People ask me how, since I’m retired and don’t make comics anymore, do I keep my brain from rotting due to disuse. Well, I have a new hobby. As you may have read here or here, Mego action figures were among my very favorite toys when I was a kid. I just wasn’t allowed to play with them at home. I had written an entire Solution Squad story about eight-inch action figures, and one of my buddies had customized a Radical figure for me, which appears on the cover.
I tried my very best to emulate the blister card from the World’s Greatest Superheroes line that Mego produced in the 1970s, right down to the circles featuring other characters with their names encircling their head shots. It wasn’t easy! Radical’s head was made from a repainted Shaggy (from Scooby Doo) with some scupted hair and beard add-ons. His costume was printed! So cool.
My very favorite Mego was the first one I received for Christmas in 1972, Superman, which you can see young Radical playing with here, in a flashback.
As fun as it was, the Mego Superman’s cape was far too easily frayed. I don’t know whatever happened to my old Mego figure. It probably got tossed during one of our many moves. But I do know that he was well loved and well used, and his cape showed it. A few years ago, I acquired one that was in near-mint condition, and I bought a cool diorama from a buddy who sculpts them out of foam to display him permanently.
The next one I got as a kid, in 1974, was a Captain Kirk figure from Star Trek. When my brother got Spock, we had many adventures together. Both of those figures stayed with my brother when I moved away. But the one thing I always wanted was the USS Enterprise playset. I yearned for it, but it was not meant to be. Well, last summer, I found both. I bought a set of the first series of Star Trek figures released in 1974. Uhura was added in 1975, but was still considered in the first series. They can cost quite a bit in good condition, and these were pristine. They had all their weapons, delta insignias, their hair paint was unmarred, they were just perfect. With one exception; Captain Kirk’s leg was broken at the knee.
Now, I am not a handy person. My grandpa and dad did their best to make sure I was at least competent with tools, and when I was younger, I used to make things in my grandpa’s garage. But I never built models, or worked with glue very much. I always preferred drawing. But, I thought, for the price I’m getting this set ($120), I can at least attempt to repair a Mego leg. I would have never considered it when I was a kid, but then again, we didn’t have YouTube back then. Sure enough, I found a video explaining how to replace a knee pin, which is what was missing from Kirk’s leg.
I replaced the pin from a bag of cadaver Megos I had gotten alongside the Superman a few years before, and ironically, a Superman corpse gave up his knee pin so that Kirk could stand again!
In the end, it really wasn’t complicated at all. But I felt accomplishment, nonetheless. Paying only $20 each for mint (-1) Star Trek figures was really cool. And then when the Enterprise playset popped up for less than $100, I knew I had to have it, finally, after all these years! My shelf looked like a Christmas catalog item from 1974!
In the box for the Enterprise was also an extra Captain’s chair and black stool. I didn’t think too much about them, and just tossed them in a box with my cadavers. We’ll get back to them, though.
I thought that would be the end of the hobby of collecting Megos. But then I found out that Mego was back in business after decades of companies trying to do what they did. I had seen some of the newer figures with their fancy correctly-painted weapons and stuff, I dismissed it. Bah! New things! But then I discovered that they had finally produced Sulu and Chekov figures with their original-looking blue phasers and communicators!
The bridge crew would be complete! And what’s this? The impossible-to-find Romulan figure was being re-released with its red weapons set! I couldn’t have a Klingon on the bridge without a Romulan!
By then, I was in my new office, and had a much better display space for my beloved Enterprise set.
And, I thought, if they re-released the Romulan from the Aliens set from series two, maybe they did the Gorn, too! The Gorn figure, if you are not aware, was perhaps the worst and cheapest figure that Mego produced. There was nothing original about it. It utilized a repainted head from Marvel’s Lizard figure, the body from a Planet of the Apes Soldier, and a Klingon uniform. Parts is parts, right?
But the new Mego did not spare the detail! They made a real Gorn that looked like the one in the show!
Naturally, I had to have one. But where was I going to put it? I ran into my diorama-building friend Mike Sutter at a toy show, and put to him an idea. Could he make Vasquez Rocks for me? You know Vasquez Rocks. It’s a park in California where everything has been filmed, including the episode where Kirk battles the Gorn, Arena.
Well, Mike knocked it out of the park. I even got the new version of Kirk for the diorama.
When I discovered that the new shelves in my office were too narrow for the full diorama, I asked Mike if he could trim them down to nine inches wide. He agreed, and asked what I wanted done with the rest. I asked if he could use them to make another diorama, the Guardian of Forever from the episode, City on the Edge of Forever. And again, he crushed it.
