jacket. One day between first and second grade, however, I complained too much about having to wear the life jacket and he decided he was going to teach me to swim. He had me take off my life jacket and dragged me out to the end of a dock in Grand Traverse Bay. I’m sure you’ve heard the legendary tales of people learning to swim by being thrown into deep water. This isn’t that story.
What my stepfather did instead was grab me from behind, put his hand over my nose and mouth, and jump with me, still wrapped up, into 10-foot deep water, sinking all the way to the bottom. Then he let me go. My nose and mouth immediately filled with water and I started choking. I could feel the sand of the lake floor under me, and I gave one mighty leap straight up. As I broke the surface, I gasped for air, and then sank right back down to the bottom again. I had gotten a look at where the shore was, and on my next jump, I headed in that direction. I came up for another gasp, and submerged again. I repeated this process until I could stand up with my head out of the water. Then I waded to the shore and fell down, exhausted and crying. He gave me his usual insults, but didn’t try to take me out to the end of the dock again.
From that point on, he didn’t try to teach me how to swim, and I never let him walk up behind me again when we were at the beach. It was a few years later that my Grandma McClain took Jeff and me to the Backwaters and let us play in the water, that I put the whole swimming thing together. Turns out it wasn’t that hard, with Grandma’s kind help. I still didn’t like deep water, but I never really had to worry about it that much, until one fateful day at Diamond Lake.
We were playing catch with a Frisbee, and one throw went sailing over my head. Confident in my swimming ability, I swam to the deep water after it, grabbed the disc, and started swimming back. I caught a wave right in the mouth and started choking, and I sank below the surface. It was a familiar and terrifying sensation. Fortunately, my stepsister, Barb, saw me struggling and came out to get me. She pulled me in until I could stand, and just like when I was eight, I collapsed on the shore. I was grateful, but pretty much the whole family made fun of me for almost drowning. It was the beginning of the end of the illusion of the happy family in Tustin.
I started looking at the whole situation critically after that. I already didn’t like the girls smoking and swearing in the house, especially when I asked if I could swear and my dad said no. That was not how I was raised at all. And then there was the matter of the 18-year-old boy from next door, who the oldest girl Debbie was dating, coming home from the military on a break and bringing Coors beer east of the Mississippi (illegal back then), and smoking something that I was not familiar with at a party at the house. I think it was pretty much at that point that my dad decided that it was not a good environment for me to be raised in.
