With summer vacation in full swing, one of the things we enjoyed was swimming at Diamond Lake. It was a local hangout, with lots of people around kids and adults alike, and a great place to cool off. There was an old inverted metal barrel several yards out into the water that kids would dive off. I was never the strongest swimmer, but I usually did just fine and took my turns diving.
When I was younger, I was late to swimming. I always had a floatie of some kind, whether a duck or some other animal. When my parents split and we went to live with my stepfather, he would not allow a floatie. I had to wear a full life jacket until I learned to swim. I never learned how to swim with him because I always wore a life jacket. One day between first and second grade, however, I complained too much about having to wear the life jacket and he decided he was going to teach me to swim. He had me take off my life jacket and dragged me out to the end of a dock in Grand Traverse Bay. I’m sure you’ve heard the legendary tales of people learning to swim by being thrown into deep water. This isn’t that story.
What my stepfather did instead was grab me from behind, put his hand over my nose and mouth, and jump with me, still wrapped up, into 10-foot deep water, sinking all the way to the bottom. Then he let me go. My nose and mouth immediately filled with water and I started choking. I could feel the sand of the lake floor under me, and I gave one mighty leap straight up. As I broke the surface, I gasped for air, and then sank right back down to the bottom again. I had gotten a look at where the shore was, and on my next jump, I headed in that direction. I came up for another gasp, and submerged again. I repeated this process until I could stand up with my head out of the water. Then I waded to the shore and fell down, exhausted and crying. He gave me his usual insults, but didn’t try to take me out to the end of the dock again.
From that point on, he didn’t try to teach me how to swim, and I never let him walk up behind me again when we were at the beach. It was a few years later that my Grandma McClain took Jeff and me to the Backwaters and let us play in the water, that I put the whole swimming thing together. Turns out it wasn’t that hard, with Grandma’s kind help. I still didn’t like deep water, but I never really had to worry about it that much, until one fateful day at Diamond Lake.
We were playing catch with a Frisbee, and one throw went sailing over my head. Confident in my swimming ability, I swam to the deep water after it, grabbed the disc, and started swimming back. I caught a wave right in the mouth and started choking, and I sank below the surface. It was a familiar and terrifying sensation. Fortunately, my stepsister, Barb, saw me struggling and came out to get me. She pulled me in until I could stand, and just like when I was eight, I collapsed on the shore. I was grateful, but pretty much the whole family made fun of me for almost drowning. It was the beginning of the end of the illusion of the happy family in Tustin.
I started looking at the whole situation critically after that. I already didn’t like the girls smoking and swearing in the house, especially when I asked if I could swear and my dad said no. That was not how I was raised at all. And then there was the matter of the 18-year-old boy from next door, who the oldest girl Debbie was dating, coming home from the military on a break and bringing Coors beer east of the Mississippi (illegal back then), and smoking something that I was not familiar with at a party at the house. I think it was pretty much at that point that my dad decided that it was not a good environment for me to be raised in.
Now that school was out, I was spending a lot more time outdoors. One of my favorite things to do was tramping around the neighboring woods with my dog, Ladybug. I had the BB gun that I had received for Christmas the previous year, and we would go out with a paper bag to find cans to set up and shoot. That was the sad thing back in Michigan in those days, there was never a shortage of tin or aluminum cans on the side of the road. Proposal A in the 1976 general election had passed, and with a ten-cent deposit now required on cans and bottles, it got a lot easier to clean up the state. Fewer people just tossed their empties out the windows of their cars like they had before.
We spent great summer days together. I would ride my terrible bicycle, and Ladybug would run along the road with me. I hated my bike, though. Absolutely despised it. I had saved up for two years on my meager allowance to buy the coveted 10-speed bicycle with the curl handlebars that virtually all of my friends rode, while I still had my yellow Huffy single-speed bike with the banana seat. My stepfather Steve kept my money for me, so I didn’t have a chance to spend it. And finally, after two years, he said that my bike was here. I went out to the shed, to find a bike like this:
Columbia bicycle
It wasn’t a 10-speed. It wasn’t a 5-speed. It wasn’t even a 3-speed bike. It was a single-speed antique-looking laughingstock of a bike, and he had spent two years of my allowance on it. I was furious. Spoiled? No. It was my money and I never would have agreed to buy anything remotely resembling this bike. But, it was the only bike I was going to get for the foreseeable future, so I took the loss and moved on. Well, that’s not really true. I’ve never moved on without rectifying a situation. I vowed that I would get a 10-speed one day.
One warm summer day, I was fishing in the little pond in the front yard. It was stocked with bluegills, and they would bite at anything. All I had to do was put a piece of corn on a hook, and drop my line with a bobber. A car was coming down the dirt road, and Ladybug’s ears perked up. She went running at the car, And it drove right over her. She was part basset hound and part dachshund, so she was low to the ground anyway. But the differential caught her as the car passed over, and she went tumbling 15 feet down the road, and lay still. I screamed her name and ran toward her, expecting to see her dead. She wasn’t but she was bloody and just barely breathing. I picked her up and got her out of the road, tears streaming down my face, and brought her up to the house Even the tips of her long, floppy ears looked like they’d been dipped in blood. My dad was home, and he brought out a towel to wrap her up in. She didn’t seem to have any broken bones, and I took her to the open shed next to the house. Dad said we didn’t have money to take her to a vet, so we’d just have to see what happened.
