One of the last things I recall about living in Tustin was attending a three-day camp with the rest of my sixth grade class. We were staying overnight for two nights in cabins and had a number of activities that we could participate in. There were people swimming, canoeing, playing volleyball and basketball. One of the memorable parts of the camp was learning about drugs. We learned about marijuana, which I had literally never heard of before. We learned about the effects of alcohol. We learned about barbiturates. When they named several barbiturates, I piped up when I heard the name of one I knew. “I’ll allergic to phenobarbital!”
The camp presenter laughed and said, “I don’t think so. You’re probably thinking of something else.” But no, I am allergic to phenobarbital. I’ve been filling it out on forms my whole life. As it turns out, I was given phenobarbital to keep me docile after I had surgery when I was four years old. It did not work, as I had seizures because of it. And that’s how I know. Oh, those experimental 60s!
But the key memory I have of the camp defined pretty much my entire adult life, and I can’t believe I almost forgot to include it in my memories. I was playing basketball with a bunch of kids that I didn’t know. The sixth grades from three different elementary schools were all staying at the camp at the same time. I was no great shakes at basketball then. I had played organized basketball for exactly one practice before my stepfather forced me to quit in the winter of 1976. As mediocre as I was, I was still athletic and very tall. But as we played, I noticed a kid trying to shoot baskets off to the side of the basketball court. He was receiving a bunch of verbal abuse from some of the more talented kids on the court, and it really made me angry. I didn’t like seeing him get bullied like that. So, I stopped playing with the jerks and went over to play with that kid.
I don’t know what his disability was. I had no background for that. He was verbal, though impaired, but he clearly had severe coordination problems. He was having trouble even getting the ball up to the rim. I spent half an hour helping him to figure out how to make a basket. We got his hand directly behind the ball so he would have enough strength to get it up there, and then it was a matter of accuracy. Aiming for a spot on the backboard was the key. All the while, they boys were still taunting him…and me. I told the kid to ignore them and we kept going.
Finally, the ball went in. He cheered. And I’m not kidding, I thought he was going to cry. And then I thought I was going to cry. I had never felt anything like that in my whole life. It was like a flood of warmth overcame me. I put the ball back in his hands and he did it again. I had never seen such joy in a human being in my life, and I’m not sure I had felt that for myself, at least not in the same way. I had helped someone feel good about themselves. The kid thanked me over and over again, and I just nodded and said it was no big deal. Well, it turned out it was a very big deal for both of us. He had new confidence, and I had a new avocation. I wanted to teach people. I wanted to have that feeling again and again. It was addictive, and a far better addiction than any drug…even phenobarbital.
Ten years ago today, I took delivery of 3,000 copies of my very own comic book, Solution Squad #1. It was a labor of love. What started out as a workbook full of math problems with superhero context became a comic book story about a group of teen superheroes who powers and name were based on math concepts.
The roots of the idea date back to the very early 2000s. Superheroes adorned my classroom. Graphic novels filled my bookshelves. Bored easily with endless worksheets and activities with generic characters and names, I decided one day to spruce up my activities. I made an activity that led students to get to know their textbooks. On it, I put an image of Cyborg from the Teen Titans cartoon (popular at the time) to explain with a word balloon how students getting to know their textbook was like his getting to know his robotic body. Kids loved it. When I had to drill them on math facts (yes, we still had to do that occasionally), I used a 1982 DC Style Guide image of the Flash running across the top of the paper, calling the activities Flash Time. Because everything wasn’t searchable online yet, I stole the line art image from the DC Heroes Roleplaying Game. They loved that too. It made a generic activity more palatable! So, I started incorporating superheroes into all my activities. Instead of graphing butterflies on the coordinate plane, we graphed Superman’s pentagonal insignia while listening to recordings of his old-time radio show on my replica 1933 cathedral-style radio.
Look how bad our phone cameras were at the time!
When I had created dozens of such activities, I thought to myself it might be a pretty cool idea to make them into a book that teachers and substitutes could use. Since I never thought in a million years that DC or Marvel would let me use their characters for such a book, I decided to make my own characters. I had been making my own comic book characters for years, since I was a child. As a young adult, I had participated in superhero role-playing games, and had paid dozens of professionals to draw my RPG characters for me, establishing contacts that would become very valuable later on. I drew for myself as well, but I was never as good as I wanted to be, and I was good enough to know my own limitations. My crude drawings were good enough to get me started in making my own characters. My first was Absolutia. Absolutia can raise and lower temperature. When she raises the temperature, it serves as a model for adding positive integers. When she lowers temperature, we’re adding negative integers. The effort required to change the temperature in either direction is a great model for absolute value—hence, her code name.
