Returning home to my dad’s house on the Night Bus was a transition. I felt like a different boy. And to be certain, I was. I went from being a timid kid who thought he was lazy, worthless, and stupid, to a kid who was coming out of his shell, beginning to gain confidence in who he was and his place in junior high and the greater world. I was able to dress and wear my hair like the other kids in my class for the first time in my life, and I no longer feared getting beaten every day.
My dad being out of work meant that he was home a lot, when he wasn’t out plowing driveways or doing the odd construction job. My aunt Nancy, his younger sister, had moved in with us, which helped with expenses. We only had a two-bedroom trailer, but we converted the dining room next to the kitchen to a small bedroom for her by putting a curtain across the full width of the trailer. Nancy was closer to my age than my dad’s age. When I was 13, she was 22. My dad was 34. She worked in Traverse City, a half-hour drive away, at Grand Traverse Auto. She was a secretary, and she would come home, telling us stories about working in “the city,” And to us, Traverse City was just that. Mesick had a stable population of 376, according to the 1970 census. Traverse City had over 18 THOUSAND people living there!
We travelled to Traverse City fairly often, especially when it was time to do laundry. My grandma had a small washing machine, but no dryer, and in the summer, she would do the wash and hang it all on a line outside. It came back in smelling like fresh Michigan air. But in the winter, we would make weekly trips to the corner laundromat at the end of 16 Road to use the coin operated machines. But about once a month, we would go to Traverse City to do laundry at one of the big laundromats. There was one on the south side of town, right next to a 7-11. While the loads of wash were running, I became introduced to the Big Gulp. I would have an occasional can of Coke at home, or Mountain Dew if I was working for the Amidons. Otherwise, I was allowed two 12-oz. cans of Meijer-brand soda per day. But on laundry day, I got to drink 32 ounces of whatever I wanted! I was high-energy by the time the wash was ready for the dryers.
These trips were also fun, because they would include lunch at a restaurant. My grandma, my aunt, and I would settle in at Chicken Coop quite often, which was just down Hammond Road. We could eat our whole lunch while the wash was in the dryer. But it was a special occasion when we ate Chinese food.
What you have to understand about the 1970s is that Chinese food in America was less Chinese than it even is now. La Choy was a brand that you would find in stores, and my mother had been a fan of La Choy Chicken Chop Suey. There were even painful commercials that sang, “La Choy makes Chinese food swing American!” But there was a Chinese restaurant in Traverse City that served food closer to what we have now in American Chinese restaurants and my grandma loved it. Born in 1914, my grandma had dropped out of school after 10th grade to help support her family. She worked in a Chinese-owned restaurant in Battle Creek in 1930, which of course was during the Great Depression. She had a special affinity for the culture and the food, but she had never made any in my presence because my grandpa and dad, I’m sorry to say, called it “Chink food,” They were pretty free with their racism against the Chinese, and every other non-white race, for that matter. My dad claimed that he had tried Chinese food but it “tore him up” and would insist on a cheeseburger. So, when it was my grandma, my aunt, and me, we were free to get what we wanted. That patriarchy thing ran strong.
My first love was egg rolls. Mind you, I hated cooked cabbage. HATED it. Whenever my mom made it, it stunk up the whole kitchen. But in an egg roll, I found it delightful. And when I discovered hot mustard, I was done. I could live on egg rolls for the rest of my life. I tried everything they put in front of me, but I always ordered egg rolls. This tradition helped me bond with my grandmother even more, if that was possible. It was legitimizing something she loved that the other males in the family made no secret of despising.
Coincidentally, a comic book that had been released at about the same time as my return from my mother’s house put quite a different spin on race. All-New Collector’s Edition C-55 came out in January, and it quickly became one of my favorite comic books ever. Once again, it was one of these great treasury-sized comics, and the cover, to this day, is still my favorite of all time.
All-New Collector’s Edition C-55
This cover, by artist Mike Grell, was something I studied for hours. As you can see, it’s a double cover, illustrating on both front and back, and on the front cover, you see Superboy in the sweet spot, as he should be, as the titular character. But the composition also puts Lightning Lad, Saturn Girl, and Cosmic Boy, who I knew were the three founding members of the Legion of Super-Heroes. Oh, sure, Karate Kid is in the background there, too, but I assumed that was because he was popular enough to merit his own short-lived title back in those days. Now, the problem is, all those yellow guys they’re fighting? They’re Lunarites, and this is going to get a bit ugly.
