Now that school was out, I was spending a lot more time outdoors. One of my favorite things to do was tramping around the neighboring woods with my dog, Ladybug. I had the BB gun that I had received for Christmas the previous year, and we would go out with a paper bag to find cans to set up and shoot. That was the sad thing back in Michigan in those days, there was never a shortage of tin or aluminum cans on the side of the road. Proposal A in the 1976 general election had passed, and with a ten-cent deposit now required on cans and bottles, it got a lot easier to clean up the state. Fewer people just tossed their empties out the windows of their cars like they had before.
We spent great summer days together. I would ride my terrible bicycle, and Ladybug would run along the road with me. I hated my bike, though. Absolutely despised it. I had saved up for two years on my meager allowance to buy the coveted 10-speed bicycle with the curl handlebars that virtually all of my friends rode, while I still had my yellow Huffy single-speed bike with the banana seat. My stepfather Steve kept my money for me, so I didn’t have a chance to spend it. And finally, after two years, he said that my bike was here. I went out to the shed, to find a bike like this:
Columbia bicycle
It wasn’t a 10-speed. It wasn’t a 5-speed. It wasn’t even a 3-speed bike. It was a single-speed antique-looking laughingstock of a bike, and he had spent two years of my allowance on it. I was furious. Spoiled? No. It was my money and I never would have agreed to buy anything remotely resembling this bike. But, it was the only bike I was going to get for the foreseeable future, so I took the loss and moved on. Well, that’s not really true. I’ve never moved on without rectifying a situation. I vowed that I would get a 10-speed one day.
One warm summer day, I was fishing in the little pond in the front yard. It was stocked with bluegills, and they would bite at anything. All I had to do was put a piece of corn on a hook, and drop my line with a bobber. A car was coming down the dirt road, and Ladybug’s ears perked up. She went running at the car, And it drove right over her. She was part basset hound and part dachshund, so she was low to the ground anyway. But the differential caught her as the car passed over, and she went tumbling 15 feet down the road, and lay still. I screamed her name and ran toward her, expecting to see her dead. She wasn’t but she was bloody and just barely breathing. I picked her up and got her out of the road, tears streaming down my face, and brought her up to the house Even the tips of her long, floppy ears looked like they’d been dipped in blood. My dad was home, and he brought out a towel to wrap her up in. She didn’t seem to have any broken bones, and I took her to the open shed next to the house. Dad said we didn’t have money to take her to a vet, so we’d just have to see what happened.
I stayed outside with Ladybug, and listened to her breathe. It started to get dark, but I wouldn’t leave her side. My dad brought my sleeping bag and pillow out to the shed and said I could stay with her until the end. He was not hopeful. I sat there with her, into the night, praying just as hard as I could for God to save her. I had finally found someone I could take care of, and someone who cared about me, staying with me day and night, and now I was about to lose her. I cleaned her up as best I could, and the injuries looked like they were only on the outside. But she still wasn’t waking up.
I fell asleep around 11:00, and when I woke up the next morning, Ladybug was awake and licked my face! She got up, gingerly at first, and then started running around like nothing had happened! My partner in crime was all right! I don’t think I had ever been that happy in my whole life to that point. Suddenly, the kind of bike I rode didn’t matter a whole lot. There were many more important things to worry about.
My brother Jeff came down to visit in June, after school got out. It was the first time I’d seen him since going to live with my dad, six months earlier. We had shared a room for virtually his entire life, so not seeing him for six months was quite different, especially with all the changes that had happened in my life. It was comforting to have him with me again.
Marvel Memory Album June 1977
My dad was at work most of the time, so he took us to my Grandma and Grandpa McClain’s house to stay for the weekdays, up in Mesick. On one of those days, Grandma took us “to town,” as we always called it. That meant lunch out and special gifts! Cadillac had many retail choices not offered in either Tustin or Mesick. Cadillac had the always-amazing bookstore, as well as KMart, and Giantway. Giantway was a department store like KMart, but you could buy groceries there as well. It was where we got almost all of our toys on visits to Grandma’s house. Jeff got a Mego Kid Flash figure for his special gift on this trip.