But I didn’t want to move my wonderful Kirk and Spock from the bridge set, so off to EBay I went to buy the cheapest Kirk and Spock I could find. I got the pair for $40, but they didn’t come with weapons. I thought, well, that was hardly relevant to this display, so I didn’t worry about it. But it made me think, how hard would it be to just get a set of weapons? Apparently, much harder than I thought! A vintage weapons belt with the blue phaser, communicator, and tricorder can set you back $50! But I wasn’t done with this piece, yet. I needed another Dr. McCoy figure, and I didn’t want to pay a lot for it. I had just found another Kirk and Spock online for even less than I paid for the first pair, just $25, and I had replaced the new Kirk with the Gorn with the classic Kirk. The Spock figure had problems, though, He had a Type-1 body, and his legs were splaying out like crazy. You guessed it, I found a YouTube video. I ordered some 2 mm elastic cord and bought a crochet hook at Walmart. After two attempts, I had completely restrung the figure, making it as good as new. However, I didn’t need a Spock figure at the moment, so he sacrificed his uniform to go with a Type-2 McCoy body I had in my cadaver box. One of the things Mego saw in the Star Trek line was cheap production. The only difference between a McCoy figure and a Spock figure was the head! The McCoy figure had been a gift from my friend Tracy Edmunds, whose father-in-law had bought it in the 1970s to use as a driver in his model race cars. His head was completely messed up from having helmets glued to it, but his body was in perfect shape. I found a McCoy head on EBay for ten bucks and boom! Instant Dr, McCoy figure. Still no weapons, but the good doctor had lost his phaser in 1930s New York in that episode anyway. And now I have a Type-1 Spock figure in my spare Mego box. When another blue uniform comes along, he’ll be dressed again and I’ll have another nearly complete figure.
While that really wasn’t true customization, just a parts swap, I kind of wanted to try my hand at it. My first attempt was to make my Star Trek Adventures captain, by modifying a new Kirk uniform with fabric paint. It was a disaster. I thought I had better stick to what I could handle and not modify the clothes too much. If I try it again, I’m going to try gluing fabric over the existing fabric. I just need a couple of black panels, not a complete dye job.
I thought I would start my journey more successfuly by making a redshirt. If you don’t know that term, it refers to one of Star Trek’s many casualties, who often wore red shirts for security, and often didn’t even have names. But there was one who not only had a name, but he appeared in 57 episodes, more than even Sulu or Chekov! His name was Leslie…most of the time.
Lt. Leslie, played by Eddie Paskey
One of Mego’s new lines was Married With Children, and I had read that they were trying to go cheap on sculpts again. They were pulling old sculpts from everywhere, and they chose one that someone had made of Eddie Paskey, who played Lieutenant Leslie on Star Trek, to make Al Bundy’s head. This was supported when I got a look of the side view of Al’s profile.
I’m pretty sure Al Bundy never had those Starfleet sideburns! So, I thought, let me try making a custom Mr. Leslie figure. I took that now-shirtless Kirk figure, and popped off his head, and replaced it with the head of Al Bundy. I found a Scotty uniform shirt online for a fairly low price, and ordered it. Scotty was the only figure Mego produced in the old days who wore red. Leslie most often wore red for engineering or security. But I had also read that you could simply repaint Mego figures with the same paint you use for D&D figures, and I had some. So, I got to work repainting the head with a color more suitable for Leslie while I waited for the Scotty uniform to be shipped. When it arrived, I used an X-Acto knife to cut away one of the rank braids (Scotty was a lieutenant commander while Leslie was just a lieutenant), and put it all together. I borrowed one of my classic figure’s weapons belts to complete the look.
My first successful custom Mego: Lt. Leslie
Since I’m not worried about vintage weapons for this figure (the only part of him that’s vintage is his shirt), I looked for reproduction Star Trek weapons. And wouldn’t you know it, Dr. Mego has some! Instead of $50, I can get a full belt for eight bucks. And I have plenty of other figures that don’t need vintage weapons, but would display better with weapons than without. That site has replacement parts for everything we need to restore our 50-year-old figures and make them look new again! Okay, now I had a taste for customizing as well as repair.
There’s been a movement not just to sculpt Mego heads but to print Mego heads made of resin. And one that came up in my wanderings was one that I really want to make: Luke Skywalker.
