I’m telling ya, sonny, back when I was a kid, a 60-year-old man could regale you with yarns of Model T’s, biplanes, and steam threshers from back when he was a kid!
So what happened?
Well, I chowed down on Quisp and Tang while playing with Major Matt Mason while watching Space Ghost to real live astronauts walking on the moon on the idiot box.
The Space Race was literally walking on the moon while I was growing up. A lot of grownups referred to about any artificial satellite as a Sputnik. John Glenn and Mercury happened when I was a baby. I had one of those litho-tin toy space capsules. Project Gemini was in my preschool days. The Apollo program lined up closely with my grade school years with Skylab wrapping into junior high. Apollo-Soyuz and a family vacation that included a trip to the LBJ Space center were during the summer between junior high and high school. Launching Estes and Centuri model rockets was a cargo cult space program in that lull after Apollo and Skylab. The flying car future may be a cliché with the older Boom, but the model rocket catalogs and the Scholastic science rags gave this younger Boomer a future vision of space shuttles, space stations, power sats, and computers everywhere in all their spinning reel and blinken lights glory.
A funny thing happened on the way to turning the big six-oh today….
This little bastard was born unfashionably late in the Baby Boom. Ike was a lame duck and JFK was the President elect. I was adopted by pig farmers and grew up in the Loess Hills of Iowa, an area that has since devolved into the Steven King district of Trumpland. All with the fat tire ATC, tractors, chore pickup, and the family pets that included at least one horse. The experience built character, wearing many hats, doing it yourself, and skills like welding and fabrication and wrench banging. I did quite a few mechanical things during the long years in limbo growing up and also after dropping out of college. I tinkered with a ’58 Chevy chore pickup, revived a ’47 Studebaker Champion, and had a misadventure with a ’60 Galaxie turned dune buggy. I revived a dead battery charger with parts salvaged from junk alternators. I converted a neighbor’s ‘50s golf cart over to hand controls. I helped swap a Buick turbo V6 into a ‘40s Willys Jeep pickup. I worked up a way to patch a Walkman knockoff into the tube radio in the ’47 Champion. I welded a new bottom in a silage wagon while I almost was standing on my head on an auger. I was involved in a cousin’s enduro and demo derby exploits. Who’s better to do Dieselpunk before it had a name than somebody who got grease up to their elbows in Dad’s One-Ninety XT at Grandpa’s Allis-Chalmers dealership?
I’m glad that I grew up with machinery and already had a lot of experience when I’m working on Siemens-Electrocom GmbH’s finest mail sorters. If I stop to think about it, I’m glad that it’s indoors and no dirtier than paper chaff instead of fighting some combine, silage wagon, or manure spreader in a blizzard or mud.
My educational experience is quite mixed. I survived being teacher’s unfavorite in a dysfunctional rural school that was failing enough to bring the Nation at Risk report upon it, the Iowa Open Enrollment Law upon it, and kept failing until the place was put out of its misery with the district finally going through resolution. The nadir was a psycho bat junior high homeroom teacher that tried to bully a lot of individuality and creativity out of me. Despite that, I created enough of a scrapheap of juvenilia to salvage ideas for the rest of my life. I ended up dropping out of Iowa State twice, once in their engineering program and once from their art program. My folks asked how somebody mechanically or artistically inclined can do badly. I wish that instead of choking up like a dumb kid, that I had the insight that I had decades later to ask them, in just how many freshman and junior classes could I flex those skills? Nearly everything was hands off with too much written, and graded with unfavoritism because I was just so unlike those younger, prettier, preppie brown-nosed versions of the professor. Making college even more miserable was peer rejection from the Sci-Fi and New Wave cliques. You’re not allowed into fandom unless you were already in fandom coming from a better school or scene somewhere else and knew the in-clique in-jokes. I did later get an Associates in Electronics from Iowa Western Community College and a Certificate in Commercial Art from the long gone Omaha UTI. I was the standout student at the UTI art program and ended up doing their flyers. I’ve recently taken some night courses in auto body at Metro Community College.
I did help Pat Moriarity and DailyKos’ own Quarkstomper get started while I was at ISU. I’d like to think that I made a big difference on their lives, but I don’t know if I can honestly say so.