Hey, we all have to start somewhere!
La Calculadora was a deliberate choice in trying to reach some of my students of Mexican ancestry. I taught in a community that has a large immigrant population, so I had learned enough rudimentary Spanish to get through some math lessons from our ESL teacher, and one of the first words I learned was la calculadora, or the calculator. I remembered The Calculator as a lame character from my childhood, but the Spanish twist on the word suggested a female character named Dora, and well, there you go. This character wouldn’t just be a weirdo in a suit. She would have a perfect memory and the ability to absorb and store knowledge at amazing rates. You see now how my brain works. From there, I replaced established DC and Marvel characters with my own.
The very earliest La Calculadora image. I hadn’t even finished designing the costumes yet.
Needing a name for my team, I found all the inspiration I needed in the pre-algebra course I was teaching.. One of the key ideas in the class was finding solutions to equations, and Solution Squad provided the appropriate comic book alliteration. I started brainstorming different characters, some of which made it to the final product, and some of which would wait until later.
One of the big ideas for which there was no comic book parallel was a set of twins code-named Abscissa and Ordinate, which are mathematical terms for the x-coordinate and y-coordinate, respectively, of an ordered pair. I knew they were going to be twins, but I hadn’t decided on ethnicity or gender yet. At this same time, my wife and I were preparing to adopt a baby girl from China. I had to prepare to be absent from school for three weeks, and as I started to put together character ideas for Solution Squad, we received our referral with the name and picture of our soon-to-be daughter. The name given to her by the orphanage was Xiao Sheng. Her name began with X! It was an omen! She would become Abscissa, and so I made up an imaginary brother for her and based their story on one I had heard during the adoption process. They would be siblings separated very young and adopted by separate American families only to be reunited later. She was born first, and he was born second. She had running speed and an independent personality, and he could fly and would always follow her lead. Together, they are The Ordered Pair!
The other characters began to fall into place, one by one. Equality is the granddaughter of an African-American civil rights pioneer. She has symmetrical features, and her names and those of her family are all palindromes. She has the ability to duplicate exactly anyone else’s ability. She is the only one of the team who actually has the build of a muscular superhero. She was a star athlete even before she got powers and she looks it. The rest of the characters have realistic body styles and differences.
Radical is my Shaggy character, my comic relief. He is a slacker and sometimes a fool. He’s also a time traveler with the most complex powers. He can generate electromagnetic prisms with bases formed around right triangles. He can then telekinetically move things along the hypotenuse side of the prism. If he pushes his power too hard, he disappears and reappears in another time. There’s no good mathematical reason for that. I had just read The Time Traveler’s Wife, and I thought it would be cool to have a character who would have an excuse for using slang. I dislike it when modern teen comic characters talk like it’s 10 or even 15 years ago. Radical has an excuse. He may have just been to the period where it was groovy to say something rad.
Early Radical, 2007
It was hard to figure out what Solution Squad was. It started as a sourcebook of activities. Then it started expanding to include complete lesson plans. But then I picked up a copy of The Manga Guide to Calculus, and I knew exactly what it had to be. It had to be the superhero comic that I always wanted to make, but with a math lesson embedded within! For the first story, I wanted something cool and fun, not something that every math teacher already knows. So, I built a deathtrap that could be escaped only by decoding a message written with a prime number code. My high school Algebra I teacher, Charles Shimek, taught me how to construct the Sieve of Eratosthenes when I was a freshman in high school. I was actually surprised to find out that some math teachers have never heard of it. Additionally, I use prime numbers and subsequently prime factorization to reduce fractions similar to the way algebraic fractions are reduced. It reinforces old skills, introduces alternate methods, and prepares students for future skills simultaneously.
As I plotted out the story, intending to draw it myself, I designed the characters, did layouts, wrote dialogue, and then started to plant seeds within the story. They would fly in the “Coordinate Plane.”
