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.
Superboy #240, cover by Mike Grell and Joe Rubinstein
Normalcy was not something I was used to. And my life at 13 was, I want to say, as close to normalcy as I ever had. I had school, I had friends, I had a loving family, and I had my weekly trips to the grocery store to buy comics, trading cards, or candy
It’s kind of funny, reading back over the stories that I’ve told thus far. The stories seem focused on the things that I bought. And I guess, in a way they are, because I was not allowed to have these things for a long time. In the five years that I lived with my mom and stepfather, candy, for example, was strictly forbidden. We could occasionally be allowed half a stick of gum, and it was only Wrigley’s Doublemint. Visits to Dad’s and Grandma and Grandpa McClain’s house were exceptional. But to not be able to have the simple joy of an occasional jaw-breaking Bazooka Joe or a bag of M&Ms just seemed oppressive.
I’ve written before that my favorite candy bar was the Marathon bar, but there were other times when I just wanted to try something I had always seen on a grocery store shelf and wanted to try. Bottle Caps became another favorite of mine.
Bottle Caps are, as you can see, “The Soda Pop Candy,” and it came in the different flavors of pop. Strawberry, orange, grape, cola, root beer, I enjoyed them all. I still remember wondering if adding some to water would make a kind of pop without the fizz, but that was a failure. But hey, at least I was free to try! The great thing about Bottle Caps is that I didn’t have to eat them all at once and could save them over a couple of days. I still occasionally indulge in these when I buy groceries. I save them for family movie night.
The other candy I could savor was Spree.
Spree was fun because the flavors were so bright. There was a candy coating, but once you got past that, the phosphoric acid took over.
We had open lunches, even in junior high, and could walk downtown if we so chose. Many of my friends would go and get food or candy, and that’s how trends started. And while Jolly Ranchers were popular, the Jolly Rancher Stix candies were more popular with our crowd. They were long, flat versions of Jolly Rancher flavors that could be sharpened down to a shiv. The most popular one, though was the Fire Stix.
Fire Stix were a bargain because they lasted forever. If you were careful how you unwrapped it, you could put the wrapper back on and put it in your pocket to enjoy later. I loved cinnamon candy in general, and when I stayed with my dad, I often got a pack of Big Red gum, which became available in 1975! Way better than that old Doublemint.
If I was really lucky, I could get a Plen T Pak!
17 sticks of gum!
It just seems so odd to think about these things now as a highlight of adolescence. They should just be things that were part of every kid’s life. But to me, now, they represent something else. It’s no wonder I still indulge in these sweets. They bring memories of happiness, lifted spirits, and finally having the freedom to make decisions for myself.
Action Comics #484, art by Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez and Dick Giordano
There’s a certain bait-and-switch that happens with comic books. Quite often, the cover doesn’t match the contents of the interior. This one was no exception, although the marriage of Superman and Lois Lane does take place within. It’s just that it was the Superman and Lois Lane of Earth-2, the world of the golden age of comics instead of the continuity of the Superman of 1978. And while the outstanding image drawn by Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez sold this comic, the interiors were drawn by Curt Swan, the stalwart Superman artist whose work spanned decades. There is nothing wrong with Curt Swan’s artwork. It’s like comfort food to me. But the dynamism of Garcia-Lopez and just the pure joy expressed on his subjects’ faces always sold me on a comic book. I hoped that one day he would succeed Curt Swan as the regular Superman artist. And then, the very next week, I practically got my wish.
DC Comics Presents #1, art by Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez and Dan Adkins
On the stands was a new title, DC Comics Presents, sort of a companion title to Brave and the Bold, which had been a Batman team-up book for several years at that point. I loved these sorts of team-ups. If I didn’t know anything about The Unknown Soldier, for example, I could learn about him when he teamed up with Batman in B&B. Outside of actual story, it was a way for DC to maintain their trademarks on dormant characters. DC Comics Presents was Superman’s own team-up book. I’m sure they were gearing up for the upcoming Superman movie that people were talking about. There had already been casting rumors flying about in trade magazines, with names like Robert Redford and Sylvester Stallone in the running. But Starlog Magazine #11, earlier in the year, had a photograph of the new Superman, Christopher Reeve!
