Podcast Tuesday: "Potsie Weber, Wanted Fugitive"

Margaret Willock and Anson Williams in The Money Tree.

I have surprisingly fond memories of corny, old-fashioned educational or "classroom" movies. My father was a high school teacher—his subjects were history and economics—during the primitive, pre-VCR days when you actually needed a projector and a screen to show a movie in class. I remember accompanying him several times to the Flint Public Library to procure these precious film reels that came in heavy, gray boxes that you needed to secure with luggage straps. For some reason, I found all of this to be unbearably exciting.

It was even better when one of my own teachers at Springview Elementary would show a movie in class. Again, I grew up in the movie projector era, before TVs strapped to wheeled carts became ubiquitous. What a thrill to hear that noisy projector whirring away as the images flickered on the screen. I think I liked the Disney nature movies best, but I generally enjoyed them all, even the really bad ones. It was a wonderful, much-needed break from the tedium of the school day.

This week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast, we turn our attentions to a somewhat forgotten 1971 educational film called The Money Tree starring Anson "Potsie" Williams in one of his earliest roles. He plays a young married man who gets into major debt by renting furniture and buying a new Ford Mustang on credit. And he drags his poor wife (Margaret Willock) down with him. What did we learn from this film? Well, you can find out below.

WATCH! The Candy Land commercial that haunted me for years! (Updated for 2024!)

This is what Milton Bradley's Candy Land looked like in 1978.

The game board as it looked in '78.

It's funny how an utterly ephemeral piece of music will become firmly lodged in one's brain for decades. Take, for instance, the instrumental music in an early '80s ad for the Milton Bradley board game Candy Land. There was a particular 30-second spot for this product that I must have seen dozens of times while watching Popeye and Andy Panda cartoons as a kid. Obviously, Milton Bradley bought up a lot of advertising time on children's TV shows, and I was smack dab in the middle of the target demographic.

The commercial itself is typical of the era. In a sunshine-yellow suburban kitchen somewhere, a young brother (played by a pre-Christmas Story Peter Billingsley) and sister play the game with their mom, while a gentle-voiced male announcer explains how it all works.

But underneath the narration is a jaunty, repetitive little melody with a whistle-like sound. To this day, I remember that insidious little ditty by heart. I will likely never forget it. As for the narrator's spiel, I didn't commit every word of it to memory, but there are certain passages that stick out: "You'll discover the Gingerbread Plum Tree, a Rainbow Pass, and Gumdrop Mountain! But be careful of the Cherry Pit Falls, and don't get stuck in Molasses Swamp!" The way he weirdly emphasizes "Rainbow Pass," as if it's a major selling point, is rather memorable.

Incidentally, one thing I learned in the course of researching this article is that there is no "definitive" version of the classic game. The internet can't even decide whether it's called Candy Land or Candyland. Under either spelling, the game goes back to 1949. The gameboard itself and the box it comes in have been redesigned and revamped many times since then. What was once merely "Molasses Swamp," for instance, is now a sentient creature unappealingly named "Gloppy." Other characters, like "main antagonist" Lord Licorice, have been added to Candy Land since the days of my youth. (In my day, bad luck was the only antagonist in Candy Land.)

Through trial and error, I learned that the version of the game seen in the famous ad dates back to 1978. Most sources say the commercial first appeared in the early 1980s, possibly 1983.

The indelible Candy Land jingle played a minor yet arguably-significant role in my life. I can remember humming it over and over to annoy my older sister during a long car trip. She must have identified the song, too, because she said, "Mom, tell Joey to stop singing the Candy Land song!"

A few years later, when I joined the school band, a few of my fellow musicians-in-training and I would try to learn as many pop songs, TV and movie themes, and advertising jingles as possible on our respective instruments. Then as now, I played the euphonium—a little-understood and much-neglected instrument to which I was dutifully assigned after failing to make the grade on the cornet. 

Being relegated to the low brass section was moderately more fun if I could play a reasonable facsimile of '"Black Dog" by Led Zeppelin or "The Ballad of Jed Clampett." I remember it was a major victory (in my own mind) when I learned the familiar seven-note "Miss Gulch" theme from The Wizard of Oz. But there was this one kid, Marc Wojtowicz, who played the saxophone and had a dizzying range of tunes at his command. And one of them was—you guessed it—the Candy Land jingle. That may not impress you, but it impressed the hell out of me.

