With winter coming to an end in Northern Michigan, all sorts of nature came back to life, including porcupines. I had never seen a porcupine before, but my dog, Ladybug, met one in the woods beside the house one evening. They had a disagreement that left over 100 porcupine quills in her mouth and nose. True to his word, my dad made me responsible for the care of my dog. He gave me a pair of needle nose pliers and showed me how to remove the quills, pulling them from as close to her skin as possible. I wasn’t prepared for the whimpering mess Ladybug became.
As I pulled my first quill, she tried to shake away from me, crying out. And on it went, for over two hours. I had to hold her head tight, wrapped partially in a towel, over and over again. Fortunately it was a Saturday night. She was bleeding from each hole that the pulled quills left behind, and I would have to occasionally stop to clean her up. I think I cried as much as she did, but I swear she looked at me with gratitude when they were all gone. I gave her ice cubes to try to curb the pain, but she wouldn’t have any of that, so I took her outside where she could eat snow. And she did.
Astonishingly, on Sunday morning, she practically acted like nothing had ever happened. I was grateful that it was going to be a normal Sunday, because I knew there was going to be a comic book waiting for me at the store in a few hours. After church, though, I had quite a shock. The price of Justice League of America had risen from 50 cents to 60 cents! Fortunately, I was still rich from raising money for the library book that I didn’t have to pay for. But this was not going to go well in the future. I would have to save an extra dime for the week when Justice League of America was going to hit the stands.
Justice League of America #143
The cover of JLA #143 was shocking. Wonder Woman hitting Superman? What could be behind this? It was true that Wonder Woman had been acting a little hostile toward Flash and Green Arrow two months previous, but hitting Superman? Why? As the story began, I felt uncomfortable. I was not used to my heroes disagreeing, let alone, arguing strongly enough that one of them would leave the team. I know Marvel comics did that a lot, but not DC comics. They were the Super Friends, after all, as seen on TV! By the time the issue was over, it was revealed that The Construct, the villain from the previous issue that had been vanquished by The Atom, was behind controlling a whole slew of characters, including Wonder Woman and several supervillains. And by the end of the issue, in true DC style, the status quo was restored, and Wonder Woman was back in the Justice League.
I was a big fan of status quo back then. It provided comfort and stability when I needed it.
We’ve already been over how the 1977 Marvel Memory Album calendar had an impact on my adolescence, but this is the one that got away. I never had the DC 1978 Calendar of Super-Spectacular Disasters…until now.
DC 1978 Calendar of Super-Spectacular Disasters
I just received this calendar in August. I’d been after this one for a long time. Back when my dad and I were the poorest I remember being, living in a trailer, him without a job, and depending on Grandma and Grandpa for financial help just to eat store-brand macaroni and cheese, I wanted this calendar. My dad had gotten me the Marvel 1977 Memory Album the previous year, but this one was $4.95 that we just didn’t have. I saw it every time we went to the bookstore in Cadillac, but comic book prices were $0.35 at that time, so this calendar would have replaced 14 comics and there was no way I was going to make that bargain. I was allowed to buy one each week, and 14 weeks without a new comic book would have been unthinkable then. Fortunately, I don’t have to make choices like that anymore!
First of all, you have to appreciate the Neal Adams cover. Superman and friends shifting the moon in its orbit? Come on! And look at Batman lending moral support. He may be yelling at Supergirl, I’m not sure. But when you look at the back cover, there appears a mystery afoot, with a secret mastermind behind a plot to destroy the Earth. Who is behind it? There are clues inside.
Looking at the inside, you find Batman battling Dr. Light. But what’s this? On January 3, a computer readout gives you a clue to the mastermind’s identity. You have to darken space I-23. Huh?
Yes, on the back page there is a puzzle board like a Battleship board where you darken in the clues to find the identity of the mastermind!
I don’t think I have to tell you that I absolutely LOVE stuff like this. It’s what made comics fun when I was a kid. But maybe the best part of it is, I can put the calendar up on my wall this year, because the dates and days of the week match!