I stayed outside with Ladybug, and listened to her breathe. It started to get dark, but I wouldn’t leave her side. My dad brought my sleeping bag and pillow out to the shed and said I could stay with her until the end. He was not hopeful. I sat there with her, into the night, praying just as hard as I could for God to save her. I had finally found someone I could take care of, and someone who cared about me, staying with me day and night, and now I was about to lose her. I cleaned her up as best I could, and the injuries looked like they were only on the outside. But she still wasn’t waking up.
I fell asleep around 11:00, and when I woke up the next morning, Ladybug was awake and licked my face! She got up, gingerly at first, and then started running around like nothing had happened! My partner in crime was all right! I don’t think I had ever been that happy in my whole life to that point. Suddenly, the kind of bike I rode didn’t matter a whole lot. There were many more important things to worry about.
My brother Jeff came down to visit in June, after school got out. It was the first time I’d seen him since going to live with my dad, six months earlier. We had shared a room for virtually his entire life, so not seeing him for six months was quite different, especially with all the changes that had happened in my life. It was comforting to have him with me again.
Marvel Memory Album June 1977
My dad was at work most of the time, so he took us to my Grandma and Grandpa McClain’s house to stay for the weekdays, up in Mesick. On one of those days, Grandma took us “to town,” as we always called it. That meant lunch out and special gifts! Cadillac had many retail choices not offered in either Tustin or Mesick. Cadillac had the always-amazing bookstore, as well as KMart, and Giantway. Giantway was a department store like KMart, but you could buy groceries there as well. It was where we got almost all of our toys on visits to Grandma’s house. Jeff got a Mego Kid Flash figure for his special gift on this trip.
Mego Kid Flash
He might have been inspired by the comic book I had bought at the bookstore, Secret Society of Super-Villains #9, which featured the character as a guest star.
Secret Society of Super-Villains #9
I still remember this comic for being notable about a trivial detail. I wondered about the pop can tab shown on the first story page:
What’s on Kid Flash’s pop can?
You have to understand that back then, most pop cans opened with pull tops, which you would then throw away, or sometimes, if you were bold, sink into the soda contained in the can. I do recall one or two people cutting their lips as the aluminum tabs made their way back up to the top of the cans, and I definitely remember cutting my own foot on one.
pull top
It would be a few months before the new tabs made their way up north. We were also a little backward in another way. When Grandma took us to KMart, Jeff had to go to the bathroom, and since he was only six, I went with him. The toilet still cost a dime to use! Pay toilets were still a thing in Michigan back in 1977, but instead of asking Grandma for a dime, I had him climb under the bottom of the door. After that, we continued our shopping.
Cadillac KMart, circa 1978
I didn’t ask for a special gift, since I got to see Grandma all the time, but I did ask if I could get a comic book. She agreed, of course. It was then that I bought my first Marvel Comic: Godzilla #1!
Godzilla #1
What you have to understand about Godzilla is that I had never, ever seen a Godzilla movie. Not a one. But my friends in second grade in Traverse City had, and based on nothing but their descriptions, I had drawn Godzilla, Rodan, and Mothra more times than I could count. So, to see an actual depiction of Godzilla in a comic book was like a sign from above. I had to have it.
Our trips to town always involved going out to lunch, but it was usually a stop at McDonald’s. But this time, Grandma had something different in mind. “Would you like to go to Arby’s?” Neither Jeff nor I had ever been to an Arby’s before. I was aware of it from riding past the giant cowboy hat signs quite often, but no one had ever suggested going there. It was a total mystery! We, of course, agreed, and were excited to try something new. Grandma got us the traditional roast beef sandwiches, which I thought smelled appetizing, but the real adventure was the choice of sauces to put on them. She told us to try just a little of each on the corner of the sandwich before making a choice. Arby’s sauce was okay, kind of a mediocre barbecue sauce. Horsey Sauce, on the other hand, was another story. Of course Jeff asked if it was made from horses. Grandma laughed, and assured us both (I was too scared to ask) that it was not. I was hesitant, because the bottle said, “horseradish.” I knew from experience that horseradish was nothing to fool with. I had made the mistake of taking a bite of it from a spoon once.
The tabletop sauces at Arby’s
But when I put that white, creamy sauce on my roast beef and took the first bite, I was transformed. I had never tasted anything so flavorful, so indescribably powerful. It was like my brain exploded into a kaleidoscope of flavor. I immediately covered the rest of my sandwich with Horsey Sauce and devoured the entire thing. And then I asked for another, and I did the same thing. Now, in those days, there were no take-home packets. There were squirt bottles on the tables, and the workers dressed the sandwiches made to go, themselves. I whispered to Grandma, and suggested taking one of the bottles with us. Grandma said that although we couldn’t do that, she could make me some Horsey Sauce when we got back to her house. I was doubtful.
When we got back to her house, the first thing Grandma did was relate the story to Grandpa. He roared with that great belly laugh he had, and after she made him his afternoon coffee and he settled in on the couch for his daily nap, she got out the Hellman’s Mayonnaise, and a jar of horseradish. Grandma added horseradish a little at a time to a cup of mayo until I thought she had the mixture just right. And for the rest of the week, I ate Horsey Sauce on everything. Ham and cheese, tuna salad, hamburgers, hot dogs, it did not matter. Horsey Sauce made everything better! When we had leftover turkey sandwiches at Thanksgiving, there was only one thing I wanted on them. When I made the deviled eggs, guess what I put in them.
I’m not going to lie to you. That day changed my life forever. I have four different kinds of horseradish sauce in my refrigerator right now, including a bottle of authentic Arby’s Horsey Sauce. It is still easily my favorite condiment of all time.