Anyway, here's the commercial. If the song takes up permanent residence in your subconscious, remember that I tried to warn you.

UPDATE FOR 2024: Reader Dan Mahoney informs me that the jingle used in the Candy Land commercial is actually a piece of stock music called "Whistling Robot" by British composer and organist Harold Smart (1921-1980). In more recent years, Harold's music has turned up on SpongeBob SquarePants and its various spinoffs. Thanks for setting the record straight, Dan!

Podcast Tuesday: "How I Learned to Start Worrying and Leave the Prom"

Dick Van Patten ruins the prom on Happy Days.

It's inevitable that viewers will bring their own personal baggage with them whenever they consume any kind of media. When we watch a TV show, for instance, we may ask ourselves how the experiences of the characters onscreen compare with our own experiences. Unfortunately, if there's a huge disconnect between what's onscreen and what we have experienced in real life, we may have trouble suspending our disbelief. Think of real-world cops or doctors watching prime time shows about their professions. The scripts may be so far removed from reality that these viewers will become alienated, unable to relate to what they're seeing.

I try not to be this way. I understand that TV is TV and life is life and never the twain shall meet. I don't expect sitcoms to be realistic. That's how I was able to watch and enjoy The Office, even though it was very much unlike any real office where I'd ever worked. I spent years toiling in cubicles -- first for an auto manufacturer in Flint, then for a market research company in Chicago -- and if anyone there had acted like the employees at Dunder-Mifflin, they would have been fired immediately and possibly led away in handcuffs. But what does it matter? This is just a television show. Its only purpose is to entertain. Why bring dreary reality into it?

Michael Scott: Like no boss I've ever had.

Recently, though, I had trouble accepting a major plot twist on an episode of Happy Days that I was reviewing for my podcast, These Days Are Ours.  Specifically, I was screening "Graduation (Part 1)" from February 8, 1977. The plot of this episode has Milwaukee teenager Richie Cunningham (Ron Howard) attending his senior prom at Jefferson High School. Also in attendance are Richie's pals, Fonzie (Henry Winkler), Ralph (Donny Most), and Potsie (Anson Williams), and their respective dates. Things are going great until Vice Principal Conners (Dick Van Patten) shows up and announces that everyone in the senior class has flunked the hygiene exam. Students will not be allowed to graduate, he says, unless they pass a make-up exam scheduled for the morning after the prom. Everyone leaves the dance to go home and study.

This was more than I could take. It was too ridiculous even for Happy Days.

I mentioned earlier that I had worked a few office jobs, which is true. But between those Flint and Chicago assignments, I spent a few years teaching high school and junior high school. My parents were both teachers, too, and I'm the product of a public school education myself. Based on all this experience, I can say that this "hygiene exam" story could never, ever happen in real life. There would be too much of an uproar from the students, their parents, the faculty, and possibly even the local media. Vice Principal Conners would be (symbolically) strung up by his thumbs for this. He is, to paraphrase Dr. Strangelove, exceeding his authority.

Did this little snafu prevent me from enjoying the episode? You can find out by listening to Episode 79 of our show. And here, conveniently enough, it is:

Happy Vernal Equinox from Vernal Q. Equinox!

Vernal Q. Equinox in his natural habitat.

When I was in junior high and high school, I created a variety of crudely-rendered characters who "starred" in comics that I would pass around every day in class. Some of the characters, like Iffy the Troll and Margin Man, had dozens of little pencil-drawn adventures. Others, however, only appeared once or twice before being abandoned. Even then, I was sensitive to reader feedback. Only the characters that got the best reaction became regulars. One quickly abandoned character was redneck mechanic Vernal Q. Equinox. I must have heard the term "vernal equinox" somewhere and thought it sounded like a funny name.

I'm sure I was influenced by Jim Varney's then-ubiquitous "Hey, Vern!" commercials, plus the Gomer and Goober Pyle characters from The Andy Griffith Show. The illustration above is my attempt to recreate what Vernal would have looked like. None of his original adventures -- and there couldn't have been more than two or three -- survive to this day in any form. The photographic background is pretty authentic. I used to clip out B&W pictures of things I didn't feel like drawing.