It’s well known that Mego passed on the Star Wars license in 1977 and that decision factored into the company’s eventual demise. Kenner took up the toy license and instead of making expensive eight-inch figures, they focused simply on molded and painted 3.75″ figures that were far cheaper to manufacture and much more flexible in the types of figures that could be offered. It was a trend that even Mego adopted afterward, when they tried to keep up with their Star Trek license for Star Trek The Motion Picture. But I often wonder what it would have been like if Mego had made the Star Wars figures. So, I’m going to try to make one. I painted Luke’s head (so out of practice) and attached it to an extra Type-2 body I had. I noticed that the foot was broken, and yep, right to YouTube, learned how to pop out the ankle pin and replace it with a donor part.
Appropriate that he’s in front of a Star Wars game, right?
I’ve ordered a black bodysuit, and a pair of replacement boots for CHiPs figures to make a start on Jedi Luke. Yes, CHiPs boots are correct.
While I was in reconstruction mode, I dug back into my box of parts, where I found a Planet of the Apes figure. I honestly did not have any interest in these figures when they came out in 1974, so I didn’t even know the character’s name.
A trip to the Mego Museum page, and it was revealed! His name was General Ursus…or General Urko. It depended on when you bought him! That page is really a nice resource, because you can find out what parts a particular figure came with to be complete. This figure did not have his rifle or his scabbard and short sword, and like Star Trek weapons, they can be really hard to come by. But, because of his condition (really nice), I decided to complete him. It took a couple of weeks to find the parts, but I did. So, I spent $55 to complete a $150 figure. Pretty cool.
The Completed General Ursus/Urko
Here is where the new hobby is satisfying. I took parts from three incomplete figures and made a whole one. There’s just something right about that. It feels good. So I took a good look at my parts box and started making notes. Remember that extra captain’s chair from the Enterprise box? I sure don’t need it, but someone evidently does!
Just like there’s a market for Mego weapons, there is a market for any spare parts, even heads! I have an extra General Ursus head, and I don’t need that either.
So, to answer the question from the first paragraph, how am I keeping my brain from rotting? I’m doing math. I’m looking for parts lots that complement what I already have, and selling what I don’t need. Here’s the pièce de résistance:
I have a Klingon figure. Its head was in good shape, as was the uniform, and one of his two boots. His knee, though, had been replaced not with a plastic pin, but with a bolt and nut! I can’t even fix it because more damage was done to the leg when someone did their best knee replacement without YouTube.
Metal knee replacement before its time
So, I took a spare Type-2 body from a Robin figure with a messed up head, and did a transplant. Now I just needed a weapons belt and a boot replacement. Vintage boots are $20 a pair. Or, if you want a single boot, the price is…$20. The whole figure is only worth about $40. I was not about to pay $20 for boots. So, instead, I found a whole Klingon. Wait, what? Well, yes, the Klingon figure is whole, but…his head is messed up and the uniform pants have a few minute problems. That reduces the value. So, I paid $35 for this whole (messed up) figure, and I will take the boot and the weapons belt, to make a whole, good, sellable-condition vintage Klingon figure, and I could sell the remaining parts. Sounds crazy, but I could get $20 for the good boot, and $15 for the Type-2 body, and–are you following this? I could get $35–what I paid for the whole figure–for the leftover parts of this figure that are undamaged. I’m not going to, though, because I’m going to keep gathering an inventory of spare parts to complete more figures later on. I will probably ditch the defective pants, though. I think I might experiment more and repaint the head, too, since its paint defects make it not as valuable.
So, no, my brain isn’t going to rot. I’m on a constant watch now to find parts that go with my parts. It just becomes important now to keep track of what I have on-hand.
Everyone, take a bow! Your time will come. You will be complete again!
Learning to read in the 1960s with Batman comics and the Batman TV show, it’s small wonder that I identified with Robin, the Boy Wonder. Always at Batman’s side, Robin gave kids, boys especially, someone to project themselves onto. Wouldn’t it be cool to be Batman’s sidekick? To ride along in the Batmobile? Robin was portrayed as about 16 on the Batman TV show, but in the comics by 1969, he was going off to college, so mark him down as 18 years old. He got aged up just a bit so that Batman would have darker solo adventures. He was still around 18-19 years old in comics in 1980, when the New Teen Titans got started. Time passed oddly in the DC universe. Yet, still, he led a whole superhero team at a pretty young age and had a lot more responisbility than most kids his age. When Marv Wolfman and George Pérez matured him for their book, it was time for a new Robin to be at Batman’s side. Dick Grayson abandoned his Robin identity in New Teen Titans #39, which I bought on my very first visit to a comic book store, mentioned here.
