Thanksgiving weekend arrived, and I thought I was finally going to get to spend one with Grandma and Grandpa McClain. I was wrong. Part of my mother’s and father’s visitation agreement was that I would spend the major holidays with my mother and my brother would stay with my father. So, on their way down from Naubinway, in the upper peninsula of Michigan, they stopped in Mesick and swapped sons. Jeff stayed with my dad and I went with Mom, Steve, and my sister Wendy down to west Michigan to spend the holiday with their parents.
Somehow, it always worked out the same way. Steve was the oldest of six brothers and sisters. His family celebrated Thanksgiving during the day, while my mother, the second oldest of four, celebrated with her mother and siblings in the evening. The logistics of family holidays always fascinated me. Mom and Steve would leave from work on the Wednesday before, pick me up and drop Jeff off at around 8:30 or 9:00 at night. Then they would complete the three-hour drive, ending up at Steve’s parents’ house around midnight. Then, all the Hammonds would stand around in a circle in the kitchen, drinking and catching up, while we kids would go to bed in our respective spots. We all had assigned places in the old farmhouse and we knew where to go.
Everyone in Steve’s family was always kind to me. I can’t think of a bad thing that I would ever say about them. They loved my mother, and out of respect for her, they treated us kids well. We would literally wake up to the sound of roosters crowing in the morning. Steve’s dad had been a farmer, but then worked for DeNooyer Chevrolet as some kind of mechanic. I knew that very well, because “The Stick” that Steve beat me with was a promotional item that he had gotten from there. It was a 14″ ruler because DeNooyer would go the extra distance, or some such. I doubt you could even read any lettering left on the wooden side of The Stick, because it had been blistered into my rear end so many times. Steve’s mom was an acerbic lady, and much to Steve’s consternation, smoked. Steve was a rabid anti-smoker, and railed against anyone who did that, especially my dad.
We got up in the morning on Thanksgiving Day, and the women, my mom included, would start breakfast. Mom and Steve always brought milk, bread, and eggs so that they wouldn’t be putting Steve’s parents out too much by feeding us. The men would all go out deer hunting, because deer season was in full swing by Thanksgiving Day. I wanted to go too, even though I was still only 12. I had taken hunter safety, and I had hunting clothes, but you had to be 14 to get your deer hunting license. It dawned on me that day that I would miss next year, too. Gun season ended on November 30 and I wouldn’t turn 14 until December. I was mad. I wanted to be part of the group of men very badly, but they wouldn’t let me. “Maybe next year,” they said.
A word on hunting: I know there are people who are dead set against it. Sorry, I’m not one of you. Steve’s family subsisted on hunting. At his family’s house, I had eaten rabbit, squirrel, raccoon, deer, and just about anything else that walked on four legs. I’m pretty sure we ate opossum once, but I can’t swear to it. They ate what they killed and I just don’t see anything wrong with that.
While we kids would keep ourselves busy and out of the women’s hair, they prepared Thanksgiving dinner. After putting the younger kids, Wendy and a few of her cousins, on the floor in front of the TV to watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, I found myself in the den, as I always did, pulling out the coverless copy of Batman #203 that I kept stashed there. I read it cover-to-cover, as I always did, put it carefully away again, and then looked for something else to read. Steve’s mother always had a treasure trove of trashy novels, but I would occasionally find something interesting. And I did. I found a paperback copy of Peter Benchley’s The Deep. I had read Jaws when I was a year younger, even after being traumatized by peeking at a particularly gory scene in the movie from the back of the station wagon when I was 10. Despite that, I liked Benchley’s writing. I asked if I could borrow The Deep to read it, and Steve’s mother laughed at my being somewhat precocious, a 12-year-old asking to read a fairly serious bestseller like that, and she told me that I could have the book. I couldn’t believe it! I thanked her and off into a corner I went.
By the time the men came back, empty-handed but in good spirits (they drank while hunting too), the football game was about to start. Watching the Detroit Lions play on Thanksgiving Day was a Michigan tradition, and it was no different in the Hammond household. I watched the game too, though to be honest, I had only a rudimentary understanding of football, thanks to hanging out at the games in Mesick, and cheered for the Lions as well. The Bears beat the Lions 31-14. I don’t actually remember the score; I just looked it up.