Why do I mention any of this? Well, today is the vernal equinox, and it made me think back to those old comics I used to do. I'm the only person in the world who remembers Vernal Q. Equinox, so this blog post is my way of immortalizing him before he vanishes from even my memory. And what is this blog good for if it can't be a repository of my useless trivia from the past? Enjoy this moment, Vernal.

Incidentally, if anyone feels that Vernal might be a marketable character, I'd be willing to sell him very cheaply. Like I'd take a pack of gum for him.

Pointless nostalgia time: 'Meadowlark Lemon Presents the World' (1979)

I didn't hallucinate it. This movie really existed.

The way you can remember the difference between latitude and longitude is that latitude lines are like the rungs on a ladder, while longitude lines look like long telephone poles. Got it? That's a little detail I stored away from a 1979 educational film called Meadowlark Lemon Presents the World, a lighthearted, 17-minute primer on basic geography hosted by a member of the world-famous Harlem Globetrotters. Though I never attended one of their games in person, the 'trotters were nevertheless a vital part of my couch potato youth, what with their two (count 'em!) Hanna Barbera series and innumerable appearances on talk shows and specials, not to mention their utterly ridiculous and unmotivated crossovers with Gilligan's Island and Scooby-Doo. Who can hear "Sweet Georgia Brown" without feeling the urge to spin a basketball on one's index finger? Yeah, the clown princes of the court were everywhere in the 1970s and 1980s, including, it seems the classroom.

I was lucky enough to be around for the last few years of educational films being actual reels of film being threaded through a projector. The transition to VHS and those omnipresent rolling TV carts did not occur until my middle school years. No, if a teacher wanted to kill some time with a movie, he or she actually had to have some rudimentary AV skills. My parents were both teachers, and I can still remember going with my dad to the Flint Public Library when he wanted to check out an educational film. (This was before video stores.) The movies -- 16mm, I guess -- came in these big, flat, grayish-brown boxes, about the size of a small pizza, and they were held shut with straps. I don't know why, but I thought that was neat. You had to go to a special room on the second floor of the library to get them. I thought that was neat, too.

But, anyway, back to the movie at hand. Somewhere around the third or fourth grade, a teacher must have shown our class Meadowlark Lemon Presents the World as part of a unit on how to read maps or something. It was the kind of weird, fun, little movie that just might take up residence in a person's subconscious forever. It certainly did in mine. Interestingly (to me), Presents the World was made by the same group of amiable zanies who did the fondly-remembered Close Encounters parody film Closet Cases of the Nerd Kind in 1980, just a year later: director Rick Harper, writer Bob Rogers, and actors Stan Greiwe and Sandy Stotzer. I imagine they had fun with this assignment. Also in the cast is Mike Jittlov, director, writer, and star of the (unseen by me) cult classic The Wizard of Speed and Time (1988).

Meadowlark Lemon Presents the World, sadly, is not to be found in its entirety on the Internet. A company called Pyramid Media markets a DVD of it, but it'll cost ya: thirty bucks for personal use, ninety bucks for instructional use. If you're planning on buying me a copy for my birthday next month, please choose the $30 option. Happily, there are some clips available online, like this one featuring Stan Greiwe as a detective-turned-superhero and Mike Jittlov as a sinister, black-hatted villain. Enjoy:



What's really weird is the complicated, nesting-doll structure of Meadowlark Lemon Presents the World. It starts out as a film-within-a-film, and before long it becomes a film-within-a-film-within-a-film. You see, the introduction involves a hapless grade school teacher (also Greiwe) showing this movie to his unruly students. Then Meadowlark takes over and shows even more films, like the one above. It's like Inception for eight year olds.

A pantry full of hate

This is a picture of clutter, in case you don't know what clutter looks like.