This was an exciting time to be reading The New Teen Titans. Longtime readers had been introduced to their newest member, Terra, and many fans thought she was just great. But when it was revealed that she was actually a spy working for Deathstroke, the Terminator, well, the wheels were about to come off the wagon. Suddenly, Dick Grayson discovered that his entire team had been ambused and were missing, and he was fresh out of yellow capes. By summer, the conclusion of “The Judas Contract” storyline was about to conclude, and Dick Grayson needed a new costumed identity.
So, after 44 years of being Robin, Dick Grayson became Nightwing. Now, before we get too far, here, I just want to point out that many barbs have been thrown toward this costume as somehow being inspired by disco because it has a raised collar. Uh, no, you mooks out there. It was inspired by the circus. You know, like Deadman? The other superhero in a circus costume?
Dick Grayson, having been a circus performer, obviously went back to his history to pull out that costume design. It was 1984, for crying out loud. Disco was gone.
Anyway, the comic where this transformation took place, Tales of the Teen Titans #44, was published in July 1984. I had just finished my freshman year of college, the second semester of which being much more successful and enjoyable for me. I had a steady girlfriend whom I had started dating in February, and I was down in Kalamazoo visiting her, when this comic book came out. But I also had a rare opportunity. My brother and sister were also in southwestern Michigan, with my mother and stepfather. They were staying couple of towns over at my stepfather’s parents’ house. I volunteered to come over and get them, and take them to the movies. My mother agreed. So, my girlfriend and I drove over to pick them up. Let’s see, I was 19 at the time (the same age as Nightwing), so my brother would have been 13 and my sister, 12. I took them to see what every kid that age should have seen that weekend: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Despite the more, uh, terrifying aspects of the Raiders prequel, they had fun and I had the unique feeling of being a true older brother, taking my younger siblings to the movies in the summertime, something I hadn’t really gotten to do, living apart from them as I did.
I enjoyed the Nightwing character, especially the part where Grayson was honoring Superman’s Kryptonian heritage as well. For many, many years of World’s Finest, the Batman-Superman teamup comic, Robin worked closely with both men, and I thought it was a nice touch to make a callback to that time. Nightwing was originally a costumed identity that Superman took on in the bottled city of Kandor, naming himself after a Kryptonian bird. Jimmy Olsen, of course, was his Robin, taking on the name Flamebird.
From Superman #158
Unbelievably, Dick Grayson has been Nightwing now for 39 years, almost as long as he was Robin. There have been some, let’s say, unfortunate choices along the way. The mullet, the ponytail, both a few years after they had been in style, for example. Having him be shot in the head and becoming an amnesiac, leaving a scar that looks like his symbol? That was rough. But more recently, the character has been given a new life, using his inhertiance to make life in his city better than perhaps Batman ever could. It’s good stuff.
It’s funny how the simplest thing can trigger strong memories. It happened to me again today. I went outside to the front of the garage to grill a couple of hamburgers and it started to rain. The drops were slow, but pretty big, and next thing I knew, it was a soaking torrent. So much for grilling!
I went back inside, and rather than dig a George Foreman grill out of storage, I just took out a frying pan and turned a stovetop burner on. Just as soon as I dropped the patties in and they started sizzling, the combination of sound and smell transported me back to the summer of 1986. I was living with five young college women on West Dutton Street in downtown Kalamazoo. It was what they called the “student ghetto” back then. They were all friends of my fiancee at the time, and I was subletting my fiancee’s room for the summer while she moved back home with her parents. I just needed a place to stay between semesters at school, because I lived in the dorm all four years. Believe it or not, it was cheaper for me to do so because of my financial aid. The house was, shall we say, not nice. I spent a good many evenings catching mice with homemade traps made out of grocery bags and string.
I was broke and hungry for the first half of the summer. I was taking a summer class up on main campus, and I needed to commute every other day to get there. I bought a bike to help with the commute. My brother had destroyed my beloved 10-speed when I was gone on vacation one year while I was away, so I had to buy a new bike. I bought a new Huffy for about $100 at Toys R Us, where I worked, and I rode that up to campus and back. I assembled it myself to save money, and while doing so, I twisted off the nut that held the wire for the brake calipers in place. It was cheap, soft metal, and it just snapped. I took the bike back. Rather than just giving me a new nut, they replaced the entire bike, and I had to put another bike together all over again. I was very careful with the tightening that time.
