My parents were great. When I was a kid they bought me a small suitcase that I could put my comics in. I took it when we went anywhere on vacation or visiting relatives, etc. I remember reading them in the back seat of the car. And later in a tree house my Dad helped me & my friends build.

A Comic Lover's Memories
Dealing with Stuff

June, 1963. Fourth grade is over and the summer seems as if it will stretch on forever, and my interest in comics is increasing.

I know that sometime that month I picked up my first-ever annual, Superman Annual #7, which seemed momentous and important, what with the Superman as Oscar cast in silver on the cover. Don’t remember reading it, but as with all of those 80-Page Giants, it was drenched in the tradition of DC Comics history, which after all stretched back 25 years, an eon for a kid of 9.



And, as with every annual, you felt as if you were reading a Dickens novel (even if you never had). There were sometimes as many as eight stories, inevitably a few cool text features that dished out secrets or origins or background on characters, some of whom you’d never even heard of. But for a quarter, you got 80 pages (counting the covers, of course) endless hours of reading, and an education. If only it had been that easy to knock off 80 pages in my history or geography books!

It was like being admitted into a secret society or finding a book of magic spells or opening a dusty chest in the attic. You never knew what you might discover. That was also the case with Tony’s Hi-Way Sweet Shoppe, a little store up the hill from my house and then down again on the busy highway at the end of my street.

Going to Tony’s was a time travel trip all its own. It was a dark little place, with a soda fountain on your right and a dark wooden magazine rack against the opposite wall. Calling it a magazine rack was lending it much more grandeur than it deserved, because there were never more than a few comics or magazines displayed there. Mostly it was acres of open space.

But… But… Whatever comics Tony had out, they always seemed to be the ones you couldn’t find elsewhere or hadn’t seen in all of the usual places. Over the next few burgeoning years of my comics collecting career, one comic in particular stands out as the perfect example of the only time I ever saw a particular comic anywhere. And in this case, I grabbed the only copy Tony had on display. It was this one, and I still have it:



But let’s return to my first excursion to Tony’s as a comics fan, and the day that I made my first foray into the 30th century, courtesy Adventure 312. Thanks to Mike’s Amazing World -- All hail it!! – I figure must have picked it up late in July or early in August.



I’ve written in one of our year-end posts about the cover of this issue because it hit me so hard when I saw it in the rack at Tony’s.

I loved everything about it, but I was especially grabbed by the deep black cover. Like the annuals, it seemed important, but for a different reason. This was no celebration, but a solemnity, a serious story about sacrifice (a concept that any parochial school kid was familiar with).

Superboy, whom I knew well by now, was there, but he was joined by other costumed heroes whom I’d never heard of.

And the logo. I couldn’t put my finger on it then, and can barely do so now, but there was something so cool about the lettering, the color scheme, and the very name of the comic that I found irresistible.

How many comics did Ira Schnapp sell by his lettering alone?

Plus there was the word “Legionnaires,” which along with the word “Rangers,” always thrilled me. All I can tell you is that I had grown up loving movies and TV shows about the Foreign Legion and Rogers’ Rangers. “Northwest Passage” was a first-run show in 1958-59, around the same time as Disney was running what would later be called a “mini-series,” “The Swamp Fox,” about Francis Marion, the famed guerilla fighter of the Revolution. And, yes, that's Leslie Nielsen as Marion. (“The Patriot” was loosely based on Marion’s campaign against Banastre Tarleton.) And every kid loved “Captain Gallant of the Foreign Legion” with Buster Crabbe, which I think ran in all its grainy glory on Channel 9 in New York.

          

(Maybe Rob Allen or Ish can verify that.)

You can see why I had to buy it.

Looking back now, I think there was something else, too. The three 12-cent Superman family comics I had now bought all had something in common: death. I wonder if that was not more than just a coincidence.

I hadn’t lost anyone close to me since 1958, when my paternal grandfather died. I have tried and tried to dredge up even a hint of a memory of that, or of any feelings I had about it. I was only four, though, and can’t recall much from that time with the exception of a few memories of kindergarten.

I do remember, though, that 1962-63 had been a very weird year in school because of one stretch, the so-called 13 Days in October when we hovered on the brink of atomic war with the Russians.

