When seventh grade was finally over and summer vacation began, I couldn’t wait to play baseball. The year before, I had played Little League in Tustin with my dad as an assistant coach, and there was no question that I was one of the stars on the team. But in Mesick, that pecking order had already been established, and I was more like in interloper coming in to disrupt things. Still, I had made friends over the course of the year thanks to my size and being recruited to play basketball, and I was one of the guys now. So, naturally, I wanted to play baseball, which was a sport I was actually good at and had experience playing.
To say that we were dominant as a baseball team would be an understatement. We crushed everyone in our path. These guys had been playing together practically since birth, and their roles were were established. Everyone knew who the pitchers were, who the catcher was, and who played each position. I, who had been used to playing first base, was cast aside in favor of two left-handed players. I was relegated instead to right field. Not because I had a good arm for that long throw to third, but because fewer balls were hit there than the other two fields. I had fielded fly balls for years on the playground, but playing organized outfield was different. I did have a good arm, far better than average, and I loved to unload from the outfield. I was pretty accurate, too. I was happy as long as I was playing.
Can you picture the movie, The Sandlot? Just kids playing in blue jeans and t-shirts? That’s who we were. Kastl Well Drilling was our sponsor, and it was written in black on the front of our orange t-shirts with our numbers on the backs. The head coach our team was Jerry McNitt, the local gas man who also had a trout farm. His son, Eric, was our best pitcher and one of the lefty first basemen I mentioned. Floyd Carpenter was his assistant. Floyd was married to Vonceille, who was the lady in town who cut everyone’s hair. No, I mean it. She was the only stylist in town as far as we boys went. Unless you wanted to drive 20-25 miles to Cadillac or Traverse City, Vonceille was the only game in town. She was also Monty Geiger’s mom, and he was one of my classmates and teammates. They lived right across from the ballfield, so it was convenient!
As the summer went on, I looked forward to Little League every day. There was nothing I loved more than playing baseball, even from a young age. It was one of the few things that I did that my abusive stepfather actually approved of. I still remember the thrill of getting my first baseball glove (from a garage sale) and playing catch with myself by bouncing a hard rubber ball off of the propane tank in our back yard. The cylindrical nature of the tank provided for fly balls, ground balls, and line drives, depending on the angle at which the ball hit the tank. Eventually, I received one of the best gifts ever, a Pitch-Back.
With the Pitch-Back, I could use an actual baseball, another wonderful Christmas gift. I was always amused that my Christmas gifts were usually things that I couldn’t use for months while we waited for good weather, but my dreams were filled with visions of using them, and that sure beat nightmares any time.
One thing I had never dealt with before in baseball but encountered for the first time in Mesick, was a curveball. For those of you who don’t deal in sports very much, a curveball is thrown with an angled spin that makes the ball change course in the air. It is NOT an optical illusion. The raised seams of the baseball provide resistance against the air in the direction of the spin, while the spin accelerates on the downward side. Bernoulli’s principle is at work here. For a right-handed pitcher throwing to a right-handed batter, you literally aim the ball at their lead shoulder, and the ideal pitch will break down and to the left, across the plate for a strike. That means to the batter, for a split-second, the ball looks like it is going to hit you. You have about half a second to determine if it’s a curveball or not, and whether to swing. You determine that by picking up the spin out of the pitcher’s hand as soon as possible. As a kid who had been hit a lot, I was not one to stay still in the box and find out. I flinched almost every single time. Throwing a curve ball puts a lot of tension on the elbow, so it’s generally not something you see until 12 or 13 years old. That added a whole new element to baseball for which I was unprepared.
Still, our team dominated every area team, going undefeated for the entire summer. We beat one team in Grawn 38-0. By the end, we were all batting opposite handed so as not to run up the score even more. When victorious, our coaches would take us to the Dari-Pit for ice cream.
The Dari-Pit, a few years before I was in Little League, but it looked pretty much just like this
This, of course, was the same place my grandma used to take my brother Jeff and me for ice cream, and I knew I loved those banana boats. When it was my turn to order, I ordered the banana boat. The other players jumped on me immediately. Banana splits were for players who hit a home run. Everyone else just got a vanilla or chocolate cone. I was devastated to have committed such a faux pas with my new team. I overreacted and refused any ice cream at all, because I had been conditioned to prepare for punishment for making such a mistake. The coaches wouldn’t hear of it, though, and were great. They just told me gently to check with them next time. This, like so many other instances growing up in Mesick, was a kindness that I would never forget. It was the polar opposite of what I was used to, and how I was used to being treated. Teachers and now coaches were proving to be positive models for adult behavior which I would emuate in my own adult years.