We didn’t live on a farm, but my stepbrothers, Johnny and David, did. Their dad had remarried and they and the boys lived in a mobile home on a few acres of land near town. My dad had always wanted me to experience that life, and to get me out of the house for a weekend, he would sometimes send me over for to work with them. I learned very important lessons from this experience. I learned that shoveling manure was not a pleasant thing to do, and there were many different kinds of manure, each with their own distinctive smell. Cow manure was the least offensive to my nostrils, and chicken manure was the worst. I didn’t mind horse manure. I was used to that, because when I was six and we did live in a farmhouse with a barn and a corn crib, my dad had a horse named Tuffy, and I liked to ride him. As I discovered later, it was once my dad’s dream to run a farm with his sons. Unfortunately, he made…other choices that precluded that dream from coming true. Pig manure, who could tell? They lay in manure all day long. It just was.
I learned about animal cruelty. The boys taught me to use a steel bar to guide the pigs when they had to be slopped. They hit the pigs upside the head to get them to change direction. I didn’t like that. But I also learned that calves were just about the most adorable thing ever born. Calves were like puppies. They were affectionate, they licked you if they liked you, and they loved to play. The more time I spent working on the farm part-time, the more I learned. As it turned out, the relationship between cows’ mass and intelligence was an inverse function. The bigger they got, the dumber they got.
One time when I was spending the weekend on the farm, I got to go to a livestock auction. That was exciting. Another time, we rode down to Sparta, Michigan to pick up a truckload of pig slop. We got to ride in the back of the truck with edible garbage all the way back to Tustin. For my weekend worth of work, I was paid two dollars, and I used it to buy a canned Six Million Dollar Man puzzle.
The Six Million Dollar Man puzzle
The main lesson I learned from this experience was that I didn’t want to be a farmer. It was hard, dirty work for low pay, if you didn’t own the farm. And maybe even if you did.
As the sixth grade school year drew to a close, my dad asked me if I wanted to play Little League baseball. I don’t think “excitement” is the right word to describe how I felt about that. I had always loved baseball far more than any other sport. I played it in any form at recess in every school I had ever attended. Playing “pickle,” “500,” or playing a full game, I would do it all. I had never had the opportunity to play organized baseball outside of one instance in third grade, where there wasn’t so much as a practice before we were thrown into a huge city tournament, I guess to gauge enthusiasm for that age. But now, I was going to get to play on a team, with actual uniforms, and best of all, my dad was going to be the assistant coach.
As it turned out, I was one of the stars of the team. The head coach, Sherman Holmes, put me at first base, because I was the tallest one on the team, and I could reach higher and farther than anyone else. I loved playing first base, because I got to be involved in every play where a ball was hit on the ground. My favorite player when I was younger was Bill Freehan, the catcher for the Detroit Tigers, but I had no experience as a catcher with the gear and fast pitches, so I gladly made the switch. On my team was virtually every boy from my sixth grade class. We were the only team from Tustin, and we played other teams from around the area, like Leroy and Luther, two other smaller towns that would eventually feed into the Pine River Area School District. But for now, we were just Tustin.
We won most of our games, lost a few, but I can’t describe how good it felt to finally be part of a team, and to be accepted. There was a point, one day before a game, when I was hanging out with one of my teammates, riding bikes around town, and he did something so unexpected, my jaw probably dropped; he lit up a cigarette. I still remember what he said to me: “Don’t tell your dad.” I swore secrecy, and never told a single person until now, as I write this. He offered me a cigarette, but I hated them. I hated the smell. Both my dad and his wife smoked, and both of my stepsisters smoked, and I hated that, too. This boy was up to serious mischief, too, as he also showed me that he had a whole paper sack full of snap n’ pops. By any other name, they were little wads of paper with a tiny bit of gunpowder that would make a satisfying crack sound when you threw them on the ground.
“Snap n’ Pops”
When we got to Little League practice that day, he put a whole bunch of them in the front pocket of his blue jeans. And it went probably just how you’re imagining it. As our shortstop, he mishandled a ground ball, and it hit him right in the front pocket. A really loud crack sounded from the impact, and he doubled over in pain. They had practically all exploded on impact, staining his pants dark with smoke. He wasn’t seriously hurt, but the entire team lost it right there on the field. He had bragged about his contraband, and we immediately knew what it was. That poor guy is probably still traumatized about it to this day.
Meanwhile, my run on Justice League of America continued with issue #145.
Justice League of America #145
The most memorable thing about this comic book for me was that it was the one that taught me about the impermanence of death in comic books. This Count Crystal guy successfully murdered several members of the Justice League, including Superman. I mean, literally, the narration includes the phrase, “Superman’s ghost.” And by the end of the issue, the Phantom Stranger brings them all back to life, so no harm, no foul, I guess.
But there were mixed signals with another comic that came out that month, Showcase #94.
Showcase #94
This comic book described the deaths of the original Doom Patrol. I knew who they were from various reprints, but had never read of their collective demise until now. While The Chief, Negative Man and Elasti-Girl were still dead, Robotman was resurrected to form a new Doom Patrol, which I thought was very interesting. So maybe not all comic book deaths were the same, after all?
As the school year came to a close, I said goodbye to my non-baseball-playing friends as well as Mr. Hunter, and looked forward to seeing them in junior high the next year. Unbeknownst to me, that was not to be.
When I was a freshman in college at Western Michigan University, I had a federal work-study job as part of my financial aid. That meant that I had to go to an office and choose from among a number of available jobs that would allow me to work, and hopefully do classwork at times during the job’s normal hours. I found the best job imaginable. I worked as a projectionist for the Student Entertainment Committee.