After a delicious turkey dinner, I helped clean up the dishes just like I did at home, and then we packed up to go to my Grandma B’s house. If there was anything better to my 12-year-old growing self than Thanksgiving dinner, it was two Thanksgiving dinners. Grandma B only lived a short 35-minute drive away in Otsego, and I looked forward to seeing my own aunts and uncles and cousins. Everyone was usually already there when we arrived, and we split off into our peer groups, as usual. I was the oldest, then Eric followed, younger by only 10 weeks. Then Peter and Cathy, just a bit more than a year younger. Then came the second wave, with Scott, my absent brother Jeff, and Dennis, with Wendy and Melissa bringing up the rear. My cousin Masami was in their group too, but was not often with us even for holidays. Her father, my uncle Norman, was in the army and was stationed in Japan, where she was born. Uncle Norman had married a Japanese woman, my Aunt Naeo, so Masami was half-Japanese.
Eric, Peter, and I would always read comic books or play pretend games, but we were getting older now, and such games were beneath us. So, we just kind of hung out, talked about the usual pre-teen woes and stuff, and probably Star Wars. Everyone talked about Star Wars. We kept an eye on the younger kids as they played out in the back yard. This was a different experience compared to times past, when I had to curb my behavior for fear of Steve. He had done nothing even remotely threatening toward me the whole time we had been together. I didn’t trust it, though, so I kept my behavior in check anyway.
After dinner, we said our goodbyes and headed back to Steve’s parents’. There wasn’t enough room in Grandma B’s house for us to stay. On Saturday morning, after Steve and his dad came back from an early hunt, we loaded up the car and headed to Battle Creek. Mom wanted to do some Christmas shopping and go to the movies. She asked me what I wanted for my birthday, which was coming up in 10 days, and instead of choosing some fanciful thing I knew she would never buy, I asked for something sensible: a digital watch. She asked me what I meant, and I explained that there were now watches with the same kind of LED (light-emitting diode) display that her calculator had. We found one at a reasonable price and she bought it for me.
We had all seen Star Wars a number of times, and Smokey and the Bandit as well. But there was a new release from the guy who had directed Jaws, Steven Spielberg. It was called Close Encounters of the Third Kind. We were all kind of excited to see it, and my mom got us a big bucket of popcorn to share and had me sit by her. I had missed my mom a lot, and was glad to be able to spend time with her outside of all the holiday festivities. She had to poke me a few times during the movie, though, because I kept checking the time. You had to press a button on the side of the watch. It didn’t just stay on all the time. I couldn’t help it, the novelty of the watch took over. If you pressed the button twice, the date would come up. If you pressed it a third time, there was a running count of seconds, which would remain unless you pressed the button a fourth time. The directions warned against doing this very much because it would drain the battery. Eventually, I got settled in, but I still remember thinking, excitedly, that we lived in the future!
Texas Instruments digital watch
There were a few times when I caught my mom sniffling and even tearing up during the movie. I didn’t think that it was a particularly sad movie, but later on, I figured out why. She missed me. And darned if I didn’t think about her every time I checked my watch.
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.
Most of the autumn passed with me still feeling like an outsider, someone without a place in the community I called home. Basketball changed all that. I had arrived in Mesick too late in the summer to join a new Little League baseball team, so the kids in my class never saw that I could play sports. Most of our PE time was spend playing either dodgeball, volleyball, or floor hockey. We even did trampoline jumping. But when basketball came around, I wasn’t very good.
I had never played organized basketball outside of one practice in sixth grade in the upper peninsula. I had asked if I could join the basketball team, and Mom and Steve said I could, as long as I kept up with my daily chores. Well, I didn’t shovel the driveway cleanly enough for Steve’s tastes, so I was forced to quit after the first practice. It was a trap even Admiral Ackbar could have seen coming, but I was too naive to know that I had been set up to fail. They just didn’t want to pick me up from basketball practice.
When it came time to try out for basketball in Mesick, I had little experience. I had no shooting form whatsoever. I pushed the ball with both hands together in front of me. The only thing I had going for me is that I was tall and I could jump. I even shot layups off the wrong foot. But after practice one day, one of the eighth graders took me aside and taught me to shoot, how to support the ball with my left hand and shoot with my right, with my middle finger centered on the ball, and to follow all the way through with a loose wrist at the end to put the proper backspin on the ball. It was simple, but it worked. My grandma agreed to buy me a basketball as an early birthday present, and I knew which one I needed.