The kitchen in my apartment has a pantry, but I don't cook so I use it as a storage closet instead. Being the lazy, indolent sumbitch that I am, I have allowed this pantry to become laughably, even shamefully cluttered. Recently, I was trying to fill out my 1040 EZ for the benefit of good old Uncle Sam and thus went rummaging through the aforementioned closet in search of a large manila envelope upon which the fateful words "TAX SHIT" are scrawled in Sharpie. It took me a while to find, and so I resolved to finally sort through all the useless stuff in there and throw out or recycle anything I didn't actually use or want anymore. Last weekend, I actually went through with this plan, and it felt kind of good for a while. The pantry is still pretty much a mess, but now at least it's a somewhat more manageable mess.

The reason I bring all this up is that my mind is a lot like that pantry. It's cluttered up with a lot of useless junk. You know what takes up an inordinate amount of room? Grudges. Man, I am the king of grudges. I have grudges going back decades. I'm still mad over shit that happened before I was even in kindergarten. There are slights and injustices I can still remember from every phase of my life, and with only a little effort, I can still dredge up the hurt they caused me at the time and make those incidents seem freshly painful again, as if they just happened yesterday. I'm sure lots of good things have happened to me over the years, but my memories of the bad things are so much more vivid in my mind. Four long decades of birthdays and Christmases blend together into one big, blurry blob of indistinct experience. But if you teased me at recess even once in the third grade, you can bet I still hold onto that memory with a vice-like grip.

If you're one of the very few people reading this, it's likely that you're someone I have known for years. And if you're someone I've known for years, it's almost certain that you have caused me some real (or imagined) grief and that I'm still angry about it. I don't like that about myself. I never meant to become so bitter. It just sort of happened, failure by failure, disappointment by disappointment. I don't know what to do with all this bitterness. It's never done me a bit of good, and yet I can't bear to get rid of it.

A brief, biological memory

The powerhouse of the cell.

The nearest thing I ever had to a spiritual experience happened to me when I was in high school. I was 14 years old and a reluctant student in a freshman biology course. This particular teacher and I did not exactly get along famously, and I found the subject matter -- i.e. the very mysteries of life itself -- just as deathly dull as anything I'd ever heard. Maybe those two facts are connected somehow. I know the class involved a lot of sitting still and taking notes. 

Anyway, I would get so bored in class that my soul or spirit would rise up out of my body and float toward the ceiling. I could look down and see myself sitting in class, taking (likely inaccurate, definitely illegible) notes about mitochondria or whatever it was we were supposed to be learning that day. The body stayed in class; the spirit was free to travel. I've never had that experience since then. It was the closest I ever came to believing in the existence of the soul. As for mitochondria, well, I never did figure those out. I know they're "the powerhouse of the cell," but that's as far as my understanding extends.

Lunchboxes of my youth: fear comes with its own Thermos

As a child, I spent my lunchtimes staring at the coked-out visage of Ms. Carrie Fisher.

Springview Elementary: a chamber of horrors.

The onset of fall always brings back memories of my own elementary school days. Unfortunately, most of those memories suck, and I would rather repress them than relive them. No offense to my former classmates, who have grown into thoughtful and friendly adults, but you scared the living shit out of me when you were children. Kids can spot weakness in a second, and I was lousy with it. I made the bullies' job too easy by being such a tempting and passive victim. (Fun fact: one of my childhood tormentors eventually did some prison time, a fate I had secretly predicted for him years earlier.) What would I have done differently, knowing what I know now about the world and about human nature? Just about everything.

Back in the early-to-mid-1980s, though, I was as clueless as they come. I mean, I was alert enough to realize I was not getting along well with my classmates, but I had no idea why that was or what I could do to change the situation. Walking to Springview Elementary School in the morning, I felt like a condemned man walking the green mile. I would not have known the words "alienated" or "ostracized" in those days, but both of those adjectives applied themselves manifestly to me. There was no sadder day on the calendar than the last day of summer vacation. I still shudder to think about it. For most kids that age, lunch and recess provide a welcome relief from class. In my case, it was just the opposite. At least in class there were rules and some semblance of order. The playground and, especially, the lunchroom were consequence-free zones where all sorts of torture, mostly psychological but some physical, was either tolerated or ignored.