   

I won’t belabor the event. Most of you know it, I’m sure, but here’s what has always stood out in my memory as I think on those times.

In Catholic school, we were fed solidly and frequently on the existential threat to Catholicism and the American way of life. We had air raid drills when we knelt against the wall in the church basement, put our hands behind our heads, and hunkered down. The air raid siren on the firehouse would blare and we would troop down obediently. Many buildings, like the bank in the center of town, bore the fallout shelter sign in case the bomb were dropped while you were next door at Bond's inhaling your 40-cent Awful Awful. (That Bond's is actuallly the one in the next town over from mine.)

   

You wonder why those gruesome Mars Attacks and Civil War cards were so popular? Displace your anxiety much?

Then there were the Treasure Chest comics sold every so often in school at 10 cents the copy. They never showed up regularly, but when they did, I bought them. They had sports stories and continuing non-religious strips, often illustrated deftly by the likes of Joe Sinnott and Frank Borth. They were in addition to the Gospel stories, lives of the saints, puzzles, etc.

What they also had were series like “This Godless Communism,” a 10-part strip (with Reed Crandall art, no less!) that ran from 1961-62 and laid out in pretty stark detail how the Communists could take over the USA and what would happen when they did. There were also plenty of stories about the persecution of Catholics by the Reds in Eastern Europe and China.



These stories were complemented by stories from our fourth-grade teacher. She transfixed us with graphic accounts (all supposedly true) of how the the Reds tortured, maimed and killed Catholic schoolchildren who had stood up for their beliefs. There were chopsticks-in-the-ears stories, murdered nuns stories, and desecrated churches stories.

I remember once her challenging us after she’d regaled us with yet another story of the torture and bravery of Chinese Catholic kids.

“What would you do if the Communists came into this room and asked you to raise your hand if you believed in God?”

We all said we would raise our hands, of course. There were no free thinkers in Sister Noreen’s classroom.

“And then what would you do if the soldiers brought you each up to my desk, held your arm down on it and asked the question again, but told you that they would chop off your hand if you said you believed in God?! What would you do then?” she screamed.

We were too scared to say anything. You didn’t argue with nuns. That image is as vivid in my memory today as it was when it was scratched into my mind 54 years ago in that classroom.

You can imagine how shaken we were, when in the midst of those 13 days, and things had reached the boiling point, Sister told us in a calm voice: “Russian missiles are 90 miles from the coast of Florida. If they are fired, they will destroy the East Coast. You may never go home again.”

Yikes.

There were no counselors, advisors, school shrinks, teachers’ aides, emergency crisis teams, in Catholic school or public school.

You were expected to be stoic and if you were Catholic, to “offer it up,” shorthand for “suck it up.” No special snowflakes. Allowed. Just deal with it, kids.

So maybe I was a bit more curious about death then. Three of the most memorable stories of my comics life, ones that still are fresh in my recollection, were about the deaths of Superman’s parents, the supposed death of Superboy, and the death of Lightning Lad, another young kid.

In an era when nobody was “traumatized” by anything, nobody “coped,” nobody “grieved,” I guess we still had to somehow deal with shit.

One more reason perhaps that comics were more than an entertainment, but a consolation.

There were other reasons that I may have sought refuge in comics beside the fear of imminent death that raised its head every so often. In the summer of ’63, I had three siblings under the age of three, a brother and twin sisters, in addition to a brother and another sister who were 6 and 5 respectively; my guess is that I was pretty much fending for myself in many ways. To make things worse, my parents were in a constant state of combat; throughout my life at home, until I left at 21, their marriage was, for lack of a better description, a manic-depressive relationship: volatile, unpredictable and prone to instability. The arguments seemingly never stopped, simply wore themselves out and then burst out again, and always around the holidays.

Many kids had it far worse; only in looking back do I realize how nuts much of my life was. I only mention it to explain how comics helped fill voids, provide periodic escapes, and in some unexpected but distinctive ways, enable me to understand the world a bit better.

Well, bro, I lived in a pretty small town. Our siren blared off twice at 8 AM and twice at 6 PM, so you'd know when you were supposed to be at school and when you were supposed to be home for dinner.