When my wife and I got married over 22 years ago, she asked me if I had any Christmas traditions. She had already shared hers with me, but I had never really wanted to share most of my family stories at first, because, well, there’s always a dark side. This one is no exception, but as I always add as a disclaimer, I promise that the story comes out all right in the end! And that leads me to one of my favorite McClain family Christmas traditions:
For most of the five years that my parents were divorced and before I went to live with my dad, we lived at least two and a half hours apart, if not four hours away from him. This led to fewer visitations than my dad was allowed. He was allowed to have us for one weekend a month, two weeks in the summer, and one week at Christmas. Because of poor choices on his part, he could rarely afford to make the 150-mile drive. Neither would my mother meet him halfway. So, my Grandma and Grandpa McClain stepped in one time in 1973, and drove all the way down to pick us up.
On the way back north to Mesick, we were driving through Big Rapids, Michigan, back when US 131 was fairly new and went straight through the heart of that town. And Grandma and Grandpa had been on the road for almost four hours by that point. So, we stopped at McDonald’s to eat. We went inside, and Grandpa McClain asked me a question I’d never been asked before: “What do you want?”
I stood there, dumbfounded. I honestly didn’t know what to say. Whenever we went somewhere with my mom and her husband, and had no choice but to eat on the road, I was given a hamburger Happy Meal, and my brother and half-sister, who were six and seven years younger than I was, would split their own Happy Meal. That’s not enough to eat for a nine-year-old, you say? I would have agreed with you. So, I stammered, “Um, I always get a Happy Meal.” My grandpa looked me dead in the eye and said, “I didn’t ask you what you always get. I asked you what you want.”
This was the most pressure I had faced up until that point in my life. I knew exactly what I wanted: Two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun! Some of you are now singing it to yourselves. Others have no clue what I’m talking about. The Big Mac had recently experienced a very popular ad campaign simply laying out its ingredients in a catchy tune. I had wanted to try one for over a year but knew there was no chance. And now there was.
I said, “Could I try a Big Mac, please?” My grandpa ordered it immediately.
“What size fries do you want?” Oh, my gosh. I thought I was going to die.
“L-large?” He ordered it.
“What do you want to drink?”
“I’ve always wanted to try a vanilla shake like my mom orders.” And I got one. And it was glorious.
My brother got a full Happy Meal to himself (he was only three) and we sat down to enjoy this fanciful feast of fast food. I was in heaven. I ate everything in front of me and made slurping sounds as the last of the vanilla shake was vacuumed from the bottom of my cup. Then, the other shoe fell.
“Do you want anything more?” Wow, I thought, here’s where I go for broke.
“I’ve heard about this new burger, the Quarter Pounder with Cheese. Could I try that?” I never heard my grandpa roar as loudly as that before that day, and I never did again. I thought he was going to double over laughing. He brought me back a Quarter Pounder with Cheese and I ate all of that too.
“Ma, this kid has a hollow leg just like his father did.” Grandma readily agreed with him, smiled, and winked at me. What a great trip that was!
I assume that Grandma and Grandpa later told my dad that story, because for every Christmas after that, my brother and I received a book of TEN 50-cent McDonald’s gift certificates in our stockings so that we could order whatever we wanted when we went to McDonald’s. Do you have any idea how much food $5.00 could buy in 1974-75?
By now, if you read my stories with any regularity, you know what to expect. Here it comes.
We had thought we were going to eat like kings, but my mother simply took the gift certificates away from us and whenever we stopped at McDonald’s, she used them to buy us our usual. A hamburger Happy Meal for me, and my brother and sister would split one. Even when I went on a school field trip where we were required to bring money for McDonad’s, I was only given enough gift certificates to buy a Happy Meal; two gift certificates, totalling $1.00. I explained one time why my dad had given them to us, but all that earned me was a good hard slap in the face.