Mego Kid Flash
He might have been inspired by the comic book I had bought at the bookstore, Secret Society of Super-Villains #9, which featured the character as a guest star.
Secret Society of Super-Villains #9
I still remember this comic for being notable about a trivial detail. I wondered about the pop can tab shown on the first story page:
What’s on Kid Flash’s pop can?
You have to understand that back then, most pop cans opened with pull tops, which you would then throw away, or sometimes, if you were bold, sink into the soda contained in the can. I do recall one or two people cutting their lips as the aluminum tabs made their way back up to the top of the cans, and I definitely remember cutting my own foot on one.
pull top
It would be a few months before the new tabs made their way up north. We were also a little backward in another way. When Grandma took us to KMart, Jeff had to go to the bathroom, and since he was only six, I went with him. The toilet still cost a dime to use! Pay toilets were still a thing in Michigan back in 1977, but instead of asking Grandma for a dime, I had him climb under the bottom of the door. After that, we continued our shopping.
Cadillac KMart, circa 1978
I didn’t ask for a special gift, since I got to see Grandma all the time, but I did ask if I could get a comic book. She agreed, of course. It was then that I bought my first Marvel Comic: Godzilla #1!
Godzilla #1
What you have to understand about Godzilla is that I had never, ever seen a Godzilla movie. Not a one. But my friends in second grade in Traverse City had, and based on nothing but their descriptions, I had drawn Godzilla, Rodan, and Mothra more times than I could count. So, to see an actual depiction of Godzilla in a comic book was like a sign from above. I had to have it.
Our trips to town always involved going out to lunch, but it was usually a stop at McDonald’s. But this time, Grandma had something different in mind. “Would you like to go to Arby’s?” Neither Jeff nor I had ever been to an Arby’s before. I was aware of it from riding past the giant cowboy hat signs quite often, but no one had ever suggested going there. It was a total mystery! We, of course, agreed, and were excited to try something new. Grandma got us the traditional roast beef sandwiches, which I thought smelled appetizing, but the real adventure was the choice of sauces to put on them. She told us to try just a little of each on the corner of the sandwich before making a choice. Arby’s sauce was okay, kind of a mediocre barbecue sauce. Horsey Sauce, on the other hand, was another story. Of course Jeff asked if it was made from horses. Grandma laughed, and assured us both (I was too scared to ask) that it was not. I was hesitant, because the bottle said, “horseradish.” I knew from experience that horseradish was nothing to fool with. I had made the mistake of taking a bite of it from a spoon once.
The tabletop sauces at Arby’s
But when I put that white, creamy sauce on my roast beef and took the first bite, I was transformed. I had never tasted anything so flavorful, so indescribably powerful. It was like my brain exploded into a kaleidoscope of flavor. I immediately covered the rest of my sandwich with Horsey Sauce and devoured the entire thing. And then I asked for another, and I did the same thing. Now, in those days, there were no take-home packets. There were squirt bottles on the tables, and the workers dressed the sandwiches made to go, themselves. I whispered to Grandma, and suggested taking one of the bottles with us. Grandma said that although we couldn’t do that, she could make me some Horsey Sauce when we got back to her house. I was doubtful.
When we got back to her house, the first thing Grandma did was relate the story to Grandpa. He roared with that great belly laugh he had, and after she made him his afternoon coffee and he settled in on the couch for his daily nap, she got out the Hellman’s Mayonnaise, and a jar of horseradish. Grandma added horseradish a little at a time to a cup of mayo until I thought she had the mixture just right. And for the rest of the week, I ate Horsey Sauce on everything. Ham and cheese, tuna salad, hamburgers, hot dogs, it did not matter. Horsey Sauce made everything better! When we had leftover turkey sandwiches at Thanksgiving, there was only one thing I wanted on them. When I made the deviled eggs, guess what I put in them.