I had spent 11 solid months living with my dad, and at last, as of December 5, I was officially a teenager! This was the first birthday I’d spent with my dad and Grandma and Grandpa McClain since I turned six. My grandma made a cake, of course, and on Monday night, we had dinner, followed by cake and ice cream. My dad had unfortunately lost his job at Suburban Furniture earlier in the fall, and had started a new job selling Case tractors at a dealership, and by winter, that job had evaporated as well. He was now doing odd construction jobs for our neighbor and landlord, Dick Amidon, and was helping my grandpa plow driveways.
My grandpa had a 1966 Ford Bronco with a big yellow plow on the front, and spent his retirement winters plowing driveways for people. In northern Michigan, snow fell much heavier than it usually did in other places, and there was always work to do. He’d get up at 4:30 in the morning and plow until seven or so, and then he’d go down to the restaurant for his usual coffee and roll. While my aunt Nancy lived in an apartment in Traverse City, her malamute/samoyed mix named Nikki stayed with my grandparents. Grandpa would take Nikki plowing with him. She loved riding alongside him in the Bronco and kept him company. I remember my grandpa teaching me to plow. It was a blast. First of all, the Bronco was a stick shift like our van, so there was a lot to do besides put the Bronco in gear and move forward. It was clutch, shift, gas, brake, clutch, reverse, clutch, gas, brake, clutch. It was not a boring activity!
After my birthday dinner, my dad had a special surprise for me. He and Grandpa and Grandma gave me a snowmobile! My dad and Grandpa had bought a used Arctic Cat Panther that had been in disrepair due to an engine fire. Together, they got it running enough for me to use. They repainted the engine cowl purple and presented it to me. I was near tears. I had wanted a snowmobile for my whole life. For those readers who don’t know, snowmobiling is a way of life in Northern Michigan. I had been riding snowmobiles with my family since I could sit on one. Usually I rode with my grandma because she wouldn’t go too fast and scare me. Don’t laugh. Snowmobiles can really fly, some easily doing over 100 miles per hour. My Panther topped out at about 50, which was good enough for me. I couldn’t wait to take it out for a long ride, but with basketball practice and games, that would have to wait for the weekend.
A lot of my friends were in band, and though I loved music, I had never been allowed to join band. Try not to be too surprised. My dad, of course, encouraged me to join band. The band teacher, Mrs. Carnahan, said that I had the lips of a tuba player, and started me out in a near-soundproof practice room, learning to play baritone. She explained that baritone music also played using bass clef, and so reading the music would be good training for tuba. It was also a lot easier to carry home for the half-mile walk to the trailer.
A rare photo of me in 7th grade! Ladybug is assisting in baritone practice.
I practiced for about a month, and then started on the tuba, and was able to join the rest of the junior high band soon after. I loved playing in band. The whole idea of listening to what others were doing and then contributing your part in concert, if you will, made me feel a lot less alone and odd. And when I started playing tuba, I could hear my horn filling the room with rich sound. I was the only tuba player, so I often carried the bass line by myself. There was nowhere to hide if I made a mistake. I sat in the back row with Margaret Saxton and Angie Alberts, who played baritone saxophone. And Margaret didn’t punch me anymore, so band was a win-win all around. The band was doing a fundraiser that winter, selling World’s Finest chocolate bars. I was given a case of them to take home and try to sell for a dollar each. And I knew just how I was going to get out of my own neighborhood where Kellie Amidon, who played trombone, would have a stranglehold on the market.
On Saturday, I dragged my snowmobile out of the garage, primed it, pulled the cord, fired the engine up, and off I went. Zoom! I drove the snowmobile across the back field and into the woods where we had been snowmobiling since I was six. I took it across a scary ridge and down into the Glengarry area out in the rural area that no one would ever attempt to cover on foot, where no one else had even tried to sell candy. I sold the entire box in one afternoon! I broke down the empty carton, stored it under my seat, and drove my snowmobile into town. You could do that with snow-covered roads. My mom had sent me a check for my birthday, and earlier in the week we had opened my first bank account. I had deposited five dollars of it in the bank and kept the other five dollars to spend. I went to Jack’s market and bought Firestorm #1. I couldn’t believe it. A new #1 issue of a hero I’d never heard of! I had just missed the beginning of Black Lightning earlier in the summer, and I was not about to let this one slip past me!