Despite all this, I still have some residual affection for lunchboxes. I might have been part of one of the last generations in this country who actually got to carry the metal ones to school with them. These were banned years ago because -- and this should come as no shock -- horrible, bratty children were using them as weapons. That's how much kids suck. A second-grader gets a beautiful metal lunchbox in his possession, and his first thought is, "I should just straight-up brain somebody with this thing. It looks like it could cause serious injury." So now, metal lunchboxes exist only as collectibles for sad grown-ups like me. I don't actually buy them, mind you, but on especially lonely nights I do browse through Ebay and see if I can find any of the lunchboxes I carried as a kid. In fact, I think I can trace my entire youth through those long-gone food containers with their matching Thermoses. Let's take a trip down Pointless Nostalgia Lane, shall we?

(Note: I do not currently possess any of these lunchboxes. These are all pictures I yoinked off the Internet. Even if I did still have these, they wouldn't be worth anything because I treated these lunchboxes as carelessly as I treated all my possessions in those days. I was a profoundly stupid child.)

One Song at a Time: "Mind"

Talking Heads around the time they recorded the Fear of Music LP.

Song: "Mind"
Artist: Talking Heads
Released: 1979

Cheery cover, no?

I lived at home until I was in my mid-20s. I didn't plan it like that. Just sorta worked out that way. And I wasn't a layabout slacker, a la Ben Katz (H. Jon Benjamin) from Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist, either. I went to college, and I worked as a customer service rep and a substitute teacher. But all that time, I was living in my bedroom from high school.

Hell, still to this day, I have the same exact bed that I've had since I was 13. I'm writing this article from it now. Same dresser, too. And on top of that dresser, the same goddamned boombox. But, anyway, let's go back to the early 1990s. Specifically 1992-1993. My senior year of high school. That's the time when you're supposed to be getting your shit together -- applying to colleges, trying to get scholarships, picking out a career, all of that garbage. I knew I was supposed to do that stuff, but I just never got around to any of it. My mom's cancer-related death took a lot of the fight out of me back then, and I turned into the reclusive, bitter weirdo that I still basically am today.

My dad took my mom's death even worse than I did and became a a rather sad and depressive person. I don't know if he's totally recovered, twenty years later. My sister, wisely, moved away and started a family of her own. Me, I stayed with my dad in my hometown. It was just the two of us in a house that was much too large. I'm not gonna lie to you, folks. Those were shitty, shitty years. (Did you see Crumb? Remember Charles Crumb and his mom? It was kinda like that. Not quite as bad, but definitely getting there. It was like the prequel to that.)

My low point was when I took that customer service job, during which I worked in the world's most depressing phone bank in the basement of an auto parts plant. You descended this dimly-lit stairway to get there, like descending into Hell. All day, you had to absorb the negativity of the callers. Between calls sometimes, I would rest my head on my desk and sob. About eight or nine months into doing that, I went through the medicine cabinet at home and took everything in it. Wound up in the intensive care ward for three days. Not fun. Then went back to the parts plant to be a customer service rep again. Even less fun.

Cut to a few months later. Out of the blue, and I mean the fucking Papa Smurf's ass blue, I got a job offer to teach at a middle school near Joliet, IL. Even better, I was at my desk at the parts plant when it happened. I immediately took it, no questions. Quitting that customer service gig was one of the Top 5 happiest moments of my life. (I can't even think of the other four.) My father was not thrilled. He made me feel very guilty about the whole thing, and I don't think he's ever gotten over it. I felt then -- and I feel now -- like an ax murderer for moving out of his house and into my own apartment in another state, even though I'd definitely be dead today if I hadn't.

That was 2001. That middle school was where I was when the Twin Towers fell. It was the day before my 26th birthday. I don't think I taught those kids in Joliet a damned thing. Someday, I'll write about my horrendous experiences as a teacher. (Short version: if you hate and fear people, especially teenagers, don't go into teaching.) But I certainly learned a valuable lesson that first year "on my own."

I thought that the move would somehow magically fix everything and that my personality would just naturally smooth itself out once I was in Illinois. Didn't happen that way. I was the same asshole there that I was in Michigan. All my hang-ups, hatreds, insecurities, and inadequacies were still there in Illinois. That's what I think about whenever I hear "Mind" from the Fear of Music album by Talking Heads. Most of the lyrics are about the things that "won't change you": time, drugs, science, money, religion.