I’m not going to lie to you. That day changed my life forever. I have four different kinds of horseradish sauce in my refrigerator right now, including a bottle of authentic Arby’s Horsey Sauce. It is still easily my favorite condiment of all time.
We didn’t live on a farm, but my stepbrothers, Johnny and David, did. Their dad had remarried and they and the boys lived in a mobile home on a few acres of land near town. My dad had always wanted me to experience that life, and to get me out of the house for a weekend, he would sometimes send me over for to work with them. I learned very important lessons from this experience. I learned that shoveling manure was not a pleasant thing to do, and there were many different kinds of manure, each with their own distinctive smell. Cow manure was the least offensive to my nostrils, and chicken manure was the worst. I didn’t mind horse manure. I was used to that, because when I was six and we did live in a farmhouse with a barn and a corn crib, my dad had a horse named Tuffy, and I liked to ride him. As I discovered later, it was once my dad’s dream to run a farm with his sons. Unfortunately, he made…other choices that precluded that dream from coming true. Pig manure, who could tell? They lay in manure all day long. It just was.
I learned about animal cruelty. The boys taught me to use a steel bar to guide the pigs when they had to be slopped. They hit the pigs upside the head to get them to change direction. I didn’t like that. But I also learned that calves were just about the most adorable thing ever born. Calves were like puppies. They were affectionate, they licked you if they liked you, and they loved to play. The more time I spent working on the farm part-time, the more I learned. As it turned out, the relationship between cows’ mass and intelligence was an inverse function. The bigger they got, the dumber they got.
One time when I was spending the weekend on the farm, I got to go to a livestock auction. That was exciting. Another time, we rode down to Sparta, Michigan to pick up a truckload of pig slop. We got to ride in the back of the truck with edible garbage all the way back to Tustin. For my weekend worth of work, I was paid two dollars, and I used it to buy a canned Six Million Dollar Man puzzle.
The Six Million Dollar Man puzzle
The main lesson I learned from this experience was that I didn’t want to be a farmer. It was hard, dirty work for low pay, if you didn’t own the farm. And maybe even if you did.
As the sixth grade school year drew to a close, my dad asked me if I wanted to play Little League baseball. I don’t think “excitement” is the right word to describe how I felt about that. I had always loved baseball far more than any other sport. I played it in any form at recess in every school I had ever attended. Playing “pickle,” “500,” or playing a full game, I would do it all. I had never had the opportunity to play organized baseball outside of one instance in third grade, where there wasn’t so much as a practice before we were thrown into a huge city tournament, I guess to gauge enthusiasm for that age. But now, I was going to get to play on a team, with actual uniforms, and best of all, my dad was going to be the assistant coach.
As it turned out, I was one of the stars of the team. The head coach, Sherman Holmes, put me at first base, because I was the tallest one on the team, and I could reach higher and farther than anyone else. I loved playing first base, because I got to be involved in every play where a ball was hit on the ground. My favorite player when I was younger was Bill Freehan, the catcher for the Detroit Tigers, but I had no experience as a catcher with the gear and fast pitches, so I gladly made the switch. On my team was virtually every boy from my sixth grade class. We were the only team from Tustin, and we played other teams from around the area, like Leroy and Luther, two other smaller towns that would eventually feed into the Pine River Area School District. But for now, we were just Tustin.
We won most of our games, lost a few, but I can’t describe how good it felt to finally be part of a team, and to be accepted. There was a point, one day before a game, when I was hanging out with one of my teammates, riding bikes around town, and he did something so unexpected, my jaw probably dropped; he lit up a cigarette. I still remember what he said to me: “Don’t tell your dad.” I swore secrecy, and never told a single person until now, as I write this. He offered me a cigarette, but I hated them. I hated the smell. Both my dad and his wife smoked, and both of my stepsisters smoked, and I hated that, too. This boy was up to serious mischief, too, as he also showed me that he had a whole paper sack full of snap n’ pops. By any other name, they were little wads of paper with a tiny bit of gunpowder that would make a satisfying crack sound when you threw them on the ground.