Unlike the previous week’s Action Comics #484, DC Comics presents had Jose Luiz Garcia-Lopez art throughout the entire book. And it was gorgeous. It was kind of a silly story written by Martin Pasko, featuring a race across time between Superman and The Flash, who had been drawn into a civil war between aliens, but I loved it anyway. As it turned out, years later, I found out from Marty himself that it was not his favorite story. He and I became Facebook friends and had many interactions. My favorite came on his birthday one year:
“Okay, Marty. I’m going to tell you the same thing I told Elliot S Maggin when I met him a few years ago. And it’s the same thing I told Dennis O’Neil when I met him a few years before that:
“I grew up being beaten every day from age seven until age 12, when my mother allowed me to go live with my father, for fear that her new husband was going to beat me to death. The worst thing he did to me was not the beatings, but burning my comic books in front of me, simply as an act of cruelty. My father was not an abuser, but he was also not a very good example to follow. It was his cheating that led to their divorce and my subsequent abuse. But at least he let me (and encouraged me) to read comics. I didn’t have adult male role models in my life. At least not any in the real world. The men who provided that example for me were Batman and Superman. And those heroes were written by real human beings whose names I knew, and you were most certainly one of them. From various issues of Action, up to and including #500 (one of my personal favorites), to DC Comics Presents #1 to various issues of JLA and World’s Finest, you did your fair share of shaping my life going into manhood. I still believe in the values those characters once embodied to this day.
“I’m 53 now, a middle school teacher for the past 31 years. I help shape the lives of young people. I also create comics, and not in the modern sense that we see Batman and Superman now, written for adults. My comics are written for me at age 12 and 13. They’re written for kids who need them, like I needed you guys.
“My 12-year-old daughter reads comics now too, and she also knows your work from Batman: Mask of the Phantasm. At the risk of turning you into the monster you fear, I wanted you to know just how much your comics meant to me as a child, an adult, a teacher, and a father. I don’t know if I’ll get the chance to meet you face-to-face one day, but I wanted you to know all of this before you got another year older.
“Thank you and happy birthday.”
To which he replied, “I’m literally speechless (yes, that’s a joke from Mr. Motormouth, moi). But, honestly and sincerely, Jim McClain: Your deeply moving and beautifully articulated comment is the greatest compliment I’ve ever been paid.”
Marty died not long after that exchange, and I am so very grateful that I had the chance to tell him what his writing meant to me. They say, never meet your heroes, but I think in this case it was one of the highlights of my life.
I also happen to be Facebook friends with Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez. But him, I’ve met in person. I was so looking forward to reading more of the DC Comics Presents series just to see his Superman in every issue, but again, the distribution in my small hometown of Mesic left a lot to be desired, and I never saw another issue of DCP until #26, a couple of years later. I never even got to read the second part of the story that it opened with until I was in college. I admire the Maestro, as he’s sometimes called. He defined what DC characters looked like for an entire generation. You may not know his name, but you know his art.
The 1982 DC Comics Style Guide
1984 Super Powers Action FigureDC Heroes Roleplaying Game
My sophomore year of high school had gone pretty well. I had just gotten my driver’s license, and I’d gotten to play varsity basketball (briefly) in the district championship in late February, having been called up from junior varsity, where I had played for the whole regular season. We lost in the regional tournament to Manistee Catholic Central, and the guys were all disappointed that the season was already over.
But not me. It was baseball season.
I loved baseball more than any other sport. I had ever since I was a small boy. And our tiny high school had no junior varsity baseball team. You were either good enough to be on varsity, or you didn’t play. And I had received my varsity letter in baseball my freshman year. I wore it proudly on the varsity jacket that my parents had gone in together to buy me for my sole Christmas present. Nothing made me more proud than to wear that jacket. They bought it for me a couple of sizes too big, which was smart, because I had gone from being 6’3″ and 150 pounds during my freshman year to 6’4″ and 200 pounds seemingly overnight. The weight gain actually came over the summer, as several of my classmates and I had attended a football camp at Central Michigan University. We worked out like beasts and ate like even bigger beasts. My bony frame suddenly started to fill out.