Firestorm #1
I bought the comic book, a Marathon bar, and a pack of Star Wars trading cards, total cost 75 cents plus tax. I didn’t want to spend all my money at once! I raced back home, put my snowmobile away, and went inside Grandma and Grandpa’s house to enjoy my finds. This was the quintessential experience I think of fondly whenever I remember this part of my life. I sat in my grandma’s recliner with headphones on, listening to music, while reading and eating a candy bar.
Most of the autumn passed with me still feeling like an outsider, someone without a place in the community I called home. Basketball changed all that. I had arrived in Mesick too late in the summer to join a new Little League baseball team, so the kids in my class never saw that I could play sports. Most of our PE time was spend playing either dodgeball, volleyball, or floor hockey. We even did trampoline jumping. But when basketball came around, I wasn’t very good.
I had never played organized basketball outside of one practice in sixth grade in the upper peninsula. I had asked if I could join the basketball team, and Mom and Steve said I could, as long as I kept up with my daily chores. Well, I didn’t shovel the driveway cleanly enough for Steve’s tastes, so I was forced to quit after the first practice. It was a trap even Admiral Ackbar could have seen coming, but I was too naive to know that I had been set up to fail. They just didn’t want to pick me up from basketball practice.
When it came time to try out for basketball in Mesick, I had little experience. I had no shooting form whatsoever. I pushed the ball with both hands together in front of me. The only thing I had going for me is that I was tall and I could jump. I even shot layups off the wrong foot. But after practice one day, one of the eighth graders took me aside and taught me to shoot, how to support the ball with my left hand and shoot with my right, with my middle finger centered on the ball, and to follow all the way through with a loose wrist at the end to put the proper backspin on the ball. It was simple, but it worked. My grandma agreed to buy me a basketball as an early birthday present, and I knew which one I needed.
1977 Spalding Basketball Ad, art by Jack Davis
This ad appeared on almost every comic book in 1977, and it was effective. I got a rubber ball and I would lie down on my back and simulate the mechanics of the shot I had learned, over and over and over again. I would probably practice that a thousand times a day, lying on the bed in my tiny bedroom. I would dribble it all the way to school (I walked) and back.
I know I’ve mentioned this before, but believe me, it bears repeating. I sweated. A lot. I had to be careful of how active I got in the gym after lunch, when we would gather to blow off steam, because I would pit out my shirts in just a few minutes. I tried to avoid playing basketball full-tilt, instead playing Horse or Pig, or just shooting free throws. But at basketball practice, there was a lot of running and there was simply no way to avoid it. It didn’t matter to anyone because I was playing hard. It wasn’t until we had a game one time that I even had to think about it.
Our uniforms consisted of simple orange t-shirts with black numbers on them. Nothing fancy for junior high. We wore whatever shorts we owned. For me, that was cutoff jeans. I had never owned any other kind of shorts. And coincidentally, the conference our school was in had two other schools whose colors were orange and black. That’s right, three out of eight teams had the same team colors. Well, we were playing one of those teams, Kingsley, and their eighth graders wore the same uniform t-shirts that ours did. So, to be different, our eighth graders had to wear our seventh grade uniforms after the game was over. I gave up my orange t-shirt, only to have the eighth grade coach hold it up in front of the whole crowd, showing the gigantic dark circles of sweat that I had left under the arms. I was embarrassed and angry. What else was I supposed to do, not play as hard as I could? That was (and is) not me. When I went to do something, I went all out. I left it all on the court. And if I was going to be humiliated for this effort, I was done. This soured the whole basketball experience for me.
After the season ended, I didn’t want anything to do with basketball, ever again. I didn’t even attend the season-ending banquet; in fact, I didn’t tell anyone in my family they were having one. The next Monday at school, all of my teammates were on me, asking why I didn’t go to the banquet. I said I didn’t want to play basketball anymore, and there wasn’t much point. They told me that I had received the “Most Improved Player” award in my absence. Me? I had won an award? They reassured me that I had done a great job during the season and that I was as much a part of the team as anyone else. I had found acceptance.