Seven blasts (repeated three times) meant that the Rescue Squad was needed. By the time you'd finished counting, whatever emergency needed responding to was probably over! It was really just an excuse for all the Junior Woodchucks to speed to the fire station.

One long blast was for the air raid drills. So the Russkies would have had to get up pretty early in the morning to blow us up!

Oh, I think Einstein was tired. 

I just figured a facelift might be fun.

And Hoosier likes it, which is enough for me.

So glad you are enjoying it, my leporine friend! I hope it "translates" to others' experiences growing up beyond suburban America.

Didn't realize how popular Einsten was. I only just figured out to change an avatar; others change them every so often and I felt like I should try to keep up.

I agree, though, that it's odd when a poster changes a longtime avatar. Still, don't want to be a stick in the mud.

I may experiment with some others!

 

You'll be coming up soon to the day of JFK's assassination. Curious to see how your experience matches to mine.

About the air raid sirens-I don't think I was ever taught the meaning of what the number of blasts represented. Or maybe they did mention it at school but it didn't sink in. All I know was if you heard the blasts and it was at an unexpected time, who the hell is gonna stand there counting them?

Then on top of the air raids, you got the periodic emergency broadcast tests on TV and Radio. Even if they told you up front that it was a test you felt it was a forewarning of what was to be

And then of course you had all that atomic war message stories in comics, movies and TV. The Twilight Zone used that theme quite often. The Atomic Knights in DC's Strange Adventures could give you some chills even though they had those cool giant dalmatians. Movies like On The Beach or The World, The Flesh and the Devil with Harry Belafonte gave me goosebumps. But most of all was the 1960 version of The Time Machine with Rod Taylor were it was predicted that 1967 was going to be the year of WWIII

Is it any wonder that the children who grew up with all this scare-mongering would become flower power, free love hippies in the later 1960s?

A Comic Lover’s Memories
Chapter 10
This is How the World Ends...

I wasn’t doing much comics buying or reading in the fall of 1963 during the first few months of fifth grade, if my memory, aided by the invaluable Mikes’ Amazing World’s Newsstand – Lo, he is with us always! – can be trusted. Fifth grade was billed to us kids as a watershed year. We now had our classes in the “new” school, built in 1952, and following what we figured was standard Catholic practice, were segregated by sex into two classes. Maybe I was putting aside the things of a child? (More likely I wasn’t going down to the Avenue that much.)

It didn’t take us long to figure out that it was not any long-standing Papist tradition or the onset of puberty or a desire to keep us undistracted by our nascent fantasies that led to the segregation of the boys from the girls; it was done because Sister Ethel Marie, a wizened crone at least a hundred and seventy-five years old, did not want to teach boys. So, all the boys plus a few leftover girls (maybe the tomboys of the class) were the charges of Sister Noreen, whom I had also had for fourth grade. (You may recall it was she who filled our heads with tales of Communist torture and told us, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, that we might never see our families again.)

But most of the time, she actually was a compellingly good teacher who had high expectations of us, and we responded by behaving up to them. So things were off to a good start.

Friday, November 22 was a beautiful day. All the kids in the fifth grade were looking forward not just to the weekend, but also to the Thanksgiving break. That next week, we’d go to school on Monday and Tuesday, have a half-day on Wednesday and then be home for a four-day weekend. My younger brother was turning three on the 24th, so there was a family party on the horizon, too.

Thanksgiving meant dinner at my grandmother’s, with about 15 of us there. But before we went over, it also meant watching a couple of movies that were shown only on Thanksgiving Day. First we’d watch Laurel and Hardy in March of the Wooden Soldiers on Channel 11 and then turn to Channel 9 to watch King Kong.

(More on these two films another time perhaps; suffice it to say that watching each of these movies remains a cherished part of my childhood.)

Now, Catholic school was all about consistency; teachers were never sick; school was never let out early; kids didn’t misbehave (not for very long, anyway); the schedule never changed; we never went on a field trip; every day followed the exact same schedule. That’s why what happened that day was so strange.