Yikes.
In this comic, the future has been altered so that the United Nations disbanded in 1978, and various nations went to war. The “Chinese Empire” left for the moon and over the next thousand years, became the Lunarites. The writers of the Legion books had long had a whitewashing problem, as just a few years before this, they explained that all the Black people in the future had gone to an otherdimensional island called Marzal that was only sometimes on Earth, off the coast of Africa. DC Comics was going a long way to explain why there weren’t any people of other races depicted in the 30th century setting of the Legion of Super-Heroes, and they did it poorly. I’m hoping that this coloring was supposed to be understood as some kind of evolutionary change, but it’s possible that it was just laziness.
Regardless of the racial undertones, the cover of this book was a textbook in anatomy, perspective, and inking, especially feathering and hatching. I learned a lot while studying it.
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.
My wife Magi and I have been watching Bosch together recently, and I’ve been thinking about the trend toward 10-episode seasons for TV shows on streaming services. Game of Thrones used that format (more or less), as did Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, which I really enjoyed. I kind of like the idea for tabletop gaming purposes. I ran a weekly Champions game for almost a year before I needed a break, but it was too much for me to handle the pressure of preparation, even with a lot of free time to come up with interesting villains, maps, and virtual tabletop tokens..
Grinding in a 162-game baseball season is one thing, but when you’re doing something creative, it isn’t necessarily the best practice. I was thinking toward the end of that experience about the Aaron Sorkin-driven Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, with its never-ending clock that counted down until the next airtime of their fictional TV show. Even when the power went out, the digital clock just kept ticking by some almost metaphorical means. That’s what running an ongoing weekly game felt like.
I think that taking the time to put together 10 games with a fairly tight plot that includes a resolution in the end, that also plants seeds for future events, sounds really nice. And with my recent Star Trek Adventures campaign as an example, you can figure out if it’s just not working and you’re not locked into it for the long term if it isn’t.
I spent a big part of the pandemic collecting superhero role playing games and supplements, but I also picked up Star Trek games, Star Wars games, and a few others. I had a lot of fun with that, because I would buy them in big lots to get the unit price down on the ones I needed for my collection, and then I’d sell off the duplicates in smaller batches, getting the unit price up to a level where I was nearly breaking even. I was collecting for hardly any cost except for my time. And since I enjoyed what I was doing, that was no cost at all.
One of my favorite games to pick up was Mutants & Masterminds. I played in a short campaign back in 2009, but that was another edition of the game. I didn’t know the rules and just kind of went along with whatever the gamemaster said I could or could not do. I never got a real feel for the rules. The most recent edition, the third edition, has the advantage of having four sourcebooks featuring DC Comics characters that I am familiar with. I could kind of get a better handle on the game that way. But the best resource for learning about it was the actual play podcast, Masks and Mayhem. Listening to four people kind of struggle their way through learning the game while playing at the same time was a lot of fun. Mutants & Masterminds is more of a narrative game than Champions, and I’m not sure how that would go with the current group I play with. But that’s where the 10-game campaign would probably work best. Just the other day, I found myself pulling out game tokens for future use from an M&M supplement. If I take my time and put together a decent 10-game run at a leisurely pace, I think it would be a lot more fun for everyone.
Running games is one of my favorite things to do. It’s a lot like writing comics, except you get immediate feedback on your story, whether the intended audience enjoys it or not. The surprises that come with cooperative storytelling are an added bonus. Oftimes, a player’s speculation on what they think is happening is better than what the gamemaster had in mind in the first place, and a good GM will make a minor adjustment to make that speculation the truth. A great gamemaster can sell the players on the idea that it’s what they had in mind the whole time. Unfortunately, I’m not a great gamemaster. I am, however, a good one, and I’m not too proud to switch gears when someone has a better idea than mine, as long as it’s entertaining for everyone. After all, that’s the purpose of the game in the first place.