The early Coordinate Plane, inspired by the Jonny Quest plane
As you can see, I digitally added the SS logo with has a story all its own. I wanted a symbol that tessellated, and I wanted the logo to be able to be drawn on graph paper with few fractions. This took forever.
The original logo
I refined it only once, and master letterer and designer Todd Klein himself, gave it his seal of approval.
I would give them a robotic assistant made up of billions of networked nanorobots–3.92 X 109 robots, in fact. He was a carryover from an old Champions campaign that I ran. His name was UNO (universal nanorobotic operative). I planted percent-change problems, distance-rate-time problems, Pythagorean Theorem problems, anything I could think of for which I already had activities. Any math teachers worth their salt can get math problems out of virtually anything. Solution Squad was going to be like a 24-page Easter egg hunt.
I knew my shortcomings as an artist, and even my attempts at finishing the looks of the characters was making me incredibly discouraged. But then, serendipitously, I saw some of my niece’s artwork from college appearing online. The amazing Rose McClain had a style that was suited much better than mine to representing young characters. I asked her what her plans were, and she said she wanted to get into comics. So, I hired her. For a long time, I couldn’t imagine the characters any other way than the way she drew them.
Rose’s first swing at a Solution Squad character, AbsolutiaAnother pass, with an early version of the costume. I inked this one, so don’t blame Rose.I started playing with colors. My school’s colors were blue and gold.I started adding piping in the ink stageOne of my followup attemptsFinal costume design with insignia to be added later
Then, with all of this drawing, and back and forth, Rose’s art skills exploded.
Final inked version by Rose with insignia drawn by me in Photoshop.
Final version in living color!
So, yes, all of this was preliminary work done well in advance of making the actual comic book. While this was going on, I was laying out the story.
This pretty much remained intact. Note the old Coordinate plane, though
While Rose began work on the actual pages in 2011, we attended Cherry Capital Con (as it was known then) up in Traverse City, Michigan. Using the designs Rose had done, I had the idea to get comic book artists famous for doing teenage or young characters to do character profiles for their origins section. I wanted to do an Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe/Who’s Who section of the comic. I didn’t want to spend time in the comic itself going over origin stories, so I wrote them in prose form. The first profile art we got was from Invincible artist Ryan Ottley.
Absolutia by Ryan Ottley
At the same time, Ryan’s tablemate, Jason Howard, who was doing Super Dinosaur at the time, was tasked to draw the Ordered Pair, Abscissa and Ordinate.
Abscissa and Ordinate, by Jason Howard
Next up was Radical, as I went to Wizard World Chicago that same summer. Carlo Barberi, who had drawn Gen13, was readily available, so I commissioned him! This is one of my favorite sketches of Radical.
Radical, by Carlo Barberi
We launched the comic as a web comic on February 29, 2012, and ran a Kickstarter to raise funds at the same time. Kickstarter was relatively young, then, and from the outside, it sure looked easy. It was not. My Kickstarter crashed and burned, raising only $535 in pledges out of a target of $7500. I determined to press on anyway, paying Rose and the other artists out of pocket by doing extra jobs after school.
Rose and I attended Cherry Capital Con that year in Artist Alley, with only a few pages of the webcomic done. We were just trying to get the word out.
Jim and Rose, Cherry Capital Con 2012
I brought activity pages, pencils with the web address, and some posters I had printed up. We had a vinyl banner held up with PVC pipe that I had fashioned into a stand. Rose got three art commissions, so her show was made!
This next story is one the highlights of my comic book-making career. By chance, I befriended George Pérez on Facebook. One of the advantages of going to comic conventions since 1984 was that I knew a lot of pros, so we had many mutual friends. Just out of the blue, I sent him a friend request and he accepted! I thought, if I was going to have anyone draw the cover of my teen hero comic, it would have to be George. I sent him a message without having any high hopes, explained what I was trying to do with math and comics, and to my surprise, he responded! He said he would have been happy to do it, but he had just signed an exclusive contract with DC Comics. BUT he would he happy to draw a pin-up! I almost fainted. I gave him the specs for La Calculadora (whose real name was not coincidentally, Pérez), and he said he would deliver it at C2E2. I was ecstatic!
When I got to C2E2, I headed directly for George’s table, with Rose and six-year-old Sera in tow. We waited an hour to get up to his table, and when we finally got to talk to him–he had forgotten the drawing at home. I was like, no big deal, and he apologized profusely, and asked for my address. He said he would send it as soon as he got home and that I could send him a check when it arrived. I thanked him, got a photo with him, and took the respectable amount of cash I had saved for this to find another artist for Equality.