I went to talk to the coach and he was also surprised that I hadn’t come to the banquet. I explained that I didn’t think I was any good, and he told me that I had improved so much that I had gone from being almost the worst player to the third-best player in just six weeks! Everything about being embarrassed by the sweat stains was instantly forgotten. That’s how important honest praise was to me back then. I thanked him profusely and promised to try even harder next year.
And how did that turn out? Well, just six years later…
Never underestimate the power of sincere praise for a kid with low self-esteem.
Although my dad and I were living in our own trailer now, my grandma’s house was a short run across a field. I had gone back and forth so often that there was a path between our houses. When we moved out of their house, my aunt Nancy moved back in. My aunt was closer to my age than my dad’s. He was 12 when she was born. She was only nine when I was born. So, when I was much younger, I was like an annoying baby brother who was always hanging around her. I used to watch Dark Shadows with her after she got out of school sometimes when I was four, until I would get too scared. Boy, would she get mad.
Nancy had married young, at only 18, to an older “friend of the family,” that she had grown up having a crush on. He turned out to be abusive, so she left him and came back home. Now that she was turning 22 and I was a less annoying 12, She introduced me to one of my most powerful artistic influences, Fleetwood Mac. She had an external cassette player, which she usually hooked up to her stereo system in the basement that my dad and I had just vacated, but for me she brought it up to the living room of my grandma and grandpa’s house. I listened to the cassette of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours on her over-ear headphones. She had a big case full of cassette tapes. She listened to them in her Ford Pinto station wagon as well, so she’d let me borrow one or two for a week, while she had the rest for her drive to and from Traverse City, where she worked as a secretary for Grand Traverse Auto. If you’re going to discover music as an important thing in your life, you really can’t go wrong with Fleetwood Mac.
I wore Rumours out, but I also discovered Seals & Croft, England Dan and John Ford Coley, The Doobie Brothers, Captain and Tennille, and more. I found myself watching less TV and listening to more music. There were some really happy days for me, sitting in my grandma’s recliner with headphones on, reading comic books and magazines, and eating a candy bar. Marathon was my favorite. For the money, you couldn’t go wrong. The hard caramel forced you to eat it slowly. Sometimes I picked up Bottle Caps or Spree, because I could portion those out. I was only treated once a week on Fridays, so I wanted to make my treats last.
Marathon Bar
My reading was now expanding beyond comic books and movie adaptations. Every magazine in existence had Star Wars on the cover. It was a phenomenon. Science Fantasy Film Classics launched with Star Wars on the cover, and it ran for years.
Science Fantasy Film Classics Vol. 1, Issue 1
When I had read the feature article on Star Wars about a thousand times, I read about the other movies that were in the magazine as well. I had never seen 2001: A Space Odyssey nor Forbidden Planet. When I asked my dad about the latter 1956 film, he raved about seeing it in the theater when he was my age, 12 years old. I really wanted to see it then, but there was no way to do so back then. We didn’t have streaming services, or even cable TV. There were no home video stores yet. Either you would catch it in reruns somewhere or it was lost to time.
My favorite magazine back then was Starlog. My first issue was #11. I’d seen it in the bookstore in Cadillac several times, but the cost was the same as several comic books.
Starlog #11
I wanted to read about the makeup men in the cover blurb. I wanted to learn how these movies were made. And what’s that? There was a Superman movie coming! We knew this from DC Comics at the time, because they were running a contest to see if YOU could be in the Superman movie!
I think my grandma and my dad indulged me in these purchases because I wasn’t just reading comic books anymore. On the other hand, I wasn’t reading them any less. Although the Star Wars comic series finished off the events in the movie with #6, the comics continued. MORE Star Wars!
Star Wars #7
These Star Wars comics were crazy. Han Solo and Chewbacca were off on their own with more adventures and misdeeds. But, it was all approved by Lucasfilm, so it counted as far as I was concerned.
Superheroes were starting to fall by the wayside in my view. I wasn’t even paying attention to the Marvel Memory Album Calendar anymore, especially with Tomb of Dracula (what else?) representing the month.
When I was in elementary school, I had learned that on Groundhog Day, if the groundhog saw its shadow, we were in for six more weeks of winter. I was much older before I learned that six more weeks of winter was bad news. We routinely still had some snow on the ground on April 1.
DC Calendar of Super-Spectacular Disasters April 1978
But this April was warming up nicely, and it was decided by our class sponsor, Mr. Salling, that our 7th grade class would have our very first dance. Now, bear in mind, what we called a dance then is very different than a middle school dance now. This was our chance to dance with a partner of the opposite sex, something many of us dreamed about and just as many feared. I was both.