Every Friday and Saturday night, the SEC showed second-run movies in Sangren Hall, in two lecture rooms that each had projection booths. My job was to haul four 16mm Bell & Howell projectors from the SEC office about 200 yards away, as well as the film, which was in three (or more) canisters. I would set up the projectors and run the films. Each reel would last about 35-40 minutes, and then I would have to manually transition from one projector to the other, flipping the A/V switch at roughly the same time to transfer the sound from one projector to the other. Then I would rewind the reel, take it to the other classroom, and prepare to start that same reel over again for the second showing. That provided me with roughly 25-30 minutes of free time before I had to go back to the first room for another reel change. During that time, I hung out with the Student Entertainment Committee.
As you might imagine, these guys (and it was indeed made up of all guys) were nerds. They loved film, and surprisingly to me, comic books. I hadn’t read a comic book in four years at that point, having put away “childish things” in order to make myself more attractive to girls my age. But here at school, away from the small town I grew up in for the first time, I found peers who still liked comics. They were talking excitedly one night about the newest Thor comic book, #337, that featured a new writer/artist named Walt Simonson. I was vaguely familiar with Thor from the 1966 cartoons, as well as the Marvel Christmas comics I had. It looked really good to me, too.
Thor #337, art by Walt Simonson
Then they were talking about Wolverine’s wedding in the newest issue of X-Men. I had barely heard of Wolverine. He was a guest star along with the other new X-Men on Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends. My only exposure to him portrayed him with an Australian accent, sticking his claw through an arrangement on a table and saying to Firestar, “‘Ey, babe, wanna piece of fruit?” These were not the X-Men I knew, and that was not the Wolverine I saw on TV. I thought, wow, I have a lot of catching up to do.
As time went on, I found out that comics weren’t the only nerdy things they were into. They also played a game called Champions. I had no idea what that was, but it sounded interesting. They said it was like D&D but with superheroes. I had never played Dungeons & Dragons, but I knew what it was. My junior high math teacher, Mr. Neahr, tried to recruit me to play when I was in 7th grade. But back then, I was really focused on trying to get along in a new school, and the kids who played in his group were social outcasts. I politely declined, and played sports instead. But now that I was away from my small hometown, I was a little bit more daring, and asked if I could try this Champions game. They had me make up my own superhero and they wrote the character up for me, using their only copy of the rules. I made a character called Darklord, who could manipulate darkness, even using it to make a coherent blast attack. He moved through darkness by teleporting.
Darklord, pencils and colors by me, inks by Barry Winston
One Sunday, we went to one of the guys’ house in Paw Paw, and played. I enjoyed the game at first, trying to see things through the eyes of my character and acting as he would. I understood the basics of rolling dice to simulate success and failure, but their incessant bickering turned me off from playing with them again. I still hung out with them and read their comics while I was working, but I never played Champions with them again.
I would, however, let my imagination wander during classes sometimes, picturing Darklord in action. I would even sketch in my notebook in the margins. I still felt awkward about the nerdiness of comic books and games, but one day, my mind got changed forever. In my honors English class, Writing and Science, a very attractive girl wearing a dance leotard and a long skirt saw me drawing in the margins of my notebook and commented about the art. I was mortified. But she said she actually liked comic books. I could not quite believe my ears. I had seen her around because we lived in the same dorm, but there had been no sign that she was a comic book nerd. I don’t know what that sign would have looked like, but she didn’t wear one. And from that point on, I was never afraid to let my nerd flag fly. She told me about a comic book store on the other side of town, close to where her parents lived, and suggested that I go there. I asked the most obvious question: What’s a comic book store? She laughed and described it, and I probably looked at her like her head was on backward. Whoever heard of such a thing? But I got the address from the Yellow Pages, and on my 19th birthday, I took two city busses, transferring downtown, and took the $10 my mom had sent me for my birthday, and went to the comic book store.
Fanfare Comics and Cards shared part of a two-story home with a country-western radio station on Westnedge Avenue. It was a hole-in-the-wall kind of place, but it might as well have been Disneyland to me. I had always bought my comic books either at the grocery store, the book store in Cadillac, or at the flea market in Copemish. But here was every current comic book on the market on shelves against one wall, while on the other side of the room were tables of boxes of old comic books, protected by some kind of plastic bags. Thousands of comic books! I went through the old boxes, picking up one of my very favorite old ones, Batman #203, which was 50 cents. I found some other old Batman comics that I recognized from my childhood too, and just started a pile. I picked up some new comics, including the latest issue of Thor. They didn’t have the issue that everyone had talked about, #337. That one had been sold out for a while now. But I got the third and fourth issues in the storyline for myself. I bought the new issue of X-Men, and I also found The New Teen Titans #39, which showed Robin and Kid Flash quitting on the cover. I had loved the Teen Titans when I was younger, all the way back to the Filmation cartoons in 1967, so I had to know what that was all about. In other words, I was hooked.
New Teen Titans #39, art by George Pérez
When I went home for Christmas break just a few weeks later, I happened to find a boxed set of Champions at my beloved book store in Cadillac. I didn’t even flinch at the $12 price. I grabbed it.
Champions boxed set
I also found the second part of the Walt Simonson Thor story, #338, in the bookstore window. And then I looked up. There, attached on a vertical plastic strip, were 10 copies of Thor #337, at cover price, 60 cents. I only had enough money for one because I was trying to budget my money for the whole month of vacation, and I bought it. I was satisfied with my purchases, and I went home to read.