George and me, 2012. Again, primitive phone cameras!
I found Jamal Igle, who was also a Facebook friend, and asked him to draw Equality. Jamal had done both Supergirl and Firestorm, young characters, and I loved his art style.
Equality, by Jamal Igle at C2E2 2012
I was super happy with that sketch. I thought it captured her natural athleticism.
It wasn’t even a week after I got home that I received the La Calculadora sketch from George.
La Calculadora by George Pérez
I was, and am, over the moon for this piece. It wasn’t long after this that George’s eyesight started failing, and he wasn’t able to do his typically high-quality work. He told me that he had drawn Dora to resemble his niece, Milla, to get a true Latina look.
Milla Vela, George’s niece
With all six profile pics done, I started shopping for a cover artist. Quite by accident, I discovered Steven E. Gordon, the character designer of X-Men Evolution. I had already started to work out an elevator pitch for Solution Squad. It was, “X-Men Evolution meets Numbers.” When I approached Steve to see if he was interested in doing the cover, he immediately said yes. I gave him Rose’s character art and asked for something quite specific.
When I was a boy, I saw my first DC Comics treasury, the Batman one with the Neal Adams cover, and I begged my mother to buy it for me. She scolded me, knowing full well what would happen to it if she bought it for me. But every time we went into a store, I could see it from a mile away. That red background could pierce fog!
Limited Collector’s Edition C-25, cover by Neal Adams
And since the Squad’s colors mimicked Batman’s own, I thought it would be natural. Steve’s son Eric Gordon did the colors.
Solution Squad #1, by Steve and Eric Gordon
As you can see, I had to learn how to make a UPC symbol as well. There was no end to learning while making a comic book.
While the story of Solution Squad was 24 pages, my idea was to make a 32-page comic, so I could include the origin stories as well. And not one to pass up a gimmick, I decided to make it a flip book. One one side would be the story, and if you flipped the comic book upside down and turned it over, there would be like another comic with its own cover and all the origin stories. I wanted to draw a cover myself, so I got to it. By then, we were refining the Coordinate Plane for the comic.
Back cover, pencils by me, inks by Terry Huddleston, colors by Rose
As you can see, my artwork was improving as well, leaps and bounds beyond how I started.
By early 2013, the comic was done. I found out about a local printer, met with them, and priced my book. I had no idea how many to print, but the best price break came with offset printing at 3,000 copies. Each copy would cost 85 cents. That seemed pretty good for offset printing in full color and a cover price of $3.99.
And on April 12, they were delivered. Ever see what 3,000 comics looks like?
3,000 copies of Solution Squad #1
Thanks for going on this journey with me. It was fun putting that story together. There will be another one coming soon when Rose and I hit C2E2 for the first time as pros! Until then!
In Mr. Neahr’s math class, I was challenged for the first time in my academic life. He piled on homework, which I spent hours on at home, pretty much because I had nothing else to do. The thing about Mr. Neahr’s instructional style was that he approached things very much as colleges did. He always addressed students by last name, occasionally using titles. He used titles every time if he didn’t like you. I was usually just “McClain.” My friends thought he was too strict, but my life experience had shown me that they didn’t know what strict was.
I liked being challenged. I still remember one time in his class being told that one cubic inch was 16.387064 cubic centimeters, and that a student had told him, years after he had left Mesick, that the one thing he remembered from the math class was 16.387064. I was determined to be like that student, so I memorized the number. I still have it memorized. Memorization, as it turned out, was a powerful tool in education, especially in 1977.
At one point in math class, I had the advantage of owning a handheld calculator, the Novus 650 Mathbox. That was uncommon back then for 7th graders. I had received the calculator for Christmas in 1975, and yes, I had asked for it. My mom had a calculator, and I enjoyed playing with it, to see what I could make it do. This particular model cost $17 in 1975, which is over $91 in today’s money. This was my only Christmas gift that year! This six-digit wonder had a fixed decimal and used Reverse Polish Notation. That means you would input your first number, press the ENT+ button, input your second number, and then press the operator button that you wanted to do to the pair. So, let’s say you wanted to subtract 18 – 6. You would input 18, press ENT+, input 6, then press the – button. I had to spend a lot of time figuring out what I could and couldn’t do with it.