I created what I call the Flexia Projects after the closest thing to a breakout character, Flexia Bast, a leonine, big, beefy, busty battle babe. The first were two versions were of a Small Press Comic called Captain Saucer. The series was vaguely like Johnny Bravo meets Futurama with Atompunk down to the peacock pompadours, the Cyclops babes, and chrome trefoils before any of that stuff existed. Fanboy, the one that was a funny appliance, was a filler comic, mocking what is now called “fan dumb” before you could do that in polite company. Captain Saucer ran for many issues through the middle half of the ‘80s and had Indie Comics aspirations when the Indie Boom and Glut were going on. I’m mad at myself for having a blind eye to some herky-jerky face and figure drawing and writing that could have fixed back in the ‘80s. I’m sore at ‘80s and ‘90s fandom and prodom using that roughness for too easy toxic gatekeeping, instead of lending a friendly hand to fix things. Rowdy Atompunk wasn’t eye to eye with the mellow no nukes hippies that dominated fandom and prodom in the Reagan-Bush era. A reboot called InterStellar OverDrive came after a rough year and a half (the Farm crisis running too long, my three remaining grandparents dying, etc.) capped off with bad experience in and around the ’87 Chicago Comics Con. It was named after a Camper Van Beethoven cover of a Pink Floyd song on a mix tape that Pat Moriarity sent me. The idea with ISOD was that I’d move away from writing these as a parody broad enough to embarrass Alfred E. Newman or Li’l Abner because of low self esteem issues. It was once an A+ college journalism project. My attempted Indie version flunked in the direct market with schadenfreude from the Des Moines fanboys to Capital City distributers. I lost money, so laugh it up! The lost ISOD revival was the first go-around with Rip Off Press. It originally had Greg Hyland for the art, but he dropped out when he got a break for his own Lethargic Lad. The next guy missed two deadlines for getting art in. The whole thing too ran to long and came out of my hide ending with what Dr. Olweus calls a mobbing (a socially manipulative bully turning a group against a person) that nuked my reputation in an already overly cliquish regional fandom. I all but dropped out of regional fandom save a couple of connections because of that. Be glad that things didn’t get messier. The second ISOD go around was the first Rip Off Press book that was cancelled due to lack of sales despite the company believing in it enough to have a five issue sell-though guarantee. It was a victim of the Heroes World crunch. I wrote a diary about it here. Some kind Kossack just so kindly broke all the jpegs…. Shon Howell was going to have a special bad girl version of ISOD#1, that had early Steampunk down to that brass curlicue laptop in 1996, slated to be in A-Bomb #18. Higher ups at Antarctic Press cancelled the series at #16. Three stillborn revivals came after that. Image said to resubmit in six months. I did and heard nothing back. The third revival was a casually of 9/11. The ISOD continuity is always being fiddled with. Flexia is now Chief Security Officer of the L4 Space Station with three children in tow. The series center has shifted to Revellia, Flexia’s fatter frumpier teenie bopper daughter. Captain Saucer got bifurcated into its own different wackier and denser reboot thing with a 99.726201% turnover in cast, but with quite a few suspiciously similar substitutes among the main characters
I have my other projects. I have a back burner project called Malevoland. It’s a roommate comedy where the orcs and ogres are the protagonists. The elves and usual good guys are deranged crusaders interrupting our protagonists’ lives when they aren’t on dungeon crawls. My other gem project is Sci-Fi Guy!, which, of course, takes place in the suburbs of Iowa during the Disco era. It’s a mash up of a nostalgic slice of life and the fan fic premise with Merv, a Science Fiction nerd going on Science Fiction Adventures with Maggie, his tomboy BFF, Prothee, a home brew robot companion, Tom, a time traveling catgirl, and Xerkibub J. Spage, a rowdy little green man with a hotwired spaceship. I did it as a web comic for a hundred-plus pages until I burned out with no commercial recognition coming. I have The Inventer & Igor, which is like Jay Ward’s Blackadder meets Green Acres in the Loess Hills. It features Carl B. Rettor aka: the Inventer, a compulsive curmudgeon, Ben “Igor” Turrie, his big dumb friend, Gears, his mindless talking pig, genus: Soowee Generis, and Dizzy Timing, a crazy girl to knock things off kilter. I’m currently working up the animatic that I should have gotten done five or so years ago. I all but given up on commercial aspirations, but I hope to keep drawing as long as the eyes and fingers hold up enough.