“Snap n’ Pops”
When we got to Little League practice that day, he put a whole bunch of them in the front pocket of his blue jeans. And it went probably just how you’re imagining it. As our shortstop, he mishandled a ground ball, and it hit him right in the front pocket. A really loud crack sounded from the impact, and he doubled over in pain. They had practically all exploded on impact, staining his pants dark with smoke. He wasn’t seriously hurt, but the entire team lost it right there on the field. He had bragged about his contraband, and we immediately knew what it was. That poor guy is probably still traumatized about it to this day.
Meanwhile, my run on Justice League of America continued with issue #145.
Justice League of America #145
The most memorable thing about this comic book for me was that it was the one that taught me about the impermanence of death in comic books. This Count Crystal guy successfully murdered several members of the Justice League, including Superman. I mean, literally, the narration includes the phrase, “Superman’s ghost.” And by the end of the issue, the Phantom Stranger brings them all back to life, so no harm, no foul, I guess.
But there were mixed signals with another comic that came out that month, Showcase #94.
Showcase #94
This comic book described the deaths of the original Doom Patrol. I knew who they were from various reprints, but had never read of their collective demise until now. While The Chief, Negative Man and Elasti-Girl were still dead, Robotman was resurrected to form a new Doom Patrol, which I thought was very interesting. So maybe not all comic book deaths were the same, after all?
As the school year came to a close, I said goodbye to my non-baseball-playing friends as well as Mr. Hunter, and looked forward to seeing them in junior high the next year. Unbeknownst to me, that was not to be.
I didn’t see Star Wars the month it opened. I didn’t see it until later that summer. But the funny thing is that I read the book first. I was a voracious reader, and not just of comic books. I read anything I could get my hands on that sounded cool. And when I saw a novel called Star Wars, I picked it up.
Whew! $1.95!Not quite what ended up happening, but that’s not uncommon in Star Wars stories.
When you read the Star Wars novelization now, you wonder what “George Lucas” really knew about his own movie before he made it. But, as is laid out here with more detail than I would ever include, Lucas didn’t actually write the novelization. A prolific author named Alan Dean Foster did.
The first thing that struck me when reading was that the droids’ names were spelled phonetically. There was no C-3PO or R2-D2. They were See-Threepio and Artoo-Detoo, respectively. It was as if each one had a first name and a last name instead of alphanumeric designations. They were called Threepio and Artoo throughout. I remember passages that described Luke getting knocked over in the cantina into some foul-smelling liquid. But the thing I remember most is the phrase, “Servomotors whined in protest,” which occurs no fewer than three times in the book.
I knew it would take some time before I saw the movie, but my imagination had already begun to run wild with the new science fiction hero. After all, the subtitle was “From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker.”
We often visited my grandparents on Sundays, which was great for me because in the evening after I got bored listening to the adults talk about their adult things, I was left alone to watch The Six Million Dollar Man battling the Venus Probe–in color! As I’ve said before, we only had a black and white television, so even as I watched Star Trek after school every day, it was not quite the same, in is monochromatic monotony. But Grandma and Grandpa McClain had a 25″ color TV, the very height of living room luxury!
The Six Million Dollar Man was my childhood idol. When my stepfather took away all of my comic books and burned them in front of me (“They’ll give you bad dreams.”) I needed a hero. Steve Austin was that hero. If my stepfather had read the source material, as I did, he may have had a different view.
You see, the Six Million Dollar Man from the TV show was an astronaut who was severely maimed from the crash of an experimental spacecraft. The Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI) replaced both legs, his right arm and his left eye with bionic (cybernetic) parts. Steve Austin then had tremendous strength, could run at 60+ miles per hour tirelessly, and could see great distances and in the dark. In short, he became a secret agent with super powers.
The television show was clearly made for kids. Steve became the last man to walk on the moon, a famous astronaut. He refused to kill people, and usually only hit people with an open hand. The physics of the show were often questionable. There was no explanation given how when his non-bionic hand was handcuffed to his bionic one, he could simply pull his arms apart and the handcuffs would snap.