Novus 650 Mathbox
I would often use the calculator to check my work, but when we were doing fractional work, I had to learn how to recognize common fractions when the decimals would appear on the screen. At one point, I made a hand-written list of common decimal equivalents, and did the long division by hand. When I did this, I discovered something interesting about the sevenths. One-seventh was 0.142857… (repeating). Two-sevenths was 0.285714…(repeating). Three-sevenths was 0.428571…(repeating). At that point, I saw the pattern. The same six digits repeated, in order, every time. They just started at a different place in the sequence! I couldn’t wait to show Mr. Neahr my discovery. He was impressed, but my classmates less so. I was being singled out as a “nerd,” that hip insult from Happy Days. I kept my discoveries quiet after that, and went back to being a clown.
I still spent hours on my homework, though. When we started doing a bit of geometry, we had to name all the segments in a standard cube.
Standard Cube
I listed all the ones I could see, like AB, BF, FE, EA, and so forth, but I remembered Mr. Neahr saying that through any two points there was exactly one line. So, I erased my work and started naming them systematically. If there was a point A, there would be a line (and subsequently a segment) through A and every other point on the cube. So, I listed AB, AC, AD, AE, AF, AG, and AH. Then I did BC (BA was the same as AB), BD, BE, BF, BG, and BH. I repeated this process until my paper was full of pairs. And that was just one problem. Then I remembered how little my classmates appreciated me showing off, and I crumpled up that paper and started it all over again, only listing the visible segments. But the next day, when someone else pointed out that there were possibly other segments that could be listed, I blurted out that I had done that and thrown my paper away. Mr. Neahr told me, at that point, that I shouldn’t let social pressures affect my work ethic or thought process, and to let this be a lesson. I wish I had paid more attention to that lesson.
My friends perceived Mr. Neahr very differently. They said that he made them feel stupid, and that’s probably true. He was an intellectual, a rated chess player, and he had no patience for foolish behavior. If you tried, he would help you, but if you didn’t, you would sometimes find yourself on the receiving end of some pretty pointed barbs. I was just glad not to be one of those recipients.
When I was in elementary school, I had learned that on Groundhog Day, if the groundhog saw its shadow, we were in for six more weeks of winter. I was much older before I learned that six more weeks of winter was bad news. We routinely still had some snow on the ground on April 1.
DC Calendar of Super-Spectacular Disasters April 1978
But this April was warming up nicely, and it was decided by our class sponsor, Mr. Salling, that our 7th grade class would have our very first dance. Now, bear in mind, what we called a dance then is very different than a middle school dance now. This was our chance to dance with a partner of the opposite sex, something many of us dreamed about and just as many feared. I was both.
My dad was excited by the prospect of me going to my first dance. He considered himself quite the lady’s man, and his three marriages by age 34 seemed to confirm that. He told me exactly what to do. He said that most of the boys would be too “chicken shit” (his words) to ask anyone to dance, and if I acted boldly and simply went up to ask someone, she would probably say yes, because so many boys would be lined up on the opposite wall, afraid to go over. He made sure I had my appearance and hygiene correct. My clothes were clean, I had showered and washed my hair, and had applied a generous amount of deodorant. We’d had conversations about that before. I was ready.
When we got to the dance, we self-organized into our usual cliques. I was with the jocks who’d played basketball together in the winter. We had sloppy joes to eat, prepared by Mrs. Salling, who taught elementary school and was our advisor’s wife. I had eaten a moderate (for me) two sloppy joes and a handful of potato chips. I didn’t want to look like a pig, after all. But at the end of the eating portion of the evening, there was a lot of sloppy joe mix left. Mr. Salling bellowed out, “Stacey! McClain! Get over here!”
Dan Stacey and I had resolved our differences earlier in the year and no longer hated each other. It turns out that when he took pictures of me in my underwear in the locker room, there wasn’t even film in the camera. And our reputations as big eaters had certainly preceded us, and Mr. Salling didn’t want to let the food go to waste. So, he organized an eating contest between Dan and me. I told him I didn’t want to participate. I was already nervous enough about asking someone to dance as it was. But he wouldn’t hear of it, and he goaded me into the competition. And one thing I had at age 13 was a competitive streak, because I was constantly trying to prove myself to gain the respect of my peers.