Inspired by the comic book store in Kalamazoo, I checked the Yellow Pages from Traverse City to see if there was a comic book store there. And sure enough, one had just opened. It was called the Comics Cave, and it was a lower level store along Front Street. Somehow, I persuaded my grandma to take me up to Traverse City so I could check it out. When we had lived in Mesick, Traverse City and Cadillac were roughly equivalent trips, but now that she lived in Cadillac, it was quite a hike. But she indulged me, and we made the hour long drive. I couldn’t get over the fact that there was something like this so close to where I had lived. I had felt forced to give up my nerdy interests because of peer pressure, but if someone was able to keep a store open dedicated to comics, then I might not have been alone after all. On the wall of the Comics Cave was something I had to have, even if it meant spending my last dollar. It was a New Teen Titans poster with art by George Pérez. I bought it with my last five dollars and stashed it away to put up in my dorm room when I returned. I still have that exact poster today.
New Teen Titans, art by George Pérez
When I got back to school in January and told the guys from the SEC about my Thor purchase, they yelled at me, asking how I could leave all those copies of Thor #337 behind. I didn’t understand why, but they explained that that one comic book was selling for $5.00 now. I didn’t believe that. Who in the world would buy a four-month old comic book for $5.00? They said, “WE ALL WOULD.” So, the next day, I called my dad and asked him to go to the book store and buy them all. When he called back, he said they were marked down to 35 cents apiece. The next time I saw him, I gave him his three dollars and change, and for the rest of that spring, if I needed spending money, I sold off one of the extra copies I had. I got a $45 return on a three dollar purchase!
As fate would have it, the girl from my English class who lived in my dorm and I had the same calculus class up on main campus on Tuesday and Thursday nights. She was a tiny young woman, 5′ 2″. She asked me to walk her back from class in the evenings because it was dark by the time class was over, and there were some poorly lit stretches between Rood Hall and Goldsworth Valley III, where we lived. I agreed. And before you know it, we were dating. I was literally the last of my suitemates in the dorm to get a girlfriend, but with my nerdity on full display, I felt like I had been luckier than they were. Less than a year out of high school, where I couldn’t keep a girlfriend despite giving up comics, I had a girlfriend who also liked comics. We made weekly bus trips to the comic book store and read them and talked about them all the way back. Go figure. I was now a nerd for life.
I didn’t see Star Wars the month it opened. I didn’t see it until later that summer. But the funny thing is that I read the book first. I was a voracious reader, and not just of comic books. I read anything I could get my hands on that sounded cool. And when I saw a novel called Star Wars, I picked it up.
Whew! $1.95!Not quite what ended up happening, but that’s not uncommon in Star Wars stories.
When you read the Star Wars novelization now, you wonder what “George Lucas” really knew about his own movie before he made it. But, as is laid out here with more detail than I would ever include, Lucas didn’t actually write the novelization. A prolific author named Alan Dean Foster did.
The first thing that struck me when reading was that the droids’ names were spelled phonetically. There was no C-3PO or R2-D2. They were See-Threepio and Artoo-Detoo, respectively. It was as if each one had a first name and a last name instead of alphanumeric designations. They were called Threepio and Artoo throughout. I remember passages that described Luke getting knocked over in the cantina into some foul-smelling liquid. But the thing I remember most is the phrase, “Servomotors whined in protest,” which occurs no fewer than three times in the book.
I knew it would take some time before I saw the movie, but my imagination had already begun to run wild with the new science fiction hero. After all, the subtitle was “From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker.”
I was in my dad’s apartment in Cadillac, Michigan, on a wintry night home from college for the break. Stevie Nicks’ The Wild Heart played on his little boom box on cassette.
After LPs and 8-tracks, we had cassette tapes!
It was a Christmas present from my aunt, who knew that Stevie Nicks was my favorite member of my favorite band, Fleetwood Mac. I must have spent a thousand hours listening to Rumours on headphones while I read comics at my grandma and grandpa’s house. But now I was a newly minted 19-year-old and I was waiting for Ron Radaweic to come and pick me up so we could go to the bar. We could do that back in those days in Michigan. You just had to be 18 and if you knew the right people, you could drink. Not legally, of course, but Northern Michigan was never really known for its stringent law enforcement. I was not a drinker, either. But the bar was where I would find other people my age. So, there I stood, in the dark, wearing my Western Michigan University hoodie and Levi’s 501 jeans with the button fly, ready to mingle and serve as wingman for Ron. We had worked together the previous summer at 4Winns Boats, doing boat upholstery, and he was one of the first friends I had made post-high school. His parents owned the very first video rental store in Northern Michigan, and we had spent many an evening picking out films that neither of us had seen in the theater. He was back from Michigan Tech, way up in the U.P. in Houghton, and we were going to live it up for a night back.
My dad was out for the night, gone off to wherever ancient 40-year-olds go, and If Anyone Falls came on. I was just thinking about Stevie’s first solo album, Bella Donna, which came out in 1981 when I was back in high school, and we listened to that a thousand times on bus rides to and from games, as well as in the locker room…on eight-track. Yeah, that’s right. Eight-track. I had bought a portable eight-track player for a dollar at a garage sale that supposedly didn’t work. I cleaned off the battery of corrosion with Coke, and put fresh batteries in it, and voila! We had music with us on the road. But high school days were now seemingly long behind, and I was a college man. So much of my identity in high school had been wrapped up in the orange and black school colors and the Bulldog mascot and the town, Mesick. I could walk anywhere in two counties and be recognized by name by the time I was a senior. My grandma would always look at me in amazement and ask how they knew me. High school sports were big in Northern Michigan, and I had played every one that I could: Football in the fall, basketball in the winter, and baseball in the spring. I was good enough to get my picture in the papers and cover my varsity letter with medals, but not good enough to get a college scholarship for it. But that was okay, because I had just enough brain to take care of that; or so I thought. While I had finished as class salutatorian in high school, I had just gotten my ass handed to me in my first semester of college. I thought about that as Gate and Garden began.