It didn’t matter, though. Literally, it was the thought that counted. I knew there was someone who loved me. Those little gestures, those small glimmers of hope, sustained me until the day I was able to leave that household in January 1977. And that’s why to this day, Magi puts a McDonald’s gift card in my stocking; They don’t make gift certificates anymore, but even though my dad and grandparents are all gone, I still know there’s someone who loves me.
My annual McDonald’s gift card, which was in my stocking this morning!
It was such an alien experience having a family who enjoyed being together. We sat around the dinner table many a winter night after the girls cooked dinner, telling stories and jokes, and sometimes even playing board games. One of the ironies of the times that I lived with my mother, stepfather, brother, and sister was that I was given board games as gifts pretty much every Christmas, but as a family of five, we very seldom played any of them. My mother and stepfather didn’t want to play The Six Million Dollar Man board game, for example, and my brother and sister were too young to understand how to play. They were six and seven years younger than I was, respectively. When I was eleven, they were five and four. So the game sat stacked on the top shelf of my closet, unplayed, with all the other board games I had received. But now, my step-sisters were five years and four years older than I was, and they humored me by playing games at the table, no matter how bad the games were. And some of them were terrible.
Six Million Dollar Man board game. It is terrible.
It was fascinating for me to learn from them. I had just turned 12 and they were already in high school. Their vocabularies were much more, um, colorful than mine. I learned lots of new words while sitting at the table. It felt wonderful to be included, joyous to be part of a family who seemed to care about each other; until one night, that all changed. We were playing Po-Ke-No, a game I had received when I was in third grade. It was a combination of poker and bingo. I thought it was a lot of fun, and we were having our usual banter at the table, when Barb, the younger of the two step-sisters mentioned that I had a half-sister.
I was puzzled. “What do you mean, ‘half-sister’? Wendy is my sister,” I said. “She was born before my mom and dad were divorced.” Barb insisted that Wendy wasn’t my dad’s child, but rather belonged to my stepfather. Suddenly, my whole sense of family was turned on its ear. I started to get angry. “No, she’s not! Stop lying!” I got up from the table and slammed my hand down on it. There was no way my sister belonged to the man who beat me every day. My dad heard the commotion and came in to ask what was wrong. I was in tears. “Barb says that Wendy is only my half-sister!”
My dad looked like he had seen a ghost. He ushered me into the living room space, just ten feet away from the table, but I caught the look he shot back at Barb, and it wasn’t a good one. He sat me down in front of the fireplace and sat across from me on a footstool. He explained that it was true, that Wendy was Steve’s child. I questioned how that could be, and he had to do a little explaining because at that time, I didn’t know where babies came from, at all. When he explained that mom and Steve had been together before he and my mom were divorced, and it was why we went to live with Steve afterward, it suddenly made sense why Wendy never came with Jeff and me to visit him. Mom had always said it was because she was too young, but Jeff was only a year older than she was, so that never made sense. I asked him if I could ask more questions about it, and he said yes.
I asked my dad why, then, had he paid child support for her for so many years. In the times that I saw my dad in the previous five years, complaining about child support was one of his common themes of conversation. Nothing makes you feel valued like hearing that your dad resents paying $50 a month for each of his children. He told me that since she was born before the divorce was final, she was listed as his child on her birth certificate. They had done a paternity test, but my dad and Steve had the same blood type, so there was no way to determine that she wasn’t actually my dad’s child, and that my mom wanted to “stick it to him,” so she claimed that Wendy was my dad’s child in the divorce proceedings.
Suddenly, pieces of this puzzle were falling into place. I remembered my grandpa calling my mother “Jezebel” when I was six, and my grandmother shushing him in terror after noticing that I was in the room at the time. But I also remembered that we would go to visit Steve and his wife and kids, and that while mom and Steve slept in one room, my dad and Steve’s wife slept in another. Again, I didn’t know where babies came from when that whole Jerry Springer show was happening, but now I knew that Mom wasn’t the only one cheating.