1977 Spalding Basketball Ad, art by Jack Davis
This ad appeared on almost every comic book in 1977, and it was effective. I got a rubber ball and I would lie down on my back and simulate the mechanics of the shot I had learned, over and over and over again. I would probably practice that a thousand times a day, lying on the bed in my tiny bedroom. I would dribble it all the way to school (I walked) and back.
I know I’ve mentioned this before, but believe me, it bears repeating. I sweated. A lot. I had to be careful of how active I got in the gym after lunch, when we would gather to blow off steam, because I would pit out my shirts in just a few minutes. I tried to avoid playing basketball full-tilt, instead playing Horse or Pig, or just shooting free throws. But at basketball practice, there was a lot of running and there was simply no way to avoid it. It didn’t matter to anyone because I was playing hard. It wasn’t until we had a game one time that I even had to think about it.
Our uniforms consisted of simple orange t-shirts with black numbers on them. Nothing fancy for junior high. We wore whatever shorts we owned. For me, that was cutoff jeans. I had never owned any other kind of shorts. And coincidentally, the conference our school was in had two other schools whose colors were orange and black. That’s right, three out of eight teams had the same team colors. Well, we were playing one of those teams, Kingsley, and their eighth graders wore the same uniform t-shirts that ours did. So, to be different, our eighth graders had to wear our seventh grade uniforms after the game was over. I gave up my orange t-shirt, only to have the eighth grade coach hold it up in front of the whole crowd, showing the gigantic dark circles of sweat that I had left under the arms. I was embarrassed and angry. What else was I supposed to do, not play as hard as I could? That was (and is) not me. When I went to do something, I went all out. I left it all on the court. And if I was going to be humiliated for this effort, I was done. This soured the whole basketball experience for me.
After the season ended, I didn’t want anything to do with basketball, ever again. I didn’t even attend the season-ending banquet; in fact, I didn’t tell anyone in my family they were having one. The next Monday at school, all of my teammates were on me, asking why I didn’t go to the banquet. I said I didn’t want to play basketball anymore, and there wasn’t much point. They told me that I had received the “Most Improved Player” award in my absence. Me? I had won an award? They reassured me that I had done a great job during the season and that I was as much a part of the team as anyone else. I had found acceptance.
I went to talk to the coach and he was also surprised that I hadn’t come to the banquet. I explained that I didn’t think I was any good, and he told me that I had improved so much that I had gone from being almost the worst player to the third-best player in just six weeks! Everything about being embarrassed by the sweat stains was instantly forgotten. That’s how important honest praise was to me back then. I thanked him profusely and promised to try even harder next year.
And how did that turn out? Well, just six years later…
Never underestimate the power of sincere praise for a kid with low self-esteem.
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.
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.
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.
The day after Labor Day was always the first day of school when I was growing up in Michigan. So, on Tuesday, September 6 was my first day at Mesick Junior High School.
This would mark the 11th time that I was starting in a new school. I had started school in Hastings, Michigan. I went to Mesick Elementary for part of Kindergarten and the very beginning of first grade, then after the divorce I was in Elk Rapids. We didn’t stay there long and I was in Traverse City for the last of first grade going into second grade. Then for the rest of second grade, all of third grade and the beginning of fourth grade, I was at Northeastern Elementary school back in Hastings. It was not the same Hastings school in which I had started Kindergarten. From there I went to Delton for about a month, and then onto Bentheim Elementary in Hamilton, Michigan, where I finished fourth grade and started fifth grade. I went to part of fifth grade in Allegan, and then we moved to the upper peninsula, where I finished fifth grade and started sixth grade at Engadine Elementary. I got halfway through sixth grade there before I went to live with my dad in Tustin, which is where this story began.
Mesick Junior High was a very different experience. The junior and senior highs were in the same building, with the exception of two mobile classrooms just outside the main building. So, here I was, at age 12, walking the same hallways with high school seniors. It was more than a little intimidating.
When I got to seventh grade, I did know a few people. There were several kids that I had been in Kindergarten with. I re-introduced myself to them, and made a few new friends as well. I had always made friends fairly easily. I didn’t have much choice since I was constantly changing schools. One of the advantages that I had was that I was always the tallest person in my class, no matter where I had gone to school. Almost immediately, I was friends with Steve Coger and Kenny La Fountain. I knew Steve from Kindergarten, and Kenny was his best friend.