I rode the Huffy up to campus on Mondays and Wednesdays, and I worked part-time at Toys R Us on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and some Saturdays. My housemates were generous enough to give me rides to work, because no one wanted me riding a bike down the busiest street in Kalamazoo at 9:30 at night. I was only working 20 hours a week at minimum wage, but that was more than enough to pay my share of the rent and to pitch in for food. My request each week was two pounds of ground beef and a pack of hamburger buns. And my caloric intake was a bowl of community cereal with milk in the morning and about a 1/3-pound hamburger each afternoon. One of my housemates taught me how to season and fry a hamburger, and I was good to go.
Not a lot of food for a 21-year-old, but it was enough to sustain me. I had the occasional box of Meijer brand macaroni and cheese. I had grown up eating that, after all.
I spent most of my time in the house reading, because I was stupid enough to take an English class on 20th century American authors. The books were long and boring. The other time I spent drawing, which paid off for me in an unexpected way. When the young women saw that I could draw, one asked me to draw a sketch of her. I had drawn from life in my freshman year, and I wasn’t bad at it, so I agreed. What I didn’t realize is that she wanted me to draw her in her underwear for her boyfriend. I tried to be professional about it. The model I had drawn in my studio art class had been nude, so I didn’t act like a total dork, but I was still nervous because this was someone I knew. When the rest of the ladies saw the result, I suddenly had a steady stream of customers. I guess that’s really the right word, because I exchanged my art skills for free rides to work. So, that made for a truly interesting summer, that’s for sure. I’m not sure how their boyfriends took having me see their girlfriends in their underwear, but they never mentioned it to me. Who knows, maybe the sketches weren’t really for them? The exposure didn’t only go one way, as I got walked in on while showering more than once, and we didn’t have a shower curtain.
At Toys R Us, I truly was in my element. I quickly became known as the “King of the 300 Aisle.” The 300 aisle was where the action figures and Barbies were stocked. I knew every toy line and I knew them well. Because there were few superhero shows at the time (can you imagine?), I watched the various cartoons that went with them. There were Transformers (Generation 1), GI Joe, Masters of the Universe, Warlord, Dungeons and Dragons, Chuck Norris Karate Kommandos, Thundercats, Silverhawks, Super Powers, Secret Wars, Star Wars Droids, and there were even some carded Mego Hulks still on the pegs, most of them with at least one broken leg.
A common sight back then…
I collected the Super Powers line myself, and had a complete set of every figure released, except one. I had never seen a Cyborg figure myself. I opened every case of Super Powers that came in that summer and still never saw a Cyborg figure. I started to suspect that it wasn’t real.
Someone got one somewhere, but it wasn’t Kalamazoo, Michigan!
This was where I first started dabbling with toy scalping. On certain weekends I was helping my friend Marc Newman do comic book conventions. Marc had awful night vision, and in exchange for comics and pizza, I drove him to and from cons, also providing raw muscle. Back then, I thought nothing of carrying two long boxes at the same time. Boy, those were the days! At one such convention, I noticed that two GI Joe figures, Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow, were selling for $20 apiece. I didn’t understand that, because I was still shelving them regularly in my evening job. The dealer said that they were hard to find in the wild, as he put it. I asked Marc if it would be okay if I grabbed a couple from work and put them up for sale at his table. he said he didn’t mind at all. So, the next week, I went to the back of the store, opened up two fresh cases of GI Joe figures, and spent $16 of my meager paycheck to buy two Snake Eyes figures and two Storm Shadows.
And sure enough, that weekend, I sold them for a total of $80! Bear in mind, I was making minimum wage, $3.35 an hour back then, so the $64 I earned in profit was the equivalent of 19 hours of labor! I couldn’t believe it. I did that for the rest of the summer. At least I could finally eat better!
The only drawback to working at Toys R Us was that I had to walk past the animatronic Teddy Ruxpin teddy bear. It had a motion sensor, so every time anyone walked past it, it began to sing, “Come Dream With Me Toniiiiiight.” And since it was on an endcap, at least 50 times a day, I heard that stupid song until I finally learned how to disconnect the motion sensor.
Bite me, Teddy
The summer passed pretty slowly, and things got heated for a bit, both literally and figuratively. We had no air conditioning. We all walked around in various states of undress as it got into the 90s. That, combined with not seeing our significant others on a regular basis due to crazy work schedules led to a great deal of frustration. I remember one night when we all sat in the living room, reading aloud stories from Penthouse Forum. I think we were all pretty much feeling it at that point, but certain people were sending pretty clear signals to me and some of the other ladies got jealous, even though I wasn’t responding to them. That caused friction among three of the five for some time.