I survived the farm crisis. Fortunately there was no real hardship, but there were a few tight years and scary times and a reason that regency poverty is sometimes a minor theme. This was big time of cognitive dissonance. I was in hard times and a dried up job market during the supposed “Unprecedented Prosperity”. I was unpublished and supposedly untalented, unskilled, unemployed and unemployable with no future despite doing grunt work to fabrication and repair up to hobby level electronics repair. And it wasn’t much fun being stuck on the farm missing all those hopping Indie Comic and Indie Music scenes that were happening hundreds of miles away somewhere else. Dad had an uncommon amount of common sense and somehow managed to come out ahead after it was all over.
My amateur opinion is that the Democrats and Left did a few choking on stupid pills level mistakes in the ‘80s and ’90s. A big one was a lack of rural outreach, leveraging feelings of betrayal during the “Keep the gain, export the farmers” days. The Left’s neglect and the Right’s talk radio has since pushed things incorrigibly into the Red. The other mistakes were not standing up for domestic manufacturing and its blue collar workers and the lack of outreach because of older Boomer arrogance to the downwardly mobile Generation Jones and Generation X .
I had a once promising rocket company. I got the Estes Alpha III starter kit for my 13th birthday. I discovered Centuri and AVI Astroport mail order. I flew the rockets through the middle ‘70s until cars and other life sidetracked me. Nearly two decades later, I had a year of dreams about getting back into the hobby. I got out the old kits and start flying again in the summer of ’94. There was boom of people getting back into the hobby then. I started my company. A guy who was ex-Estes was impressed enough to be a co-conspirator. Some of this was to fill in the vacuum of Estes going through their ‘90s dork age. Some of this was wanting to be Centuri Junior. I started out making launch pads, but moved into kits. I thought I had a big break with Fun Rockets, but the alpha partner made a big cheesy foam bad decision and brought everything down. It’s amazing what I could have had. If things played out differently the world could have had a bunch of technically interesting and fantasy kits, and the company would have probably branched into RC pure flight planes, featuring the purest of all: flying wings. People are making clones of Tangents, Swingers, and sometimes Zoomies and Silver Hawks 20 years later. I still leisurely fly. I’m digging the latest incarnation of the Estes AstroCam.
I have my other bragging rights and other misadventures. I was engaged for a while in the middle ‘80s. It fell through. Yes, there are a few little things that I would have done differently. I was a “bowl jumper”, fixing steam generators for the Westinghouse Nuclear Support Division for a while. I got some robot training with the SM-10 and ROSA. I got inside of the containment vessel, aka: BRT for Big Round Thing. Who’s better to do Atompunk than somebody who has robot training and is almost radioactive?
I wrote a play called “Sisyphus Rock ‘n’ Roll” derived from an old InterStellar OverDrive script. The play flirted with being produced by the IWCC drama club. I did cartoons and typesetting for Timber Ridge Outdoor and Adventure Magazine. Some of the cartoons were swiped without permission for one of Bryon Godbersen’s Airshow flyers.
I had a job like assembling tractor radios and running an automated pneumatic turret press in a factory. I did computer paste up at a label company on their Camex Breeze system. I learned the system faster than anyone before, but was screwed by office politics. I finally settled in for the middle half of the ‘90s doing paste up at a place that printed majority of the thermograph (raised textured ink) business cards in Omaha. I was became the best paste up guy they ever had and maybe one of the best in Omaha. I was the first one from my old hometown to get a website up on running on July 4, 1996. That night I lived out a kiddie fantasy of seeing a literal car trunk of fireworks set off at a Tripoli Prefecture party. That early website got me a career playing computer and internet expert at the phone company in my old home town. I even owned a house up there for a while. That career ended after a year and a half when an absentee company up north bought out the place. I alternated between freelancing and having a job with Dugan Brothers, an early Internet shop that was nicknamed “Fredrick’s of Iowa”. I had a paste up job at a county seat newspaper at the next county over. The place was dysfunctional enough that Gannet, the parent company of the parent company sent in a corporate troubleshooter in from the big city. I had issues with various “Karens” in HR getting jerky over somebody that they pegged as a Napoleon Dynamite archetype acing their technical aptitude tests. That made me wonder back with dealing with hippies running the Indie Boom. I worked at Carly’s computers. The place was Compaq when I started and HP when I left. I was there through XP dropping, 9/11, the plant closing, and other disasters.