I think that running a 10-run campaign would be beneficial in other ways. I would have time to write out campaign summaries in some detail. It’s something I used to do back in the 90s when I ran a bi-weekly game. I lived in Michigan City, Indiana, and all my players lived in west Michigan, so I had a 65-minute commute each way to a friend’s house in Paw Paw, where we played. I didn’t mind this commute. I do some of my best thinking when I’m driving on the highway. I’d have time to visualize the game on my way there, and on the way back, I used my Sony microcassette recorder to dictate the game summary while it was still fresh in my mind. The next morning, I would transcribe the summary on my keyboard and distribute it to the players electronically, using our BBS. Yes, those were the days! Now I could just use WordPress, or Discord if I wanted immediate feedback. When I was running a weekly campaign for the long haul, I just couldn’t find the time.
Some of the campaigns I might like to run:
Wild Cards: Flashback–Set in 1986 after the Astronomer’s defeat and during the WHO tour that takes most of the well-known aces abroad, a mysterious drug called Flashback appears on the streets of Jokertown. One dose sends the user on a 12-hour hallucination of the way things used to be, allowing jokers to forget their deformities, at least temporarily. Highly addictive, each successive dose lasts roughly half the time of the previous one. Can a small group of aces and jokers uncover the truth behind the drug epidemic? Mutants & Masterminds 3rd Edition.
M&M Wild Cards
Star Trek: Chimera–While the captain of the starship Challenger (and most of the main characters) is on a landing party, the ship is taken over by once-human Augments who have melded their DNA with other humanoid races from the Alpha Quadrant. Can the landing party hope to sneak aboard and re-take Challenger? FASA’s Star Trek The Roleplaying Game 2nd Edition.
Challenger in orbit
Champions 1989: Escape from Stronghold–With the Champions gone missing, can the player characters prevent a mass escape of the “classic enemies” from the superprison, Stonghold? Champions 4th Edition.
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.
After Star Wars dominated the box office for virtually the entire last half of the year, it seemed like the things I enjoyed were beginning to catch on. Television became a pretty dominant part of my evenings, once my dad procured a television for us. As I recall, he ordered it on credit through the Fingerhut mail-order catalog. It was a 9-inch panasonic black and white TV, and it was perfect. The TV had the benefit of having a cigarette lighter adapter, so I could actually watch it in the back of the Ford van while we were on the road!
The Panasonic 9″ black and white TV
What you have to bear in mind about this time is that we had no cable or satellite dishes in our little town. You got your choice of three stations, CBS, NBC, and ABC, which came in fuzzy half the time because it was a UHF station.
The networks shows that I enjoyed continued, for the most part. The Six Million Dollar Man was limping into its fifth and final season. Its spinoff series, The Bionic Woman, made the move from ABC to NBC. This was weird because they actually had a crossover two-part episode, that started on one network and concluded on another. Wonder Woman, a television show very important to most 12-year-old boys, moved from ABC to CBS for its second season and changed the setting from the 1940s to modern day. Charlie’s Angels actually remained on ABC, but continued with its second season without Farrah Fawcett-Majors. Most of my discerning friends and I regarded Cheryl Ladd as an acceptable substitute, but did not hold a candle to Lynda Carter. This was a topic of long conversation and much debate.
Lucan was a show about a 20-year-old who had been raised by wolves for the first 10 years of his life. No, I’m serious. I loved it, but it was cancelled after only 12 episodes. Logan’s Run made the leap from the big screen to the small screen, which was often done in those days. With a bunch of Star Trek writers behind it, it was also cancelled after one season of 14 episodes. Gregory Harrison played Logan, if you can believe that!
Man from Atlantis, starring Patrick Duffy as an amnesiac water breather with enhanced strength, which had four TV movies beginning in March, began a normal series run in September, but was also cancelled after one 17-episode season. Are you starting to see a pattern here?
The Amazing Spider-Man started with a 90-minute TV movie featuring Nicholas Hammond, who didn’t look a thing like Peter Parker, but it was another superhero show about one that everyone knew. Spider-Man was featured on The Electric Company when I was younger, and this show really didn’t do anything to enhance his image.
I generally liked CHiPs, a show about motorcycle police of the highway patrol in California. I would often watch that one in color at my grandma and grandpa’s house, because Hawaii Five-O came on immediately after it, and that show was my grandma’s favorite.