Another point of tempation came when we got robbed. While we were all out of the house, someone broke in through the back French doors, and took the television, the stereo, and…the Trivial Pursuit game. Honestly of all those things, the Trivial Pursuit game hit us the hardest because we didn’t have cable anyway. We played the board game more than we watched the TV. But that sense of violation made us feel insecure. I was invited to sleep with two of my housemates for a week after that. No funny business, mind you, just sleep. Yes, the thought did cross my mind. I was 21 years old and had seen every one of them in their underwear. I have a feeling I could have, but I was engaged at the time, and remained faithful.
I ended up with a B in the summer reading class, and I don’t think I even read the last two books on the list. But I knew I could BS with the best of them and I did on the written final exam, and at the end of summer, I was almost grateful that it was time for me to move back into the dorm. At least I would eat better. All of my possessions put together fit into the trunk of one car. But what to do with my bike? Well, I’m not especially proud of this, but coincidentally, I tightened the brake caliper nut too hard (it was always coming loose) and snapped it again. I still had the receipt, so I returned the bike to the store for a refund. It was obviously faulty because it happened twice, so I got my money back instead of yet another replacement. I basically got the use of a 10-speed bike for the summer for free, courtesy of the Toys R Us where I had worked all summer.
Strangely enough, I was not invited to sublet with the five young women again the next year. Ironically, I sublet a room in the house that their boyfriends rented together. I look back on that summer now, and I’m kind of grateful that cell phone cameras were not a thing then, because I did not share stories of the summer of 1986, except for the fact that I knew how to cook hamburgers.
One of my favorite things about spring and summer was going to the Copemish Flea Market with my Grandma McClain. Held every Saturday, my grandma would always prefer to get fresh fruits and vegetables there from a farm stand, rather than the limited selection available at the local grocery store. They would hold us over until her massive garden started yielding carrots, peas, tomatoes, corn, rhubarb, and blackberries. I only remember growing potatoes once, because they were so inexpensive at the flea market.
I, on the other hand, would be on the hunt for more unusual fare. There was the comic book dealer, who not only sold older comics cheap, but would also trade two for one. But there would also be other stuff, like frog spears, rubber band guns, and other hand-carved toys. I mostly stuck to comic books, always in search of something I missed at the grocery store that served as my only other source. He also had paperback books, something that my grandfather enjoyed immensely.
My Grandpa McClain had his daily routine as a retired ornamental iron worker. He’d get up at 4 AM, make coffee, and then go out to the garage to putter. When my grandma got up at seven, he’d come back to the house for breakfast, and then putter around until lunch at noon. After lunch, he’d lie on the couch, reading a Zane Grey western until he fell asleep in the sunlight, which streamed through the window. He’d still have his cheaters (glasses) on, and his mouth would be wide open. I always thought, wow, that’s the life. He’d go back out to the garage until dinner, then watch the news and whatever show Grandma wanted to watch until bedtime at 11. If baseball was on, everyone was happy, and in the springtime, baseball was on just about every night.
We had a cabinet full of Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour westerns. I was free to read whatever I wanted from the cabinet, but I found the westerns to be pretty repetitive. Grandma and Grandpa also had a subscription to Reader’s Digest, which I looked forward to, and their Condensed Books anthologies, which had abridged versions of popular novels of the time. When I found Peter Benchley’s Jaws on the shelf in Volume 98, I knew I had to read it. Just a couple of years before, when I was still living with my mother, we had gone to the drive-in theater, where they played a kids’ movie first, and then a popular movie more geared for adults second in a double feature. The expectation is that the kids would go to sleep for the second feature.
We had a station wagon at the time, and we kids were supposed to lie down and go to sleep in the back. When we went to the show and Jaws was playing, though, I could not go to sleep. That John Williams music was so suspenseful, and the sounds I heard played like the most exciting radio show I’d ever heard. So, I kep sneaking peeks over the back seat. I gave myself away during the scene when Hooper was diving on Ben Gardner’s boat and the fisherman’s severed head floats out through a hole in the boat. I let out an audible gasp and I was busted. My mom figured the damage was done at that point, and let me climb over the back seat to watch the rest of the movie. I was 10 years old, and the memories of feeling like a grown up would stay with me for a long time.
My mom had the original novel, but I wasn’t allowed to read it. I argued that it wasn’t fair because I’d already seen the movie, but it was useless. She wouldn’t let me. So, when the opportunity came up to read the Condensed Book version in my grandparents’ cabinet, I didn’t ask. I had been given carte blanche, remember. I was stunned. Hooper and Brody’s wife? Organized crime? Where was all this in the movie? And the ending was, shall we say, radically different from the movie. I have to tell you that this was a whole lot different than the Hardy Boys books I had read just a few years before. It was closer in tone to the Cyborg novels upon which The Six Million Dollar Man was based. I was starting to get the impression that novel reading was a whole lot more exciting than most people made it out to be and they definitely weren’t all for kids.