When I got to college in August, I discovered that my dorm, Eldridge Hall, in Goldsworth Valley III, had more people living in it than lived in my entire hometown. It was culture shock, to be sure, but not as much perhaps as the fact that I was still recognized by the guys on the floor of my dorm. Just down the hall from me was the cousin of the baseball player whose line drive I had caught to save the Class D state championship game in 1982. “Circus Catch,” they called me. The only thing I wanted to do when I went away to college was to forget all about high school, and yet there I was, infamous for it. I tried to focus on my studies, but I’ll be honest, some of my high school classes had not prepared me well. Chemistry was killing me, even though I’d gotten an A in it in high school. The professor was literally a rocket scientist. He had worked for NASA and he wanted you to know it. I struggled with it, but my roommate and suitemates sat in the back didn’t. They used their brand-new TI-55 calculators to share answers. With three 8-digit memories, they encoded the answers to the first 24 of 25 questions on the test. 1 was A, 2 for B, 3 for C, 4 for D, and 5 for “none of these.” I refused to participate in their academic dishonesty, and I paid the price for it. By the end of the semester, I was in desperate trouble. I needed a B on the final just to pull out a C in the class. I studied 14 straight hours for the final, trying to figure out what I’d been missing, and pulled a BA on the final, to get a CB in the class. Enchanted played next.
Why was I even waiting for a ride? Because I had sold my car midway through the first semester. I was very popular with my roommate and suitemates because I was the only one of us four who had a car. Most freshmen couldn’t have one, but I got permission. The 1974 Ford Pinto station wagon ferried those boys back and forth whenever they could persuade me. But one night, as we were piling into the car, I noticed that the “Bulldog Country” bumper sticker on the rear bumper of my car had been torn off. I didn’t like that, but it was no big deal. It was only a bumper sticker, and I was trying to separate myself from my hometown anyway, right? Well, we got about five blocks down the road, and there was a bad vibration, and it got worse. I pulled over and found that all the lug nuts were loose on the driver’s side front wheel. I jacked the car up and tightened them. What a weird coincidence. Then a horrible thought crossed my mind, and I checked the rest of the wheels. All the lug nuts had been loosened on every wheel! I was shaking. Naturally, I thought that the athletic rivals who called me “Circus Catch” had done it, but I had no proof. I drove the guys to their destination and went back to the dorm. I parked the car and never drove it again. I called my dad and told him to come and get it and to sell it for me. Whoever had done it knew it was my car, and I’d never feel safe in it again. Nightbird ended just as the snow started getting heavy.
I popped the tape and flipped it over to play the title song, The Wild Heart, and reflected that the first semester hadn’t all gone badly. I had rediscovered my love of comic books. I had given them all up when I was a freshman in high school because the only place to buy them in my little hometown was a local grocery store, where the girl that I liked, a junior, was a cashier. For me to buy them, I’d have to pay her the money and endure the judgment. It was easier to give them up. But at Western Michigan, I was shocked to discover that there were girls who liked comics too. One of them was in the first class I took, Honors English 105, Writing and Science. She lived in my dorm on the 6th floor (I was on the 5th) and she told me that there was a comic book store in town. I laughed. “What do you mean, a comic book store?” She told me that there was a store that sold nothing but comic books. I couldn’t believe it. What a wild fantasy world! But on my 19th birthday, I visited it for the first time. I was writing a paper for the English class and I interviewed the owners. They had new comics as well as old back issues. My mother had sent me $10 for my birthday, and I spent it all that day. I bought old issues of Batman from the 1960s for a quarter each, as well as the Limited Collector’s Edition featuring the Superman-Flash races, which I had never seen before. I wrote a paper like I had never written before, so excited was I by the discovery and got the highest grade in the class. I vowed to make a trip to that store regularly from that point on. And I took more of an interest in the young lady who had told me about it.
As I Will Run to You, Stevie’s duet with Tom Petty began, I took a good look around the apartment. There was not a hint of my existence except for my cheap plastic suitcase (black with red piping like the Batmobile) on the floor over by the futon I was sleeping on in the living room. I thought back to just a few weeks previous, on that same 19th birthday, when my dad had failed to call me. I was crushed that night, but the more I looked around, the more I thought to myself that it was no coincidence. Out of sight, out of mind. My dad felt that his obligations to me were over once I had graduated from high school. The only thing he missed about me being around the one-bedroom apartment was half the rent and utilities he made me pay to stay there in June, July, and part of August. I didn’t leave so much as a coffee cup in the kitchen when I left. He had me take everything with me. That’s when it finally hit me. I truly was an adult, standing on my own two feet.
Nothing Ever Changes echoed around the empty apartment, as Ron pulled up in his Honda. The evening was uneventful, for me at least, as we tried to talk to people in the bar. It was packed, of course, with all the college kids back for break, and after about an hour, we got ourselves invited to a party at someone’s house. Again, not my scene. I always felt uncomfortable in crowds of people I didn’t know, and that remains true to this day. I patiently waited for Ron to finish his rounds and asked if he could drop me back at the apartment. He agreed, but then went back out into the night to seek his fortune elsewhere, leaving me alone with my thoughts again. My dad called a little after midnight, and told me about possibly getting back together with his third wife, Peggy. Wonderful, I thought. At least he’ll be happy without her kids around. When I lived in her house, I was the youngest of the five step siblings, and if I was gone, they all would be too. Sable on Blond? Gross. I couldn’t wait to go back to school so I could miss that reunion.