I don't know if David Byrne was directing this song at himself, at the listener, or at somebody he knew. But I'll be good and goddamned if it isn't all true. I can add a few items to his list, too. Xanax won't change you. Therapy won't change you. Welbutrin won't change you. In the chorus, Byrne sings, "I need something to change your mind." Amen, brother. I'm still looking for that something.

One Song at a Time: "I Only Want You"

The Passions, a lesser-known but worthwhile doo-wop group.

The song: "I Only Want You"

Artist: The Passions

Released: 1960

Soundtrack to a college crush.

During all my years of schooling, an era of my life I tried to prolong indefinitely so as to avoid entry into the dreaded "real world," I only ever had one crush on a teacher. 

It was one of my college professors, a woman who taught courses on Spanish literature and culture. If you follow any particular major or minor long enough, you'll eventually have the same profs over and over again, and she was repeatedly one of mine. To maintain propriety, I'll avoid naming her or the institute of higher learning for which she still works. 

Let me cut you off at the pass by pointing out that she wasn't the busty, provocatively-dressed "Hot for Teacher"-type seductress you're likely picturing. No short skirts, plunging necklines, stilettos, or fishnet stockings here. Instead, this professor was a modest, sensibly-dressed brunette with a soft voice and a mildly nerdy vibe. I can never be sure why exactly I developed such a crush on her, but looking at her picture in the college's staff directory still makes my heart flutter to this day. 

Every crush needs a musical soundtrack, I feel, and for this one I chose classic doo-wop, in particular a track from 1960 called "I Only Want You" by The Passions. I discovered it on a Rhino Records compilation and loved it immediately, playing it over and over. AllMusic describes The Passions as "an above-average white doo-wop ensemble from Brooklyn." Apparently, they recorded for a few years, starting in the late 1950s, but never quite made it. 

This particular tune wasn't even one of their bigger hits, but it got my attention anyway. What was it that first caught my fancy? Was it the lopsided drum part, which emphasizes the second and fourth beats of each measure rather than the first and third, sounding like a pirate with a peg-leg running through a steel corridor? Maybe it was the descending pizzicato strings that "answer" the lead singer after every line of the verses? 

Probably it's just the unabashed erotic yearning of the lyrics, i.e. the fact that the guy in the song is just so consumed with lust for some young lady "every waking hour, every minute of the day." This poor dope can't even get a break when he falls asleep: "Even in my dreams, you are there it seems/I can always see your face." It reminds me of a line from Just Jaeckin's Emmanuelle (1974): "Real love is erection, not orgasm." That's the essence of "I Only Want You." It's the perfect combination of harmony and hard-on.

This is the second episode of this proposed series. I've changed the title from "Best Song Ever" to "One Song at a Time" to emphasize that this is basically an autobiography in the form of record reviews.

Water towers I have known and feared

Flushing, MI's infamous "smiley face water tower." Photo (obviously) by someone named Bruce Larkin.

Childhood is a rich, flavorful stew of unresolved fears. I had a relatively uneventful upbringing, and yet when I cast my mind back to those early days, what rises to the surface more readily than anything else is the terror I felt at being so small and in a world that was so strange and often unwelcoming.

The town where I did most of my growing up was called Flushing, MI, and one of its few really distinctive features was a bright yellow water tower with a giant smiley face painted on it. We all called it (get this) the Smiley Face Water Tower, and although it was intended as cute and whimsical, it inspired within me a deep and restless dread. Why? Those eyes, man! Those unblinking, soulless eyes, always staring at you!

I first saw the SFWT at the age of six, and in retrospect it was probably the closest thing Flushing had to a life-size replica of the Lord God Almighty. As it happens, old Smiley has a peripheral but still-significant place in popular culture, as evidenced by this 2004 write-up on the Roadside America website. A contributor named Dan McGraw reports:

There's a smiley face water tower in Flushing, MI. It got painted that way around the Bicentennial and occasionally gets repainted with the same design. For reasons I'm not sure of, it got nicknamed "Kick-boy-Face" by the local early punk rockers, and it kinda stuck. It has a drainage pipe that runs top to bottom, and it makes an awesome echo if you yell into it.

