Books are my preferred Christmas gifts, and this year was no different.
Last year my son gave me a rather large book, nearly 1,000 pages, which is the size of a concrete block and about the same weight. He should have given me a set of barbells along with it because I had to train until Valentine’s Day just to be able to pick it up. I’m kidding, but I am proud to say I have finished about half of it. The type was so small an eagle couldn’t have seen it if he were perched on the back of my recliner. I had to purchase a magnifying glass, which was appropriate since the book was about the FBI.
This year he gave me a few more books, also big and heavy. (I really must talk to that young man and remind him just how old and infirm I am.) Had he asked, I would have suggested he give me comic books. The rage these days are graphic novels, but they are still comic books to me. They are much thinner and lighter and have fewer words, mostly drawings, which I can more readily relate to.
They do remind me of the comic books I devoured in my youth. There was a drug store at the corner of Main Street and Route 6 that had a huge magazine section as you came in the back door. I’d sneak in so as not to be noticed and sit there reading all the popular comics until Mr. Lariviere, the owner and pharmacist, spotted me and shooed me away. “Buy one or go home.” he’d scold.
Off I’d march down Route 6 until I reached Tinkham’s Pharmacy, near the Post Office. It shared the building with a baseball factory, which later became a convenience store and a dry cleaner. The drugstore became the infamous “wind tunnel,” the depository of all town gossip. There are hair and nail salons there now.
Tinkham’s had an even bigger comic book selection than Lariviere’s. The magazine racks were by the front window, out of view of the pharmacist, so I could sit there all day perusing the pulp pages of Archie Comics, Superman and Captain America. (I might accidentally glance at the Police Gazette, Hollywood Confidential or Modern Romances.)
The end pages would always have advertisements. One promised you could “create life before your very eyes,” just added water and Walla, “Real Sea Monkeys” which were actually brine shrimp. Another was the Charles Atlas ad that proclaimed “97-lb. weakling becomes the world’s most perfectly developed man” and how “in only fifteen minutes a day, you too can become a real man.” A tempting deal for a skinny, bespectacled kid like me.
One ad I did fall for was the Art Instruction School’s “Draw Me” contest. Just copy the pirate on the page and you could “win” a scholarship to their correspondence course. I did win and, though the course was free, my folks had to pay for the textbooks. Thankfully they succumbed to my begging, and I am still drawing today. Unlike with college now, the debt has long been paid.
Alas, comic books took a hit in the late forties and nearly disappeared by the late fifties. Claims that comics corrupted youth, making mush of our minds and turning us all into delinquents spread like wildfire across the country. Town meetings were held, comic books were burned at public rallies. Groups cleaned out drugstore shelves to protect “our youth” from corrupt ideas. Words like indoctrination were bandied about in newspaper editorials.
There were even Senate Hearings held, and a Comic Book Code was adopted, which resulted in a small stamp appearing on all comic books declaring “Approved by the Comic Code Authority.” By then I was reading Sports Illustrated, which I had to pay for. Comic books were for kids.
I sure wish I had gotten comic books for Christmas.
Editor’s note: Mattapoisett resident Dick Morgado is an artist and retired newspaper columnist whose musings are, after some years, back in The Wanderer under the subtitle “Thoughts on ….” Morgado’s opinions have also appeared for many years in daily newspapers around Boston.
Thoughts on…
By Dick Morgado