Dad told me that later on, they had made a deal with him that Steve would adopt Wendy so that my dad could stop paying child support for her, but only if they got to take Jeff as a deduction on their taxes. My dad agreed to it, but he was not happy about it, being extorted into doing what was right in the first place. I didn’t even know that Wendy’s last name had changed because she hadn’t started school yet. It never appeared on any documents I ever saw. After about an hour of this, I was still upset, but calm enough to apologize to Barb for calling her a liar and slamming the table. She said she was sorry for telling me, but she also said she didn’t know that it was a secret. I said that I understood, but suddenly, the idea of the close-knit family was tainted. I didn’t believe her.
As February rolled in, I settled into a routine. Going to school, visiting my grandparents, going to church, buying comic books. It was comforting to be safe and have that regularity, but I didn’t know that feeling was about to be threatened.
My teacher, Mr. Hunter, was big on reading, so he made sure we all got library cards for Tustin’s small public library. He literally walked us across the street to get our cards and our first books. The first book I checked out was The Making of Star Trek, by Stephen Whitfield. I read the book from cover to cover the first day I had it. I was a huge Star Trek fan from the time I was a little boy, and it was still in syndication. I watched it after school on the black-and-white TV in the living room.
The book was so interesting and I learned so much from it that I read it again over the weekend. It described in great detail what everyone involved with a television production does, from writers to directors to producers, even best boys and gaffers. It had preliminary designs for the Enterprise, detailed views of the props, biographies of the actors, everything to keep a 12-year-old fan’s attention, especially in the age before the Internet. I didn’t take the book to school on Monday, and that turned out to be a costly mistake. My dog, Ladybug, apparently didn’t enjoy the book taking attention away from her, so she chewed off about 1/4 of the cover while I was away.
I had taken responsibility for Ladybug, remember, so I knew I was on the hook for the price of the book, $1.50! I was in a panic. I had to return the book at the end of the week, but I didn’t have $1.50 to pay for it. What was I going to do? I’d already bought a comic book on Sunday (Justice League of America #142) with my church money, so I was dead broke. I didn’t want to tell my dad or my stepmother what had happened, so I was determined to figure things out on my own. I started by trying to sell some of my old toys that I still had and didn’t need anymore to try to raise $1.50, but I couldn’t find anyone who wanted my old stuff.
Justice League of America #142
In Justice League of America #142, the Atom was having a crisis of confidence. The Mighty Mite didn’t think he fit in with a powerful lineup that included Superman, Wonder Woman, and he was ready to retire. He, Aquaman, and the stretchy Elongated Man were forced to fight to protect an alien called Willow, and even then, the Atom felt overwhelmed by the situation. I could relate.
I started looking for kids who weren’t in my class to buy my toys. I was getting desperate. I finally thought I’d found someone, a neighbor kid from down the road that I’d just met. I let him take the toys home before he brought me the money, and I was so relieved. But he returned them the next day because his dad had said no to the deal. I was crestfallen. I was spending nights lying awake, wondering what I was going to do. On the following Monday, I learned something about borrowing books from the library; you could renew a book if you weren’t done with it! I renewed the book for another week, while saving my church money in hopes of eventually paying for the book.
This temporary solution helped me sleep a little, but I was still nervous. After I ran out of renewals, I started paying the fines on a weekly basis. I got my next fifty cents of church money, but I had to pay 10 cents for the late fine for the library, so I was back down to 90 cents. The following week, I got another fifty cents, and paid another 10 cents. I had $1.30 saved up, so I knew it would only be one more week before I could pay for the book. My dad noticed that I wasn’t buying any “funny books,” as he called them. I just looked down at my shoes and said that there weren’t any that I wanted that week. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him what I’d done, and I didn’t want to be a burden to him or Peggy. I was still afraid of being sent back to live with my mom. I knew how my dad favored the women in his life.