Perhaps the most important shows to debut in the fall of ’77 were The Love Boat and Fantasy Island. My dad was always out on Saturday nights, and often overnight. You can use your imagination figuring out what he was up to. This was the first time I was left alone to take care of myself. I felt so grown up. The Fingerhut TV had the advantage of being portable, and on Saturday nights, I took it into my tiny bedroom and put it on the floor of my recessed closet, which was about eye-level if I were lying in bed. I would watch The Bionic Woman, then the two new shows. Both The Love Boat and Fantasy Island did their very best to put their female guest stars into swimsuits, and back then, there weren’t the same options for adolescent titillation that there are now. The best we straight boys could hope for was the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue.
At 11:30, after the news, came the best show of all time, Count Zappula’s Horror House. Count Zappula was a sci/fi horror host played by Don Melvoin, a local celebrity who hosted old movies during the day. Along with his dog, Lover, who was renamed Igor (pronounced “eye-gore”) for the Zappula show, Melvoin introduced me to countless classic horror and science fiction movies. Count Zappula became famous for this mishap that happened on his show:
Count Zappula gets famous!
Don Melvoin had been an actor in the late 60s and early 70s, guesting on The High Chaparral, Bonanza, Night Gallery, and a few other shows. He was also Deputy Don in the 1950s AND the 1980s, hosting a kids’ show, but I knew him as Count Zappula.
The problem with watching Count Zappula was that he was up against Saturday Night Live, which was going into its third season, and I did my best to watch both shows at the same time, flipping back and forth between them. I got to see Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin doing Weekend Update, and Steve Martin hosting a number of times and doing the “Wild and Crazy Guys” routine with Aykroyd, and so much more. I was actually relieved when SNL was in reruns because I could devote my full attention to the Count. This show helped cement my pop-culture interests, with classics like Gargoyles, and THEM!, The Blob, and more. I had my generic corn chips and Meijer-brand pop and spent late Saturday nights as I wished.
The same channel showed classic Flash Gordon and Commando Cody serials as a weeknight program at 11 PM called Hot Serial. I can’t even find an image for the show on the Internet, but the intro had a floating bowl of oatmeal hovering on the screen. My dad would watch those with me and reminisce about going to the movies in the 50s when he was a kid. Later, when the serials would be ridiculed on Mystery Science Theater 3000, I was already well-versed in classic movie serials. Watching Radar Men from the Moon, my dad giddily pointed out his hero, Clayton Moore, playing the heavy. Clayton Moore, of course, was the Lone Ranger, whose adventures my dad and I had watched together in reruns on Sunday mornings, before the divorce. It was just another great way that we bonded.
Despite the difficulties I was facing in school, I still enjoyed life with my dad. On Fridays, even when we didn’t go to the football game, I got my allowance and was able to make a few minor purchases at the local grocery store.
DC Super-Stars #17
This was one of my favorite comic books, featuring the first appearance of a character called The Huntress. I had always been a sucker for origin stories, and this one also had the origin of the Legion of Super-Heroes, and Green Arrow’s origin drawn by one of my favorite artists, Mike Grell.
There had been a book that I had coveted for a long time that I saw in the Cadillac bookstore, but with a cover price of $10.95 (over $50 in today’s money!) no one in my family would ever consider spending that kind of money on a “funny book.” But every time I visited a bookstore that had it in stock, I read it, until I had practically memorized it cover-to-cover.
Secret Origins of the DC Superheroes trade paperback
And a few years before that, my grandma had bought Jeff and me another one of the oversized “treasury” comics with the origins of super-villains!
Limited Collector’s Edition #C-39
I think what appealed the most to me about these origin stories was seeing how tragedies shaped the heroes and villains. I had just suffered five years of physical and emotional abuse. I hoped that if something as tragic as seeing my parents killed would make me a hero, and not a villain. I had my doubts, mostly because I had spent five years being told I was worthless, lazy, and stupid. When I saw the origin of Luthor, who blamed Superboy for the loss of his hair and swore revenge, I thought he was being petty, compared to what I had gone through. These were some of my most private thoughts, because at that time, I still had never confided in my father what had happened to me and what was probably still happening to my brother, Jeff. Steve had threatened me when I left to live with my dad. He said that if I ever told what he had done to me, he would kill my brother, and I had no reason to doubt him. Carrying this burden was never easy, and even now, some of my dearest friends from that time tell me that they had no idea what I had experienced. It’s because I feared what would happen if I revealed that information. Looking back, it’s no wonder that I escaped into comic books as much as I could.