We began eating. One each. Two each, Three. Four. Five. Ten. We didn’t even start slowing down until we had each eaten 12 Sloppy Joes apiece. The thirteenth went down slowly, and Dan had just finished his 14th. My buddies were cheering me on, and about three-fourths of the way through my 14th Sloppy Joe, I puked. I mean, it all came up. I managed to avoid getting any on my clothes, but it was all over my plate and the tables we used in the home ec room. A collective “EEEWWWWW” erupted from everyone. And yes, there had been girls watching, too; the ones I was supposed to ask to dance. Without thinking, I put the last quarter of my Sloppy Joe and my mouth and swallowed it whole. After all, my stomach was empty now. That made the next reactions of grossed-out girls even worse.
I was mortified. I don’t think there’s a description of the level of embarrassment that quite captures how I felt at that moment. I just knew I was never going to find a dance partner, not just that night, but maybe ever. How was I going to go home and face my dad? I felt like such a failure.
I couldn’t brush my teeth, but I rinsed my mouth out and bummed a piece of gum (or two) from one of my friends. When the dance started, Mr. Salling encouraged me to go ask a girl to dance, but I just meekly shook my head and stayed where I was. I was afraid of rejection, the same kind of rejection I had felt from my mom’s husband when I had tried to be a son to him. I couldn’t take it if the same thing happened to me in my new school.
About a half hour into the dance, I just decided to go home. I lived a 10-minute walk away from the school, and I didn’t want to call for a ride. I would walk home in the dark. Just as I got up to leave, a pretty little blonde girl named Jenny Harris asked me to dance. I looked skeptical. “Are you sure?” I asked. She smiled at me and nodded yes, and she took my hand and led me out to the dance floor, also known as the high school gym. It was a slow dance, and in those days in seventh grade, that meant putting your arms around each other and swaying back and forth, maybe even going in the occasional circle. As we rocked back and forth, I almost cried because I was so grateful to Jenny for having pity on me. And it felt like a colossal weight had been lifted from my shoulders. After the song ended, I thanked her, and she just smiled and nodded again.
I would discover much later that Jenny was in fact Mr. Salling’s pet and spy. She was a friend of the family, and she babysat their new son. Mr. Salling had seen what I was going through and said in his gruff tone, “Harris! Go dance with McClain.” And she had obliged him.
“Jenny,” or Jen as she goes by now, is still my friend to this day, 45 years later, and I always respected Mr. Salling because of this kindness. I related this story at his memorial a few years ago with Jen at my side, and I don’t think there was a single dry eye in the house, including mine. That’s the kind of teacher he was. That’s the kind of man he was. And having these types of people in my life at that age, both Jen and Mr. Salling, made all the difference in the world.
One of the first things I found different when I moved in with my dad is that I was permitted to take showers. That’s not to say that I didn’t bathe. Of course I did. But for 95% of the time I lived with my mom and stepfather, I took baths, and it was not a pleasant experience.
Because we saved money in any and every way possible, all of us kids took baths in the same bathwater. I went first, and then my brother and sister would be bathed at the same time. When my stepfather ran the bathwater, it was scalding hot. And I had to get in before it cooled off. It was very uncomfortable, and I got back out just as quickly as I could. I had to wash my hair while in the bath, and instead of rinsing my hair under running water, I had to submerge my head in the bathwater, again, still scalding hot.
There were no toys allowed in the tub. No bubble bath. Just Ivory dish soap, 99 44/100 percent pure. For how uncomfortable the bath was, I wouldn’t have wanted a toy in there with me anyway. It was all business, in and out. And if I was judged not clean enough, as happened more and more frequently as puberty began to set in? Well, the following bath would be given to me by my stepfather, who was, shall we say, not gentle with the washcloth. I might as well throw a trigger warning in right here.
Not only would he practically scrub the epidermis off me, but as dandruff was becoming a problem for me, instead of using a shampoo to treat it, I was given additional rinse time. He would grab me around the neck and the back of my skull and hold my head under water. And hold it. And hold it. He would hold my head submerged until I had to literally fight for breath. These struggles were probably part of what made my mom give me to my dad. She told me much later, when I was 29, that she thought that Steve was going to eventually kill me, and I have to admit, that as an 11-year-old, I thought that, too. There were some occasions where I was close to passing out or drowning. This process continued until the first pubic hair appeared. And from that point on, my baths were my own.