My dad was excited by the prospect of me going to my first dance. He considered himself quite the lady’s man, and his three marriages by age 34 seemed to confirm that. He told me exactly what to do. He said that most of the boys would be too “chicken shit” (his words) to ask anyone to dance, and if I acted boldly and simply went up to ask someone, she would probably say yes, because so many boys would be lined up on the opposite wall, afraid to go over. He made sure I had my appearance and hygiene correct. My clothes were clean, I had showered and washed my hair, and had applied a generous amount of deodorant. We’d had conversations about that before. I was ready.
When we got to the dance, we self-organized into our usual cliques. I was with the jocks who’d played basketball together in the winter. We had sloppy joes to eat, prepared by Mrs. Salling, who taught elementary school and was our advisor’s wife. I had eaten a moderate (for me) two sloppy joes and a handful of potato chips. I didn’t want to look like a pig, after all. But at the end of the eating portion of the evening, there was a lot of sloppy joe mix left. Mr. Salling bellowed out, “Stacey! McClain! Get over here!”
Dan Stacey and I had resolved our differences earlier in the year and no longer hated each other. It turns out that when he took pictures of me in my underwear in the locker room, there wasn’t even film in the camera. And our reputations as big eaters had certainly preceded us, and Mr. Salling didn’t want to let the food go to waste. So, he organized an eating contest between Dan and me. I told him I didn’t want to participate. I was already nervous enough about asking someone to dance as it was. But he wouldn’t hear of it, and he goaded me into the competition. And one thing I had at age 13 was a competitive streak, because I was constantly trying to prove myself to gain the respect of my peers.
We began eating. One each. Two each, Three. Four. Five. Ten. We didn’t even start slowing down until we had each eaten 12 Sloppy Joes apiece. The thirteenth went down slowly, and Dan had just finished his 14th. My buddies were cheering me on, and about three-fourths of the way through my 14th Sloppy Joe, I puked. I mean, it all came up. I managed to avoid getting any on my clothes, but it was all over my plate and the tables we used in the home ec room. A collective “EEEWWWWW” erupted from everyone. And yes, there had been girls watching, too; the ones I was supposed to ask to dance. Without thinking, I put the last quarter of my Sloppy Joe and my mouth and swallowed it whole. After all, my stomach was empty now. That made the next reactions of grossed-out girls even worse.
I was mortified. I don’t think there’s a description of the level of embarrassment that quite captures how I felt at that moment. I just knew I was never going to find a dance partner, not just that night, but maybe ever. How was I going to go home and face my dad? I felt like such a failure.
I couldn’t brush my teeth, but I rinsed my mouth out and bummed a piece of gum (or two) from one of my friends. When the dance started, Mr. Salling encouraged me to go ask a girl to dance, but I just meekly shook my head and stayed where I was. I was afraid of rejection, the same kind of rejection I had felt from my mom’s husband when I had tried to be a son to him. I couldn’t take it if the same thing happened to me in my new school.
About a half hour into the dance, I just decided to go home. I lived a 10-minute walk away from the school, and I didn’t want to call for a ride. I would walk home in the dark. Just as I got up to leave, a pretty little blonde girl named Jenny Harris asked me to dance. I looked skeptical. “Are you sure?” I asked. She smiled at me and nodded yes, and she took my hand and led me out to the dance floor, also known as the high school gym. It was a slow dance, and in those days in seventh grade, that meant putting your arms around each other and swaying back and forth, maybe even going in the occasional circle. As we rocked back and forth, I almost cried because I was so grateful to Jenny for having pity on me. And it felt like a colossal weight had been lifted from my shoulders. After the song ended, I thanked her, and she just smiled and nodded again.
I would discover much later that Jenny was in fact Mr. Salling’s pet and spy. She was a friend of the family, and she babysat their new son. Mr. Salling had seen what I was going through and said in his gruff tone, “Harris! Go dance with McClain.” And she had obliged him.
“Jenny,” or Jen as she goes by now, is still my friend to this day, 45 years later, and I always respected Mr. Salling because of this kindness. I related this story at his memorial a few years ago with Jen at my side, and I don’t think there was a single dry eye in the house, including mine. That’s the kind of teacher he was. That’s the kind of man he was. And having these types of people in my life at that age, both Jen and Mr. Salling, made all the difference in the world.
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.