Someone, probably another teacher, knocked on our classroom door. When Sister Noreen returned to her desk, she looked shaken and told us to stand to say a prayer. Very odd. Not the praying. We did that constantly. The timing was off, though. We weren’t close enough to the end of the day to say our final prayer. This was different.

Can’t remember what we said, but someone more insightful than I must have recognized it as a prayer you say for someone who is near death or dead, because immediately the class was buzzing with the rumor that maybe one of the guys building the new church had fallen to his death.

Well, that held us until we got on the bus a few minutes later. That’s when the eighth graders let it be known that they had been allowed to watch the news on the classroom television because the President had been shot.

I wish I could remember more clearly how I felt or what that bus ride was like. Usually it was punctuated with the music from “W-A-Beatle-C,” 77 on your AM dial, with plenty of yelling and laughter. Occasionally, Phil the bus driver would have to holler at us to keep it down. I’m pretty sure it was a pretty quiet ride that day, if only because I remember how I felt as I walked home.

I had to walk a bit from the where the bus dropped me off to my house, and the crossing guard. I’m guessing I was with my sister and brother, who were in first and second grades, but I don’t recall their being with me. What I do remember is coming to the corner just a few doors from our house and seeing the crossing guard, who lived across the street from us. She looked terribly sad, which was so out of the ordinary, because she was always smiling at us when we got there.

I just remember looking at her and asking, “Is he?” and watching her nod, her eyes filled with tears. I felt like a character in some movie drama.

My mind is almost a blank from there on. My parents, though I didn’t realize it then, weren’t big Kennedy fans, despite the ethnic and religious links. Still, though, and this is what I do remember well, our television seemed never to be turned off over the next four days, which today, with TVs in every room and the omnipresence of TV news and sort-of news, may seem odd.

My mother would watch “Art Linkletter’s House Party” and “To Tell the Truth” as she folded clothes, but other than that, the TV was off until after dinner, when my parents watched the news at 7 o’clock. We didn’t watch TV on “school nights.”

In fact, we never bought a TV until I was almost in college, because we always got my grandmother’s hand-me-downs, and when those went kaput, we just had to waited until my uncle bought her another one.

That weekend was different. The black and white -- the gray, actually -- of the television cast a pall over the house as the unimaginable events of the weekend marched by like the mourners in the Rotunda of the Capitol. I must have watched some of it, but I suppose I could only take in so much, and by Monday, with school cancelled, we had to get out of the house and play. There were a lot of kids whose parents had the same idea.

We wound up down the street running around one kid’s house, playing who knows what. We should have gone up to the side street and played football, but for whatever reason we didn’t. Running around a kid’s house meant running around the neighbors’ houses, too, because the houses were only separated by narrow driveways.

My friend’s neighbor, Mr. Listner, who always played the role of Mr. Wilson in our neighborhood (he seemed to relish being the first guy on the block, which was nice and steep, to clear his sidewalk of snow, which meant that our sleds came to an abrupt stop in front of his house just at the start of the second incline), came out, really upset and told us that we should have more respect, because we were burying our president.

Mr. Lissner was right, of course, but he didn’t have kids; he didn’t realize that there was only so much we could take in at our age. But we all went home after that, feeling pretty bad.

I never held it against Mr. Listner. In fact, as the years went by, I was ashamed that I had been out there running around. I think Mr. Listner, whether he realized it or not, was feeling what a lot of folks were feeling. It was a sudden jolt, like when your back slips out of whack for the first time ever, and you’re shocked because you can’t move as smoothly as you had just a minute before.

Or like hearing a siren wailing way off in the distance and then sensing that it’s coming in your direction, but dismissing it until you see the fire truck turning the corner onto your block.

Or that feeling you get after you tell yourself over and over that the doctor coming out to meet you in the waiting room is going to have good news, he’s going to have good news, he’s going to have good news and then he doesn’t have good news and you plunge into the abyss.

I didn’t feel any of that during that black-and-white November weekend. I felt the aftershocks, though, and over the next few years I started to realize how much things had changed on that Friday afternoon in late November.

The world hadn’t ended with a whimper, but with a bang.

Exactly, ish! And it was indeed wall-to-wall coverage. Overwhelming to us younger kids. It was not the TV we were used to.