We were living with my grandmother by that time, my grandfather having passed the year before. My dad and I shared the semi-finished basement as a bedroom. My dad had a girlfriend now and spent many nights at her house anyway, much to my grandmother’s chagrin. Even when he was there, I had far more space than I had in the trailer. I was still splitting wood and it showed. My arms were gaining muscle, and you could see veins popping against my skin all the way down my biceps, and then branching out on my forearms. My stomach was flat and if I flexed, all my abominal muscles were visible as if in bas-relief. At football camp, I had won a certificate because I did 31 situps in 30 seconds. I could do 300 without stopping with no difficulty. Those were the days.
Though I played both football and basketball as well, baseball was by far my favorite sport because I loved not just the games but the practices as well. Football was just an evil grind that beat you down into the ground, and basketball was not very instructive. You spent just as much time learning to run plays for the offense as actually playing basketball. Baseball was different. The very first thing we did was start by playing catch and getting our arms loose. Hearing the hiss of the ball as it sailed through the air and the sharp pop as it hit your partner’s glove was as satisfying as any sound on Earth. The smell of glove oil and wintergreen-scented linament filled the air. Every sense was satisfied by baseball. Unlike football and basketball there were no plays to learn. We’d been playing together for years at that point. We all knew who was going to be playing where and how good each of us was. Practice consisted of one of the best things ever known: Playing baseball.
I tell you all of this to make a point. As soon as practice was over, I sped on my bike just as fast as I could to get home. Star Wars was on the radio!
I had read in the newspaper or a Sunday magazine that a Star Wars radio show was coming to our local NPR station. Yes, we did have an NPR station, thanks to the Interlochen Arts Academy 15 miles north of our little town. I did not want to miss a thing. I loved old radio shows, and I definitely loved Star Wars. To combine these two interests into one production was almost too much to hope for. Keep in mind that The Empire Strikes Back had come out the previous year, and had ended on a cliffhanger. If filming schedules stayed the same, we had another two years to wait for the next film. So any Star Wars was good Star Wars. You know, as long as there wasn’t another Holiday Special.
I sat down at the dining room table and tuned the radio to 88.7 MHz. You had to do that manually in those days, with no digital readout. You just estimated as best you could until the signal was strong. Sure enough, the familiar John Williams theme was playing. As I listened, I could tell I was in for a good time because Chapter 1, “A Wind to Shake the Stars,” didn’t simply begin with the star destroyer passing overhead, chasing Princess Leia’s ship. No, it began as the novelization did, with Luke working on his uncle’s farm and going into Tosche Station to pick up some power converters. He races through Beggar’s Canyon in his skyhopper. He sees the Star Destroyer battle with the Tantive IV. He reunites with his childhood friend Biggs, who tells Luke that he’s going to jump ship and join the Rebellion against the Empire. With the conversation fleshed out, you get a sense of how dangerous the Rebellion really is, because Biggs just wants someone to know in case he doesn’t return home. Ironic, yes?
I was hooked.
As the chapters progressed and I flew home each week to catch the next chapter, we got to meet Princess Leia and her father, Bail Organa. The princess has an unfortunate encounter with an Imperial bureaucrat that actually ends up with him dead at Leia’s hand, because she slips and reveals the code words, “Death Star” in relation to the secret space station. We find out how Leia actually gets hold of the Death Star’s plans. Sorry, Rogue One. All very exciting stuff.
The extended scenes were provided by novelist and Star Wars writer Brian Daley, the same Brian Daley who had given us the novel, Han Solo At Star’s End in 1979. Daley filled in gaps and added material that had previously been edited out of the original film and some from the original script.
I won’t say the whole radio drama holds up 100%, but it holds up pretty well, and I love it because it’s one of the nerdy things I hung onto quietly while in my athletic/socially acceptable phase. Naturally, I didn’t tell my teammates about it. I’d been teased enough.
There’s a fascinating story from NPR about how the whole thing got done here, and listening to it is not a bad way to celebrate Star Wars day on May 4.