The next morning, I went to breakfast with my grandma at the Big Boy down at the corner of Pearl and Mitchell Street. Grandma McClain lived in another one-bedroom apartment in an adjacent building to my dad’s. He still wasn’t home yet from his excursion, so I entertained her instead. I had my usual Mexican Fiesta omelet, and she had scrambled eggs and hashbrowns. My grandma and I had always had a special connection from the time I was born. I was the only grandchild for the first six years of my life, so naturally, she spoiled me a bit. She was only around my brother for about a year of his life before my parents split. I was just about to start seventh grade when my dad and I moved to Mesick to a mobile home across a field from hers and Grandpa McClain’s house. And it was she who had provided the positive influence and unconditional love that had helped to heal the deep traumatic scars that had been inflicted on me in the five years under my stepfather’s roofs. She was focused now on her newest grandson, my aunt’s son Jeremy, who had just been born the year before. I listened to her tell all the stories about him, and I was happy that she had somewhere to focus her energies now that I wasn’t around. I didn’t feel replaced, per se, but I did feel relief that she wouldn’t feel alone with my dad off chasing after another potential wife. After breakfast, we went down to the bookstore that I had been frequenting since childhood and had found so many of my precious treasures that I still value to this day. On this visit, I found a copy of the boxed set of Champions, a superhero roleplaying game that I had had an opportunity to play that fall, that opened my eyes to a whole new world. I also found a copy of Thor #337, by Walt Simonson, that many of my new comic-loving friends had raved about. With the recent trip to the comic book store in Kalamazoo and the idea that I didn’t have to be bound to the restrictions I had placed on myself in high school for the sake of impressing girls, I returned in January to a whole new life, and a whole new me. I hung up my Mesick Bulldogs varsity jacket for the last time and started wearing my late grandpa’s parka, which I had inherited for the really cold days.
The lyrics from Beauty and the Beast rang true in my mind. I had changed.
We often visited my grandparents on Sundays, which was great for me because in the evening after I got bored listening to the adults talk about their adult things, I was left alone to watch The Six Million Dollar Man battling the Venus Probe–in color! As I’ve said before, we only had a black and white television, so even as I watched Star Trek after school every day, it was not quite the same, in is monochromatic monotony. But Grandma and Grandpa McClain had a 25″ color TV, the very height of living room luxury!
The Six Million Dollar Man was my childhood idol. When my stepfather took away all of my comic books and burned them in front of me (“They’ll give you bad dreams.”) I needed a hero. Steve Austin was that hero. If my stepfather had read the source material, as I did, he may have had a different view.
You see, the Six Million Dollar Man from the TV show was an astronaut who was severely maimed from the crash of an experimental spacecraft. The Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI) replaced both legs, his right arm and his left eye with bionic (cybernetic) parts. Steve Austin then had tremendous strength, could run at 60+ miles per hour tirelessly, and could see great distances and in the dark. In short, he became a secret agent with super powers.
The television show was clearly made for kids. Steve became the last man to walk on the moon, a famous astronaut. He refused to kill people, and usually only hit people with an open hand. The physics of the show were often questionable. There was no explanation given how when his non-bionic hand was handcuffed to his bionic one, he could simply pull his arms apart and the handcuffs would snap.
Eventually the TV show would spin off The Bionic Woman, featuring Steve’s girlfriend Jamie Sommers, a tennis pro who just coincidentally fell victim to nearly the same kind of injuries while skydiving. She got a bionic ear instead of an eye. There was also a Seven Million Dollar Man, who went bad, a Bionic Boy, with leg implants that compensated for his paralysis, and of course who could forget Max, the Bionic Dog?
When I received the Six Million Dollar Man action figure from my Grandma B for my 11th birthday in 1975, I was the first one in my fifth grade class to have one. I was the envy of all. You could look through his “bionic eye” through a viewfinder in the back of his head. He could lift the included engine block when you pressed a button in his back. Oh yes, my stepfather let me have it over having another doll, but by that time, I was learning to ignore him.
Six Million Dollar Man action figure, image taken from Ebay
During the summer when I was 11 years old, my grandmother took my brother and me to a bookstore in Traverse City, Michigan. Horizon Books was just a hole in the wall on the south side of Front Street then. When we asked if they had any Six Million Dollar Man books, the clerk showed us the original novel upon which the Six Million Dollar Man was based: Cyborg, by Martin Caidin. My grandmother asked if it was appropriate for my age and the clerk replied that it was. I was so excited to see this book that I couldn’t even wait to get back to her house to start reading it.
Cyborg, by Martin Caidin
To my dismay, I found a mistake. The book claimed that Steve Austin had lost his left arm, not his right! I immediately took a pen to the book, crossing out “left” and writing “right” in the margin above the line. And Steve didn’t work for the OSI, he worked for the OSO (Office of Special Operations). What was this?? My grandmother calmly explained that when books were made into movies or television shows, details could be changed like that. Satisfied with (and more than a little surprised by) that knowledge, I went back to reading.