I still enjoyed my funny books, but the world was suddenly a much larger place, thanks to Reader’s Digest.
It is the summer of ’85, I’m 20 years old, and I’m driving home from my bagger job at Meijer on Westnedge Avenue in Kalamazoo. I’m cruising north on US 131 in my ’78 Buick LeSabre, windows down, the radio on loud. Voices Carry by ‘Til Tuesday comes on over the speakers. I like this tune, and I’m singing along to it:
“Hush, hush, Keep it down now, Voices carry.”
When the music fades, there’s a short pause, and then the song mysteriously plays again. That’s strange, I think, and I listen to it again. As I said, I like it. Then it plays again. And again. And again. I arrive home after the 20-minute drive, and I run upstairs to the attic room that I rent from my grandmother. I turn on my JC Penney stereo that my mom had found for me at a garage sale, and it’s still playing.
The song played 22 consecutive times that night before the station played a commercial. I felt like I had to see the mystery through to the end, but I never found out why. No explanation was ever given, no mention of it ever made again.
After high school graduation, I went to work in the same factory where my dad worked: Four Winns Boats. I started at $4.25 per hour, which was significantly better than the minimum wage at the time, $3.35. I was a vinyl puller, also known as an upholsterer. I was one of the people who took the wooden frames that made boat seats, stapled foam on the boards, and stretched the sewn vinyl seat covers over the frames, stapling them down with an air-powered staple gun. It was repetitive work, as there were only two kinds of seat frames I was responsible for, the ones that formed loungers. There was a seat and a back. Each set was two seats and two backs. Someone down the line would assemble them together so that the back-to-back boat seats would expand out so that you could lie down on them. In very short order, I was the fastest puller they had. It was virtually mindless work, and I enjoyed it after four years of high school.
The only problem with the job is that it came with a price. I had to quit my high school baseball team, while we were still playing in the state tournaments. My dad had arranged this job, and if I continued on in the tournament for two more weeks, the job wouldn’t be there anymore. Regrettably, I folded up my uniform and turned it in. I felt like I was letting my friends, teammates, and coach down, but on the other hand, I felt like it was time to grow up. I would need this money for college, especially because my dad lived by the philosophy that since I was 18, I had to pay my share of the rent, even though I didn’t even have my own room in his one-bedroom apartment. I slept on a futon in the living room. I also needed to buy a car, and soon.
Ironically, my high school graduation gift from my parents was a car, a 1974 Chevy Nova that my dad had bought for himself. He got my mother to donate $350, half its perceived value of $700, and he gave me the car; allegedly. My mother was furious. Basically, she paid him $350 for his car and he “gave” it to me. Until he didn’t. Right about that time, my aunt and uncle’s car broke down completely and they needed a replacement immediately. My dad gave them my car. How he gave them MY car, I’ll never know, but like Vin Diesel says in those stupid Fast & Furious movies, it’s about family. I guess. So, there I was, without the car that had been given to me as a gift. It took a few weeks, but along with the graduation gift money I had received from some of my more scrupulous relatives, I scraped up enough to buy myself another car, this time a 1974 Ford Pinto station wagon. Since I paid cash for it, this one had a title in my name and no one was giving it to anyone! I loved that car. It was orange and had mag wheels for some reason. I removed the AM radio it came with and installed an AM/FM/cassette boat stereo and speakers from Four Winns in it with my own hands. Electronics class at the Wexford-Missaukee Area Vocational School really paid off! I even bypassed the normal fuse box so that the stereo could play without the key in the ignition. Now I had freedom that no one would ever take away from me. Because my dad worked second shift and was a supervisor, I was not allowed to work on the same shift, so I worked days. That and having a car freed up my evenings to do whatever I wanted.
One of the first things I did was go to a movie by myself. Yes, I could have gotten a date, but this was special. Return of the Jedi was out in theaters, and I didn’t want to embarrass myself by taking a girl to see it. I had already suffered enough jibes from my former classmates for liking this genre. It wasn’t like it is now. So, one evening, I plopped down in a seat by myself in the Cadillac theater with a big bucket of popcorn and a Coke, and settled in. Toward the end of the movie, an unfamilar emotion washed over me. You see, Star Wars had come out when I was 12 years old, the summer before I started junior high. Luke Skywalker was a simple farmboy. When its first sequel, The Empire Strikes Back was released, three years later, I was a high school sophomore. I literally drove my family to see the movie with my learner’s permit in hand. Luke was in his adolescence very much the same as I was at the time. And now, at the end, Luke’s hero’s journey came to fruition, as he proclaimed himself an adult. “I am a Jedi, like my father before me.” I didn’t need to be beaten over the head to recognize the parallels. I had come of age. Young, yes, but I was paying my own way. I had a job and a car that I had bought with my own money, and would soon be on my way to college and the rest of my life. The possibilities were endless.
