The Blue & Gold

Before middle schools we had junior high schools, grades 7-9. In Olympia there were two junior high schools, Washington and Jefferson. I started out in Washington but partway through my academic journey there they built a new junior high to absorb us Boomers. It was called Reeves Junior High. It was named in honor of Mr. Reeves, my grade school principal at Roosevelt Elementary. He was a nice man who lived a block away from me.

Reeves was the school for the tough, working class kids. It was not an easy place to learn from the classroom due to the anarchy. All of our lessons came from elsewhere.

The school newspaper was called The Blue & Gold (school colors) and was run off on a mimeograph. I have a scattered few issues from the first year. Many of my cartoons failed to reproduce to the point where they could not be read, but I found a few I could post here.

It was at Reeves that I first learned the power of cartooning in politics. The Olympia Mayor, Tom Allen, wanted to turn the downtown Sylvester Park into a parking garage. Even though I was a teenager, I met with him to state why this was wrong, and he treated me like a teenager. That is to say, I was brushed off and ridiculed by him as an "environmentalist." (The term "treehugger" had not been invented yet and The Evergreen State College had not surfaced in Oly at this time, so we were still living in an extension of the 1950s in Olympia). So I drew a bunch of cartoons about "Tommy Treecut" for the Blue and Gold. The principal, Ted Wynstra, called my parents to complain, saying Tom Allen was a friend of his, and my Mother responded by saying, so what? The kid has a right to free expression.

Yes! As I have stated before in this blog, I was very fortunate in the parental department.

And Tom Allen was later nailed in some scandal involving self-interest in the construction of the public library and left office under a deserved dark cloud. 

Anyway, part of digging into that mimeo gel to produce those cartoons meant I had to sit in the school office area. I quickly noticed that the central microphone for the school announcements was in the same room, as well as the stack of notices waiting to be read. So I started writing bogus notices and slipping them into the stack. I wonder how many people showed up for fake meetings?

Ain't I a stinker?

So, here are some of the cartoons I drew during that era, 1969-1970:

Norman, the Wonder Prune was regular character I used

Remember, the Moon landing was new thing in 1969!

 This cover was drawn by our art teacher, "Snuffy" Jenkins.

He died fairly young, only a few years after he drew this.

He was a squat, square, straight-talking guy who loved teaching.

This was the kind of Cold War paranoia nonsense we Boomers could not get away from, even in a junior high newspaper!

Gimmie Comics # 1

1st edition, June 1973, McCleary, Washington, 100 copies, white cover, 10 legal size leaves.

2nd edition, September 1982, Olympia, Washington, 25 copies, blue cover, digest size.

3rd edition, 1984, Gilbert, Minnesota, HSC, 25 copies, white cover, digest size.

Print-on-demand reprint edition, 1994, digest size.

1st Danger Room Reprint edition, July 2005, 5 copies, green cover, digest size.

I count this as my first underground influenced comic. The initial edition was hand cranked from a mimeograph. A few copies were in comic shops in Aberdeen and Tacoma, Washington. The Tacoma shop asked me what the heck I thought I was doing. A few of these were sold or given away before I destroyed the remaining 80 copies. So theoretically there are 20 copies out there in the world.

I don't even own a copy of the 1st edition, but my old friend Rex Munger lent me his copy many years later and I copied it, retraced some of the faint lines and reissued the thing with an intro. The 2005 edition has a rewritten introduction.

The graphics were carved into that gummy mimeo master with a stylus. Although not exactly a stellar work, you can see I was already interested in porcupines. There's the obligatory drawing of then-President Nixon as a Nazi. The victim in the New Hampshire pancakes page is a self-portrait. Actually, within a few years I actually was in a New Hampshire diner and deliberately ordered pancakes for breakfast. The artist on the last page is also a self-portrait. Apparently I had cut my hair short by the time I reached the end.