After another week of fitful sleep, I finally had $1.80 saved up and I took my money to the library along with the damaged book to pay my debt to society. When I shamefully explained the situation, I thought the librarian was going to fall over laughing. She not only forgave and returned my fine money, but she gave me the book as well. They said that I was the first person to check that book out in over five years, and it was headed for the discard pile anyway. She thanked me for being such an honest young man, and sent me on my way. And I was rich! I had two whole dollars, and a book that I would read many, many more times over the years.
The Atom also found his strength, as Willow chooses him to defeat a powerful new enemy, the Construct. The Atom also realizes that he has a place in the Justice League. And I had my place at home. I wasn’t a burden after all.
I couldn’t wait to spend more time with my dad after I moved in with him. It seemed like no sooner had I moved in then we had to jump into a new routine, with going to church on Sunday, starting school, visiting my grandparents midweek, and bringing in wood on Saturdays. Honestly, I barely knew my dad at that point. When we’d have the rare chance for visitation, Dad would usually have some kind of female companion, whether it was his second wife, a new girlfriend, or his third wife, Peggy. We didn’t exactly get his full attention. But now that I lived with him, I wanted that to change.
In Mr. Hunter’s class at school, we were shown, courtesy of some timely Scholastic reading materials, some of the behind-the-scenes secrets of King Kong, which had just come out in December. I asked my dad if we could go to see it, and he agreed. He had to work a half day on the last Saturday of the month, but we’d go to the movies after. The theater in Cadillac was just down the street two blocks from Suburban Furniture, where he was a floor salesman. Also on Mitchell Street was a newsstand, one of my favorite places in the whole world, where my grandma had often taken me to buy books and comics.
I spent the entire morning at the newsstand, armed with fifty cents from the previous week’s church behavior money. There hadn’t been a new Justice League of America to buy, so I had saved it. I took my time and read as many comic books as I could, with no one around to yell at me that it wasn’t no library, which was nice. And sure enough, I finally decided on something worthy of my limited money; it was Six Million Dollar Man #4, from Charlton Comics! I had never seen #1-3, of course, but I wasn’t about to leave a comic book featuring Steve Austin behind!
Six Million Dollar Man #4
I hadn’t been able to read comics or watch many cartoons with superheroes when I was with my mom, but the Six Million Dollar Man was somehow an exception. My grandma on my mom’s side, had even bought me the coveted Six Million Dollar Man action figure for my 11th birthday, one of the greatest gifts ever. I met my dad back at Suburban Furniture, packed my comic book away in his van, and we went to the movie.
The one-sheet poster had been up for weeks, and it was tantalizing enough. Kong was straddling the twin towers of the World Trade Center, which had been completed not even four years previously. And unlike the 1933 classic, he wasn’t just going up against biplanes. There were helicopter gunships and a jet!
King Kong One-Sheet, 1976
The quality of the movie was unimportant to me at the time. What was important was that I was with my dad and I had him all to myself. We split a big bucket of popcorn and had our own drinks, something pretty much unheard of in my previous moviegoing experiences. It was like a dream come true. When I walked out of the theater, my spirits were as high as they’d ever been. Then my dad took me to Burger Chef for a late lunch, and I got one of the collectible glasses from the movie. Boy, those were the days; buy a Coke for $0.59 and keep the glass! And I miss Burger Chef to this day. House of Hunan has stood on that site for decades now.
King Kong Glass from Burger Chef
As we sat there eating our delicious Super Shefs, my dad couldn’t help himself but describe in detail what was wrong with the movie; how the bullets from the helicopters shouldn’t have been able to pierce Kong’s skin, how they couldn’t have gotten him on the ship; how Kong wasn’t big enough to wade across the river. I listened respectfully. I didn’t have the knowledge then to agree or disagree. One thing was certain: I wasn’t as jaded as he was–yet. I was just happy to be there with him, and the whole day just added another layer of security to my life.
I drank out of nothing but that King Kong glass for the rest of the time I lived there with him in Tustin.