June was filled with graduation parties, so there was always somewhere to go in the evenings. I loved grad parties. All the turkey, ham, and roast beef you could eat, always on the same rolls. I think everyone used the same service to get their food. There was almost invariably a keg, too, but I wanted nothing to do with beer. Pop was my drink of choice, and Mountain Dew was my favorite. Coke would do as well, though. Since I was now paying for my own food, I appreciated free dinners almost every night! Quite often, when I stayed until the end of a party, I would do my good deed and help clean up, and parents would often beg me to take home leftovers. I would, and those became my lunches at work, wrapped up and packed in my Igloo cooler that I had bought the previous summer for the Christmas tree trimming patch. I took that cooler everywhere, even to the drive-in for movies.
When my brother Jeff, who was 12 at the time, came for visitation that summer, I took him to the drive-in so that we could see some cinematic masterpiece like Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone. We made a bag full of popcorn using the air popper my dad and I had gotten when I was in eighth grade, and put a six-pack of pop in the cooler with ice. I had a dub of Michael Jackson’s Thriller on cassette, and my brother thought it was the greatest album ever made. We played it again and again. It felt good to be a big brother, because I knew what he was going through at my mom’s house.
I took girls to the Cadillac drive-in, too. You might as well just queue up Bob Seger’s Night Moves, so I don’t have to go into detail. I know I remember going to see Flashdance at the theater with one of my high school crushes, but I didn’t see much of the movie.
Later on in June, I traveled down to Kalamazoo for Western Michigan University’s orientation. I had to take a couple of days off work to do it, and I didn’t appreciate losing the money, but it was highly recommended for incoming freshmen. I had never driven a long-distance trip like that before, so it was exciting. What was not exciting was driving the Pinto, which didn’t have air conditioning. When I got there, I saw parents dropping off their kids everywhere, and I was just all by myself. It felt strange but exhiliarating at the same time. We got marched all over campus, touring the facilities, taking placement tests, even applying for work-study for fall. We were also introduced to some of the slightly off-campus offerings, like Bilbo’s Pizza. Named, of course, for the main character in The Hobbit (which I had never heard of), it was a Middle-Earth-themed pizza place, complete with round oaken tables and dark lighting. The only pizza restaurants I had ever sat down in were Pizza Hut and Little Ceasar’s, which yes, had sit-down locations back then.
This was well before Hot ‘n Ready, and even before Pizza! Pizza! was a thing. It was still a cheap-looking place, nothing at all like Bilbo’s. So my small-town self was impressed by the ambience that a real pizza place provided. And the pan-style pizza was pretty good, too!
That visit made me excited. I could hardly wait to start a new life on campus. I had kind of walked away from several of my high school friends at the time. When my two best friends (I thought) planned their graduation parties together and left me out, I got the message that I was not wanted. So, I started making new friends. One of my newer friends was Brian Goodenow, a Pine River student I knew from my class at the Wexford-Missaukee Area Vocational Center. We had been in the same electronics class. Brian was a DJ at WATT, AM 1240, which was only a short drive from my apartment. I spent a lot of time hanging out with him while he was on the air. And I made another new friend at work, Ron Radawiec, who had also gone to Pine River. Ron’s dad had just opened up the very first video rental store in Northern Michigan, so Ron and I would often rent movies to watch at his house when we had nothing else to do. I found the video cassette recorder to be a magical tool, and I envied theirs. Of course, you couldn’t afford to own movies. No, the average cost of a VHS movie was $80-90 back then. That’s why you rented them! Three-dollar rentals were expensive, but nowhere near the cost of a newly released movie. And because of my Pine River connections (it was the high school where all of my Tustin Elementary friends went), I even got a visit one night from Janet Johnson and Robin Byers, my sixth grade crushes, with whom I had also reconnected at the vocational school. They were there for nursing. It seemed like my world was getting bigger than the isolated Mesick High School experience.
Moreover, it felt like my life had come full circle, going back to when I first went to live with my dad. Like Luke Skywalker, I had completed the first leg of my hero’s journey.