I had been a dominant athlete in Tustin, but Steve and Kenny were better than I was. Picking teams in phys ed always ended with each of them going to separate teams as first picks and then whichever one I ended up on would inevitably win whatever game were were playing. Phys ed was also traumatic for us seventh grade boys because we were required to shower…at school. Seriously, our grade, given to us by Coach McNitt, was made up of two things: participation and whether or not we showered. We used the same locker room as the high schoolers, as the varsity and junior varsity sports teams. The showers sprayed hot needles all over you. The water pressure was insane. Once everyone got over the initial weirdness of seeing each other naked, it was fine, but the tension leading up to it was high. I still remember asking for soap on a rope for Christmas.
It was actually very good that I was forced to take a shower after phys ed because puberty had hit me like a freight train. I was constantly sweating. My hair would be almost instantly oily, and I regularly pitted out my shirts. This caused all kinds of grief for me.
My math and English teachers were married. Mr. and Mrs. Neahr taught out in the mobile classrooms outside the building. Mrs. Neahr taught English and was like a second mom. She was generally encouraging, but she was discerning about what we were reading.
Batman #291. H-E-double hockey sticks!
I had tried to show Kenny and Steve my copy of Batman #291 from the summer, but Mrs. Neahr snatched it right out of my hand and threw it away, calling it “trash.” I mean, look at it, it has the word “Hell” right on the cover! I was horrified, and never brought a comic book to school again.
Mr. Neahr taught math and terrified everyone. He always wore a jacket and tie, and had this cool fifties haircut with horned rim glasses. He addressed us as Miss or Mister, or simply by our last names when he was feeling jovial. A lot of people struggled in math with Mr. Neahr, and I hated his class. Not because of the material, but because of a bully. It was the first time I had been subjected to bullying.
Margaret Saxton sat next to me in the back row of the classroom, and she reveled in punching me. Every time Mr. Neahr’s attention was diverted, she would punch me in the left arm as hard as she could. After about five punches, I was near tears. There was nothing I could do. She constantly called me “greaseball” and said things like, “You’re a real hunk; a hunk of shit.” I could not do anything about this abuse. I was always taught not to hit girls, but I was seriously tempted to put that rule to the test. I would go home, barely able to lift my left arm. There were other tormentors as well. Dan Stacy constantly made fun of me. My aunt had bought me my first pairs on non-tighty whitey underwear, and he made fun of me in the locker room when we changed for phys ed. One time he even brought a camera in and said he took a picture of me. The camera, as it turned out, didn’t have film in it. But the thought of someone passing around a photo of me in my underwear terrified me. Seventh grade was turning out to be a nightmare.
I tried to find a way to fit in. I was getting desperate. Then, the solution appeared to me. There was a kid named Denver Liabenow that got everyone’s approval by being a class clown. He would do the craziest stuff, like crawling around the room like a spider. Everyone loved Denver. So, I decided to be funny.
While I couldn’t be funny like Denver, I had my own ways. My grandparents had several comedy albums that we had listened to for years. We listened to Bob Newhart, Andy Griffith, Jonathan Winters, Homer & Jethro, Bill Cosby, and my personal favorites, the Smother Brothers. I got them all out, and listened to them using headphones so I wouldn’t disturb anyone else. The Smothers Brother appealed to me with their biting wit. They often made fun of the establishment, using sarcasm and subtlety in a way that other comedians didn’t. I took a lesson from them and started retaliating against the people who bullied me. When they would say something like Margaret would do, calling me a “hunk of shit,” I would strike back by saying something like, “And I’m still out of your league. What does that say about you?” It worked. People around us laughed and she stopped talking to me.
Dan Stacey took a lot more effort. If I insulted him, he would just beat the crap out of me. So, I appealed to what I noticed about him. He could really eat a lot. So, when we were in a situation where there was food, I was sure to engage him with a matching appetite. This would come in handy later.
Mr. Neahr did see that I was struggling to fit in and that I didn’t seem very happy in Mesick. He ran a club for kids just like me, who were the “oddballs” of the school. They played a new game called Dungeons & Dragons after school, and they even had a club. I looked at some of the stuff they were doing, and it looked cool, but I didn’t want to be in the “oddball” club. I thanked him but declined.
