ORANGE COAT

 

There’s only one reason why I can recall what I did 50 years ago today- and that comes by way of relating it to an oddball event. That screwball event consisted of a “daredevil” trying to shoot himself over a canyon on a garage-built rocket while a zillion people paid to watch on private TV… so it’s easy to remember. The date was September 8th, 1974 and it was the day that I began work at my first real job. Oh, sure I did odd jobs such as popcorn vendor at the circus, or cutting people’s lawns for cash. But this was a REAL job, with a supervisor, who had a manager, who had a general manager. Yep, I was an underling making that $1.65 an hour minimum wage. Still, this was the job I’d wanted for more than a year. I was going to be an usher at the fairly new Saginaw Civic Center.

I wanted to be an usher there since both of my parents worked at the Civic Center (now the Dow Event Center) part-time. Mom had been one of, and probably the first, hourly employees hired there before the building opened in early 1972. At that time only the arena and front offices were ready to open. The whole facility wasn’t officially opened until the 6th day of May 1972, yet in order to begin generating revenue General Manager Bill Fifer and his assistant Bob Lister, had the arena opened for events in late January. My dad soon became the main Zamboni driver and we kids were in that arena ice skating nearly every weekend beginning in March of 1972. A staff of ushers acted as rink guards and aided guests during other arena events. They wore really ugly orange suit jackets and followed very strict rules like how to stand, never to sit, hands out of pockets and always be polite. I wanted that job.

The only problem was that you had to be at least 17 years of age to apply and I was too young. Finally I turned 17 in the spring of 1974, but hockey season was nearly over and they would not need ushers until the fall. Finally, as September of 1974 arrived I put my hat into the ring and applied for the job. Actually, I don’t recall ever formally interviewing for the job. My mom and dad were good friends with the Fifers and the Listers and dad had just been dubbed “Head Usher.” Thus, it was taken that I’d be on that staff, and September 8th was the first usher event for the season. It was the closed circuit, big screen showing of Evil Knievel’s Snake River Canyon jump. The show would be projected on a huge screen in Wendler Arena.

Dad as "head usher"

I’d spent the previous two weeks looking forward to this day. I got my black slacks, black shoes, white shirt and clip-on tie. Of course, since I’d been running around that place for two and a half years, I knew every seat, section, door, room and hallway and Mr. Fifer joked that I didn’t need any training at all. In fact, they made me a rink guard right away- even though the ice wouldn’t go down for more than a month. He quipped that I was probably one of the best skaters in the city, so he was sure I could handle it and my dad agreed. During the season I ended up skating three 2-hour sessions on Saturday, two on Sunday, a half hour of public free skating after ever weekend hockey game plus about a half hour between sessions just for fun. That added up to about 14 hours of ice time every week from October through April. The best part was- I got paid for it.

On the day of Evel’s canyon “jump” I was stationed in section “19”. To say this job was a no-brainer would be an understatement. To say that Evel’s “jump” would be thrilling, would be overkill. It was just a dangerous stunt using an under-engineered rocket “sled” that failed at ignition deploying its drag chute at liftoff. Yet, I got paid to stand there and watch until it was all over and everyone who’d paid to come in and see the farce finished their popcorn and went home. The announcers at the Snake River site did their best to drum up the drama, but it wasn’t much of a thrill for me. As a diehard space buff the “rocket bike” was underwhelming. Afterward I turned in my ill-fitting orange coat and went home with dad.

Hey- hockey season was coming, dad had me on his ice crew and there would be some interesting times ahead. I got to meet Karen Carpenter, went to dinner with Loretta Lynn and her crew and just before the Porter Wagner Show,

Dolly Parton sang a whole song to me while I was working at the back door to the arena. You see when you compliment the star on her sweater that has butter flies on it, and she says, “It’s for my new son- Love is like a butter fly. I’m introducing it tonight. Would you like to hear it?” You don’t say, “Naaa, I’m into rock and roll.” You say, “Why yes Ms. Parton.” And so, she ordered a stage hand to get me a chair- told me to sit in it, and sang me the whole song. I told her it would be a hit.

That first job was one of the few that I actually liked. However, it was a lot of hours and took up every weekend and usually most of my weekday evenings. But I got paid to skate… ya’ cannot beat that.

ABOUT SMELT

A few words about smelt. On the Great Lakes these pint-sized fish run in schools near the shoreline in the early spring. For example, on Lake Huron, in the Tawas and Whitestone Point area the run is normally in late April and always during the night. These fish are caught by using a simple hoop net. The process is known as "smelt dippin' " and often involves camp fires and beer. Once caught they are very easy to clean. You simply lop off the head, slit down the belly and thumb down to the tail to remove the guts. Roll them in some flour and pan fry in oil until golden and crunchy. They are really yummy because all of the bones and scales as well as the tails are edible. Actually catching the little buggers is another matter.