The best bragging right that doesn’t involve Flexia and friends is dominating the “Unpassable Test”. The old USPS ET-09 electronics aptitude test supposedly flunks out whole rooms of people unable to crack a passing 70%. Most passing grades are in the low 70s, or in the low 80s with the 10point veteran bonus. This chicken civilian scored a 90.9. I’ve found as much as a place in life as ever being an electronic technician for the Post Office for almost 16 years. I bought a house and have enough left over for frivolous things like 3D printers, model rockets, and Studebakers.
I have a love for all things Studebaker. First off, obviously, they’re “the bestest car that they don’t make no more!” I was smitten by the bullet-nose that looks like a spaceship to an overly excitable eight year old. It introduced me to the idea of how something could be both old and futuristic at the same time and to the design styles Deco and Googie. It was the first inspiration of a few of why I was Atompunk and Dieselpunk before that stuff had a name. I picked up a ‘47 Champion the body style predecessor of the bullet-nose, as a teen and revived it. There are a lot of things that I would have done differently, but I was inexperienced and the adult advice wasn’t always the best. I picked up a 1941 Commander Land Cruiser with the engine head in the back seat. I got the last big six flathead head gasket in Big A’s computerized inventory and got it running. Then I got sidetracked. I picked up a borderline survivor or driver ’57 Silver Hawk, imagine a pony car from the age of fins, when I worked at the phone company. I thought that I had a great barter with a body man, with exchanging a parts F-150 for fixing up the Hawk. He let it rot for years, promising to get to it soon, before kicking it and me off his property. How can he conscientiously let a fine and rare machine like that rot? I picked up a basket-case ‘51 Commander Starlight, the jackpot of Googie futuristic with the bullet-nose and the wraparound rear window. I bought a survivor/driver 1963 ¾ton Champ because it was oddly a near ringer for the “Daisy Mae”, aka.: “Stu Bludebaker” pickup in Sci Fi Guy! My Dodge pickup with 5.9 V8 has the bragging rights of towing it over the Grand Tetons. I finally got a great survivor ’51 Commander Land Cruiser with only 47,000 miles on it. Plus I have a non Studebaker project to get back to with Wee Beastie. It’s a ’79 porthole Pinto with world class 5speed and an engine that’s internally SVO and externally XR4Ti. I’d like to make it all SVO. I’m going to start really pushing on fixing up these now, especially picking up the pieces of the Hawk, now that I’m 60 in what time I have left. I hope to retire if I inherit half a farm and work on them all day.
I did have a one-time windfall in 1984 and scoped out the Coast for a move out there that I had daydreamed out loud about, but never could pull off. I did the tourist shtick of seeing Disneyland, the Universal Studios tour, Sea World, dipping the toes in the Pacific, walking over the bridge to Tijuana, and even eating at the San Ysidro McDonald’s two weeks before the mass shooting. I hung with Gary Panter, once at his place and once at the ’84 San Diego Comics Con back when it was still a niche dealie. Both times he tried to get me together with his buddy Matt Groening, back in his fugly bunnies days. Mr. Groening couldn’t make it either time. I could kick myself for being a timid lamer and not following through by myself.
In late spring of ’89, I got together with Pat Moriarity outside of Greenfield, Iowa. He was ¾ way through a project called Popcorn Pimps. I was ¾ through InterStellar OverDrive #3, the Cseworld romp. He didn’t think that he could make it in comics. I was sure that I would. Pat went on to be a Seattle scenester, Rolling Stone’s Hot Cartoonist of 1996, Golden Tooney winner, giant of alternative press, and all sorts of other acclaim. I’m fixing mail-sorting machines in Omaha….