Eventually the TV show would spin off The Bionic Woman, featuring Steve’s girlfriend Jamie Sommers, a tennis pro who just coincidentally fell victim to nearly the same kind of injuries while skydiving. She got a bionic ear instead of an eye. There was also a Seven Million Dollar Man, who went bad, a Bionic Boy, with leg implants that compensated for his paralysis, and of course who could forget Max, the Bionic Dog?
When I received the Six Million Dollar Man action figure from my Grandma B for my 11th birthday in 1975, I was the first one in my fifth grade class to have one. I was the envy of all. You could look through his “bionic eye” through a viewfinder in the back of his head. He could lift the included engine block when you pressed a button in his back. Oh yes, my stepfather let me have it over having another doll, but by that time, I was learning to ignore him.
Six Million Dollar Man action figure, image taken from Ebay
During the summer when I was 11 years old, my grandmother took my brother and me to a bookstore in Traverse City, Michigan. Horizon Books was just a hole in the wall on the south side of Front Street then. When we asked if they had any Six Million Dollar Man books, the clerk showed us the original novel upon which the Six Million Dollar Man was based: Cyborg, by Martin Caidin. My grandmother asked if it was appropriate for my age and the clerk replied that it was. I was so excited to see this book that I couldn’t even wait to get back to her house to start reading it.
Cyborg, by Martin Caidin
To my dismay, I found a mistake. The book claimed that Steve Austin had lost his left arm, not his right! I immediately took a pen to the book, crossing out “left” and writing “right” in the margin above the line. And Steve didn’t work for the OSI, he worked for the OSO (Office of Special Operations). What was this?? My grandmother calmly explained that when books were made into movies or television shows, details could be changed like that. Satisfied with (and more than a little surprised by) that knowledge, I went back to reading.
The Steve Austin of the novel was a whole different character from the one in the TV show. This Steve Austin could not see out of his bionic eye, but it did hold a camera that could take up to 20 frames of film. The camera was activated by a button just under the “plastiskin” at Austin’s temple. His arm could not lift great weights because it was still attached to muscles and ligaments in his shoulder. He used it primarily as a bludgeon. But one huge difference in the arm was the CO2 airgun in his finger that shot cyanide-tipped darts. They definitely never had that little contraption in the television show! He also had a supply of flares that he kept in his hollow wrist joint. There was a plug he could pull out to gain access to them. Austin’s legs were also far different. He couldn’t run 60 miles per hour, but he could run without tiring, since his respiratory and circulatory systems were only working to supply oxygen and blood to one limb. His feet had swim fins that could deploy from the underside, just behind his toes.
Austin was much more ruthless in the novel to say the least. He undertook two missions, one to steal a Soviet MiG and one to infiltrate a Central American military complex. He was basically James Bond with built-in gadgets. The novel also dealt with other, more adult concepts, like impotence. Steve Austin’s doctors had specifically chosen an attractive nurse to try to persuade him that he wasn’t a monster. The novel also dealt with suicide, the first time I had ever been exposed to that word. Austin tried to kill himself, after requesting steak and orange juice to eat. It was a ruse to get a glass so that he could break it and free himself from the restraints that kept him in his hospital bed. That’s some pretty serious stuff.
After finishing this book, the TV show never quite had the same lustre again. When Austin battled the Soviet Venus Probe in January, it looked pretty ridiculous, to be honest, even as I enjoyed both parts at my grandparents’ house. Earlier in the fourth season, Bigfoot had returned, as well. And now, armed with a little more maturity provided by literature, I was a little disappointed. Even the comic books were a bit muted now. Fortunately, there was also a Six Million Dollar Man black and white comic magazine that had more adult stories in them. In fact, in the fourth issue, one of the stories was practically taken verbatim from the first novel.
So, at the same time my interest in children’s comic books was being rekindled, I was taking a more mature look at fictional characters through novels and magazines. This would become a common theme throughout my adolescence, and in fact, even into adulthood. I still enjoy childish things as well as more adult entertainment. It’s very possible to hold two thoughts at once.