As a little boy growing up in Saginaw, it became clear that smelt dippin' was a right of passage. From the time I was eight until I was a teenager, my dad and uncles always took me smelt dippin'. I always wondered what the deal was- ya' go out in your waders, dip yer' net in the cold lake- sometimes having to shove the ice flows back out to lake with yer' foot- then come home exhausted with wet feet, numb fingers, and one frigging smelt.

On the night of April 23, into the morning of April 24, 1969, I was again on my way up-north to the lake with my dad, my uncle Tom and our neighbor Vern for smelt dippin'. We had a large steel washtub and an inflated tractor tire innertube. That would float with us and supposedly hold whatever smelt we netted. Our destination was a spot called "Singin' Bridge" which was a two lane bridge over a creek that flowed under US-23. The bridge had a steel grating and when cars drove over it, the thing made a sound that if you were drunk enough may have sounded like singing. The beach was fairly crowded but the other dippers were spread out into the sackcloth darkness. We floated our tub and I waded out as far as my scrawny legs would take me and dutifully began dipping while the three grown ups went farther out. A half hour passed and nothing... soon it was well after midnight and I was sure I was close to hypothermia. Dip- nothin' dip, nothin' endlessly. My only justification was that no one else out there in the blackness seemed to be getting anything either.

Then I dipped, and it was like my net got caught in a sandbank. I struggled as hard as my little skinny arms could and as I lifted the net it was filled to the top with sliver squiggling smelt. Standing there a bit shocked I softly called out to my dad,

"Look."

"Holy shit," dad murmured and then commanded me to not say a word.

Quickly he motioned to the other two men to get over to where I was standing still trying to hold that net that likely weighed as much as I did. They rushed over and we dumped my net. Then all of us stared pulling nets full out of the lake. We were standing in the middle of a whole school of smelt! It took only minutes for the four of us to fill that washtub. I forgot my wet feet and froze fingers- the smelt were finally runnin'. Then my uncle and our neighbor rushed the floating washtub toward the beach. My dad motioned to me to "watch this" and in his loud railroad engineer's voice he shouted.

"THEY'RE RUNNIN' THEY'RE RUNNIN' "

The onrush of other dippers was almost frightening as we got the hell out of the water. It took both my uncle Tom and Vern to get that tub into the back of the station wagon. We were done for the night.

I spent the whole of the next day learning how to clean smelt, bag 'em and freeze 'em all, except for the ones to mom would cook for dinner tonight.

The smelt were indeed runnin'.

 

People have often asked how I got into cartooning? And what were my first cartoons like. Well- here’s the answer. My very first cartoon strip.

It was early 1975 and while at my workbench in the electronics lab at COC, I felt the urge to do some cartooning. I wanted to do cartoons with sick violence, death and laughable characters. Of course, if an 11^th grader got caught doing such involving lots for people getting mowed down, even in 1975 I’d have found myself in protracted counseling. I pictured myself in old Dan Jacoby’s office looking at ink blots until I graduated. The answer was “ants” you can kill as many as you want and no one cares! Since I’d been featuring ants aboard my model rockets crashing to their doom- it was logical that his ants and their ant world that exists among, but un-noticed by the humans, would be the setting. Inspired by the old television series, “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea”, I began work on “Forage to the Bottom of the Sea” which featured not only the ants, but my boyhood best friends Jim Brink and Ken Wolff.

Sketched within remarkably small frames and done totally in pencil, the strips were crude and contained both off-color language and sometimes humor that only the three of us could understand. The story was that of a miniature submarine and its crew of ants that sailed from the creek that ran behind my house in the farm-town of Freeland, Michigan to another creek that ran near my old neighborhood on the east side of Saginaw, Michigan. Interestingly, if you followed a map, in the 1970s it was indeed possible to connect the two locations by way of water, so long as you can sail in depths of less than three inches. Once back in my old neighborhood, the submarine ants engaged in a fictional havoc imposed on Jim and Ken.

I knew nothing about cartooning and was doing the strips off-the-cuff as a pass-time to get my brain off of electronics (which by the way, I passed with an “A” in the 11^th grader and qualified for “Advanced Electronics” in my senior year plus a job in that area after graduation- I was not a fan of electronics, but felt it may one day help me in aviation. The electronics training saved my ass in the cockpit more then once.) My ant characters were crudely illustrated and my penmanship and grammar were awful. Most of the jokes were inside stuff that only Jim and Ken could snicker at. I did, however, leave a few “easter eggs” as they call them today, for the guys. For example, the fish on the tree refers to Jim’s passion for fishing. Also "Brink" is the name of the ant who invades Jim Brink's home and then Jim feeds him to his fish- so he fed himself to the fish. Additionally, the serial number on the side of the “Flying Snub” 738278 was my serial number when I was in the Civil Air Patrol. Those give a clue as to how “inside” the humor was.

Yet cartooning was a great pastime. While most folks sat and watched TV to pass the time- I sat and drew mindless cartoons. The work quickly evolved and bettered. When I got to college a friend in the dorm insisted that my cartoons go into the Avion student newspaper… and things went nuts.

That, however, is another story.