The Steve Austin of the novel was a whole different character from the one in the TV show. This Steve Austin could not see out of his bionic eye, but it did hold a camera that could take up to 20 frames of film. The camera was activated by a button just under the “plastiskin” at Austin’s temple. His arm could not lift great weights because it was still attached to muscles and ligaments in his shoulder. He used it primarily as a bludgeon. But one huge difference in the arm was the CO2 airgun in his finger that shot cyanide-tipped darts. They definitely never had that little contraption in the television show! He also had a supply of flares that he kept in his hollow wrist joint. There was a plug he could pull out to gain access to them. Austin’s legs were also far different. He couldn’t run 60 miles per hour, but he could run without tiring, since his respiratory and circulatory systems were only working to supply oxygen and blood to one limb. His feet had swim fins that could deploy from the underside, just behind his toes.
Austin was much more ruthless in the novel to say the least. He undertook two missions, one to steal a Soviet MiG and one to infiltrate a Central American military complex. He was basically James Bond with built-in gadgets. The novel also dealt with other, more adult concepts, like impotence. Steve Austin’s doctors had specifically chosen an attractive nurse to try to persuade him that he wasn’t a monster. The novel also dealt with suicide, the first time I had ever been exposed to that word. Austin tried to kill himself, after requesting steak and orange juice to eat. It was a ruse to get a glass so that he could break it and free himself from the restraints that kept him in his hospital bed. That’s some pretty serious stuff.
After finishing this book, the TV show never quite had the same lustre again. When Austin battled the Soviet Venus Probe in January, it looked pretty ridiculous, to be honest, even as I enjoyed both parts at my grandparents’ house. Earlier in the fourth season, Bigfoot had returned, as well. And now, armed with a little more maturity provided by literature, I was a little disappointed. Even the comic books were a bit muted now. Fortunately, there was also a Six Million Dollar Man black and white comic magazine that had more adult stories in them. In fact, in the fourth issue, one of the stories was practically taken verbatim from the first novel.
So, at the same time my interest in children’s comic books was being rekindled, I was taking a more mature look at fictional characters through novels and magazines. This would become a common theme throughout my adolescence, and in fact, even into adulthood. I still enjoy childish things as well as more adult entertainment. It’s very possible to hold two thoughts at once.
Although May 1977 is forever tied to Star Wars, it wasn’t for me because I didn’t see it that month. I was still in school, in Tustin, and we just didn’t go to the movies that much while living with Peggy and her daughters. Freaky Friday, Airport ’77, Black Sunday, The Car, we saw none of them. The weather was warmer, though, and that meant two things: Playing baseball and picking up some extra money mowing lawns. I mowed our lawn for free. I didn’t even get an allowance, nor did I expect one. But the neighbors I could walk to paid me to mow their lawn, which didn’t take any time at all. I was a champion lawn mower from way back.
When my mom and stepfather bought a house on Gun Lake Road just outside Hastings, where we had lived in a rental house for just over a year. I was still in third grade when we moved. To stay in the same elementary school, I had to ride a bus full of high schoolers, and then transfer to an elementary bus at the high school. I got quite the education riding the high schoolers’ bus. When I would get to the high school each morning, about a hundred kids were lined up along one wall, smoking. They had a designated smoking area. I was scandalized! Almost as scandalized as I was living with my dad and Peggy. Her daughters, aged 17 and 16, both smoked–in the house!
But back to Hastings. My mom and stepfather were so proud of that house by Gun Lake, though. It was a three-bedroom ranch-style house on a one-acre lot. And yes, that meant the lawn was just short of an acre and it fell on nine-year-old me to mow it, which I did every Saturday. It took three hours and three tanks of gas to mow that yard. And how much did I make for my effort? Two dollars. I did it all that spring and all that summer. Bought a brand-new fishing rod and reel with my money, too. So, to be paid two dollars in 1977 for mowing the neighbor’s lawn, which took me at most 30 minutes, I thought I was getting away with grand theft! No longer limited to church money, I was free to make major purchases every week! The first one was indeed grand.
Limited Collector’s Edition #C-51, cover by Neal Adams
When I saw this Neal Adams wraparound cover featuring my favorite character, Batman, with Robin lying apparently dead on the ground, I HAD to have this oversized comic book. What had happened to Robin?? I had to know. Now, I hadn’t been able to read any Batman comics for the previous five years, so I didn’t know that this book reprinted Batman #232, #242, #243 and #244. Ironically, the last comic book I got before my stepfather burned all of mine was Batman #238, which almost immediately preceded most of these stories, and also sported a Neal Adams wraparound cover.
Batman #238, cover by Neal Adams
So, this story was completely new and surprising to me. I had no idea who this Ra’s Al Ghul character was, but he looked completely terrifying on that cover. And I was not disappointed. Ra’s Al Ghul had discovered Batman’s secret identity! His daughter and Robin had been kidnapped by the same people! This was a darker Batman than the one on the TV show, but I had been in on the ground floor for that transition from pop-art star to dark detective. I also loved the goofy Batman of the 50s in reprints. It was perfectly acceptable to my 12-year-old mind that these were all the same character. I read this whole comic probably 20 times the first week I had it. And it took its place with pride among the other Limited Collector’s Editions I owned.
If you’re not familiar with the Limited Collector’s Editions from DC Comics or the Marvel Treasury Editions, they were glorious in their time. While an ordinary comic book from the Bronze Age measured 7.25″ by 10.5″, the LCEs and Treasuries were printed in luxurious 10″ by 14″ dimensions. The others that I had were all bought for special occasions like Christmas presents by my grandma, and they still hold a special place in my heart to this day, but that’s a story for another time. This was the first time I had bought one with my own money and I was about as proud as I could be.