McGraw also says that there is a similar tower in the movie Natural Born Killers but does not specify whether it's actually the one from Flushing. (There are apparently many such towers in the United States.)

I have a couple of further comments to make about McGraw's review of the monument. I lived in Flushing for twenty years -- 1981 to 2001 -- and I never heard anyone call this tower "Kick-boy-Face." Not once. It was always the Smiley Face Water Tower. Moreover, during those two decades, I never noticed that Flushing had any sort of burgeoning punk rock scene. And if the tower's drainage pipe was particularly famous, I didn't know about that either. Mr. McGraw may be correct on all these points; his account just doesn't align with my own personal memories of the Smiley Face Water Tower.

What I recall was simply a giant, canary-colored monolith with a painted-on grin. As for its precise location, that's trickier to sort out. Flushing had at least two big water towers, and I seem to remember that the SFWT was near enough to my school that I could stare up at it from the playground. These could be false memories, though.

A quick Internet search reveals that there is indeed a water tower very near my alma mater, Springview Elementary ("Home of the Sharks"), but whether it's the infamous SFWT is impossible to tell. There's a Google Maps photo of the tower here, but it's taken from an angle that almost cruelly obscures the design. It looks like it certainly could be the one, but I'm not placing any bets on it.

UPDATE: A former classmate of mine, Denise Mercer Blackwell, has informed me that the SFWT was, in fact, the one next to the elementary school and provides this incredible anecdote, via Facebook: "It was across from the school. I remember in 6th grade Mr. D [that's Mr. Dumler, our sixth grade homeroom teacher during the 1986-1987 school year. - J.B.] had to shut the blinds because someone was on top of it, evidently going to jump, and we could not pay attention for all the emergency vehicles. I never look at that water tower without thinking of that day." I must admit, I had totally blacked that out of my memory. Thanks, Denise!

Daddy Long Legs or robot camels?

While Smiley loomed largest in my nightmares, I had a general fear of water towers when I was a kid. I was quite the Star Wars fan back then, and for some reason the towers reminded me of the heavily-armed All Terrain Armored Transports (aknown as AT-ATs or Walkers) used by the villains in The Empire Strikes Back. The animated TV show Family Guy referred to these fearsome machines as "robot camels" during its 2009 Empire spoof entitled "Something, Something, Something, Dark Side," but the Transports looked more like giant Daddy Long Legs to me. At least, that's how I saw them back then.

Anyway, a persistent fantasy/worst case scenario of mine in those days was that all the water towers of the world would spontaneously come to life one day and start stalking the earth on those long, spindly legs of theirs, crushing everything in their path and causing widespread destruction and panic among the citizenry. I pictured people running and screaming as they were being chased by the now-ambulatory water towers, which moved with a horrendously loud mechanical screeching, their footsteps landing on the ground with the weight of circus elephants.

Smiley, of course, would be leading the charge. Perhaps that was why he'd been grinning smugly all those years. He was just biding his time, waiting for the day when he and his water tower brethren could finally get revenge on their dreaded human oppressors.

Funny how kids think, isn't it?

K is for Kettle (Day 11)

Look at the witch's kettle.

The print is a little smudgy here, so I'll transcribe. Look at the witches kettle. Again, it should be "witch's." Again, I was eight. My prose here is not too terribly impressive. I was overly influenced by Dick & Jane at this point in my career. But the facial expression on the witch is, if I must say so myself, pretty damned amusing. "Me? A witch? Don't be silly!"

New October Project! My Halloween Dictionary

The cover of My Halloween Dictionary.

Hello, one and all!

While rummaging through my vast archives in a fit of Citizen Kane-esque nostalgia, I discovered a remarkable artifact: a project I did in elementary school, circa age 8! It's a little booklet entitled My Halloween Dictionary. As a way of gearing up for Halloween itself, I've decided to share this golden oldie with you a page at a time... along with some contemporary commentary from an older, wiser perspective. And feel free to add any comments of your own. Above is the front cover. Stay tuned for more! A new page will be posted each day for the rest of the month.

Below is the inside front cover with comments by my third grade teacher, Mrs. Maki. (Which is pronounced just like the last name of the guidance counselor on South Park.)

Comments by my third grade teacher.