My dad really wanted me to become a part of the whole school community, so on Fridays, after he got paid, he would take me to dinner at the restaurant (remember, there was only one), and then we’d go to the high school football game. He had no interest in high school football, but I think he just wanted me to connect somehow. At the very first game I attended, Steve Coger was there and we ran around together. Steve had the job of raising the flag during the national anthem, and I asked if I could help with that. So, every week, that became our thing. It was a rocky start, but things started to turn around fairly quickly.
When the football team was away, my dad would take me to the movies. We saw some great ones like Smokey and the Bandit and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but some not-so-great ones, too, like Starship Invasions. More on those later.
When I lived in Mesick the first time, I had a long and spectacular summer off from school between Kindergarten and first grade. During that summer I met Matt and Kellie Amidon. The Amidons had a cement business and they lived on the other side of a small woods from us. Matt was going into 6th grade and Kellie was a year ahead of me, going into second grade. We spent our summer days tearing through those woods, riding our bikes, digging holes, and reading comic books. We had a great time. When I came back to Mesick in the summer of 1977, so did they. Apparently they had moved to Oklahoma, but now they were back, and they built a brand-new house at the end of a road that ran alongside the field adjacent to my grandparents’ house. They were selling lots along the road, and my dad surprised me by getting us a mobile home to live in on one of those lots. I don’t know if he bought or rented it; I never asked. But it was our home, his and mine.
The two-bedroom trailer was humble. Dad had the room at the end of the hallway. He had a queen-size bed and a dresser. My bedroom was tiny, six feet long and about five feet wide. There was just enough room to drop a twin bed in it, with enough room for me to stand next to it. My room had a recessed closet with four drawers underneath it. I had literally no clothes to hang in it except my shirt and pants that I wore to church when we lived in Tustin. We had abandoned the practice when we moved to Mesick. Everything I owned fit into the four drawers. And naturally, I nailed the 1977 Marvel Memory Album to the wall.
Marvel Memory Album September 1977
We started with nothing. I mean, we even took the swivel chair out of my dad’s van to put in the living room and supplemented that with Grandma and Grandpa’s lawn chairs to start. A few trips to the Copemish Flea Market got us some plates and silverware, and my Star Wars and King Kong glasses were our drinkware. I had a set of sheets and a bedspread for my bed, but I preferred to use my sleeping bag. That way I didn’t have to make my bed in the morning. I didn’t mind any of this. I had my dad all to myself with no step-family to make things weird.
Looking back now, I can’t imagine how my dad must have felt to have to move in with his parents at age 33, divorcing for the third time, with a 12-year-old son. He seemed to take it in stride, though, and that made me happy. He was genuinely determined to make the best life for me that he could.
I spent the last week of my summer vacation helping the Amidons finish work on their new house. I learned a bit about construction (enough to know that I didn’t want to do it for a living), and I also discovered something incredible: Mountain Dew.
Mountain Dew can, circa 1977
When we were hot and thirsty after installing insulation, Matt and Kellie gave me a can of this magical elixir that I had never tried before. It was sweet, refreshing, and addictive. Each day that I came back to work with them, I got another can. We generally didn’t have this sort of fancy stuff at home, instead settling for Meijer-brand foods, so this was a rare treat.
Mmmm, Meijer brand!
This was one of the great lessons of my life. I had to learn how to economize when margins were razor-thin. Meijer brand mac and cheese was 19 cents. Kraft was 23 cents. We always went with the Meijer brand, at least until the generic unbranded brand came out:
Generic (unbranded) foods
Does this packaging look familiar? When I saw the Dharma Initiative labels on LOST, I almost busted a gut laughing at the memory. Some producer had to have grown up poor like I did!
Dharma Initiative foods from LOST
Generic brands were even cheaper than the store brands and you could try any number of products. My favorite: Chicken hot dogs. I don’t even want to think about what parts of the chicken went into their processing but I’m sure my DNA has been altered to adapt to digesting just about anything because of it.
My dad said that we would plant a garden in the spring to supplement our stingy choices of food, but we just had to make it through the winter with what we could afford. The bottom line is, I didn’t care. As long as we were living in the same house and I was treated well, it was like a dream come true for me.