I was also given deodorant to use to combat the effects of puberty: Secret. “Strong enough for man, but made for a woman,” the slogan went. My mother had tried Secret, but it didn’t agree with her body chemistry, so I had to use the rest of the roll-on. Nothing like going to a sixth grade classroom smelling like your mom. It was humiliating to say the least.
When I went to live with my dad, though, everything changed. I was able to take showers without worrying how long I was in there. I was given Speed Stick to use as a deodorant, the same as my dad used. No one in my new family had ever used an anti-perspirant before, so I still pitted out my shirts regularly, but at least I didn’t smell bad. I wore a baseball cap to cover my always-greasy hair. Puberty was a rough go from the beginning for me. It didn’t matter when I showered, night or morning, my hair would be oily in just a few hours. I even wore that cap to school, despite school rules. This is probably another reason why Mr. Hunter was an incredible teacher. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I do now. That’s the kind of man he was. When I think about him and the teachers I had later in junior high and high school, is it any wonder I became one myself?
When I was nine years old, I joined the Cub Scouts, and one of the things the Cub Scouts was known for back at that time was teaching young boys to be responsible with pocket knives. I have carried a pocket knife ever since. I got my first one when I was nine and I carried it through elementary school, junior high, and high school. In high school, I even carried a hunting knife in a sheath on my belt. Can you even imagine? And yes, it was allowed, as long as the blade didn’t exceed three inches.
When I first became a full-time teacher, I lived in Michigan City, Indiana. There was an knife/cutlery store at the outlet mall in Michigan City. When I visited as a 20-something adult, I decided it was time to upgrade my pocket knife. And I found The Mechanic. This Swiss Army knife had everything I needed. It had the usual blades and bottle and can openers, but it also had a Phillips head screwdriver and a pair of pliers. Now, most of you are probably thinking that no one really needs a $30 pocket knife. You’d be wrong.
The Mechanic, by Victorinox
I used the Mechanic for over 25 years. As a teacher, there were hundreds of times that I used the pliers alone to pull a locker open when a student had jammed the door shut over their coat. I used the Phillips head screwdriver all the time when screws came loose. Go ahead, you’re thinking it. I always had a screw loose. I sharpened innumerable pencils when the classroom pencil sharpener failed in its only job, evoking gasps from students almost every time: “Mr. McClain, you have a KNIFE?” I always laughed and said, “You do know I have to pass a background check every five years to work here, right?”
I used the knife to open cans of Trader Joe’s version of Spaghettios when I was sitting at conventions, unwilling to pay $12 for a sandwich that should have cost four. When my banner stand lost an endcap, I had the tool to put it back on. If that knife ended up costing me a penny per use, I’d be shocked.
I took this knife everywhere I went, even on planes, pre-9/11. I would never have thought of going anywhere without it. But there are some places where you just can’t take it with you besides airports now. No knives are allowed in courtrooms, for example. The county/city building in Mishawaka has a metal detector. And unfortunately, one year, I find out the hard way that you could no longer take pocket knives into Ford Field, where the Detroit Lions play. A few years ago, we were making our annual sojourn to see the Lions play, and we had parked two miles away and walked. And when we got to the gates, there were metal detectors and a strict policy posted. I did not have the endurance or time to walk another four miles to take my knife to the car and return, so I did the unthinkable; I threw my knife away.
I thought I could replace it easily. It had to be a popular model with all the use I’d gotten out of it over the years, right? Oh, I was so wrong. The Mechanic had been discontinued in 2017. There were no more to be found. Every time I found a knife shop to visit, I always inquired, hoping someone would still have one in stock, but no one did. I thought to just look online, and sure, I could get another one–for a hundred dollars!
Finally, I caught a break this month and found one on Ebay. I only paid $50 for it, including shipping. If that seems exorbitant, it’s really not. My $30 knife in 1992 would cost $63.22 now, with inflation. I actually got the replacement for less than I paid for the original. Is it a brand-new knife? No, but it opens cleanly and the blades are sharp. And even though it’s not the original one that I bought in the 1990s, I hope it’s something my daughter will carry when I’m gone and remember me. Because she never knew a time when I didn’t have one. And the way she is with machines, she’ll probably get more use out of it than even I did.
