that usual gang
of idiots – Mad would not
be Mad without you

Al Jaffee has died.

The New York Times reports that:

Al Jaffee, a cartoonist who folded in when the trend in magazine publishing was to fold out, thereby creating one of Mad magazine’s most recognizable and enduring features, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 102.

“I have this idea,” he recalled telling them. “I think it’s a funny idea, but I know you’re not going to buy it. But I’m going to show it to you anyway. And you’re not going to buy it because it mutilates the magazine.”

The men did buy it, and then asked for more, and the inside back cover quickly became Mr. Jaffee’s turf. Although other regular Mad features changed artists over the years, no one but Mr. Jaffee drew a fold-in for 55 years.

Anyone my age knows Mad Magazine.

Odd little jokes and word play that I first read in Mad still come to my mind on a regular basis.

I am not sure of who bought them in my family.

There was a built in cupboard with three drawers in our family room and that was where all our comic books were stored.

The Mad Magazines also got tossed in there.

The thing was, I never knew where they came from or who bought them.

But there they where.

And always, ALWAYS, someone had already folded the fold in.

Then when I was in Junior High, I happened to be in Kay’s Drugstore on the North End (NOTE: Not the North East side as some folks thought was implied by the NE on the street signs – the NE stood for North End) of Grand Rapids, Michigan where I grew up.

I happened to be in Kay’s Drugstore with money in my pocket.

I must have been sent up to the Avenue (as Plainfield Ave was called) to get my hair cut at Dick’s Barbershop.

If you were a boy my age and you lived on the North End of Grand Rapids, you got your hair cut at Dick’s Barbershop.

That meant we all looked the same in our school pictures.

That also meant that when you got to Dick’s you stood outside until it looked like Dick or Arnold had a free chair,

If you didn’t wait and just walked right in you might end up in Nick’s chair.

Nick, AKA ‘Nick the Butcher’, had this bad habit of catching his razor on that bony part behind your ear.

“Whup,” he would say, “might have nicked you there.”

If was bad enough you would get Band-Aid stuck on your head under your ear lobe.

You would see these Band-Aids under other kids ears at school and point and laugh and say “Nick the Butcher got you.”

But I digress.

I must have been sent to get my hair cut and had some change left over so I could go to Kay’s and get a candy bar or something.

Instead I looked at the comics and Mad Magazine.

I still remember how it felt when I figured out I had enough money to buy my own copy of Mad.

It felt great and at the same time, almost wrong.

It wasn’t that Mad Magazine was banned in our house or anything like.

But it was … off color … shall we say.

I am not sure why I felt it was wrong but I do remember feeling that my Mom would not be happy if I came home with it.

So I made the decision that Mom just wouldn’t know.

I grabbed a copy and went to the counter to pay feeling both good and bad and very grown up.

It came to me that who ever it was at Kay’s who was working at the cash register and would check me out would most likely know who I was and if not WHO I was, would know I was a Hoffman and the fact that I bought a copy of Mad Magazine might be mentioned to my Mom the next time she came in.

I quickly rationalized that being from a family of 11 kids, the chances were good that while my family would be known, I would escape in the anonymity of being the 8th kid and I could live with those chances.

I got my copy of Mad and read it all the way home.

When I got home, I put the Mad flat under my sweater, walked in the house and yelled, I’M HOME.

My Mom was in the kitchen (she was usually in the kitchen – in the days when all of us were living at home, 6 o’clock dinner time preparations started with 2 dozen pork chops around 4pm) and she told me to stop and turn around.

Busted! I thought but then she just complimented me on my hair cut.

Until the hippy era, I had to same hair cut which was universally known as a ‘Princeton’ or a buzz cut with bangs.

I pretty much looked the same from 1964 to 1972 except that I got glasses.

I said thanks and walked as innocently as I could through the kitchen to my room.

I walked so innocently that had my Mom been watching she would known I was up to something but she turned her back and I made it downstairs.

In my room, I closed the door and slipped the Mad Magazine out from under my sweater.

I sat on my bed with extreme satisfaction and did a ‘first time’ back page fold-in for the first time.

BOY HOWDY but did I feel like something!

There then was the rub,

How did I brag about this to my brothers without revealing that I had brought a Mad Magazine home?

As much as I wanted to tell everyone what I did, I made the decision that not getting caught was better than showing off.

I stayed in my room and read Mad Magazine.

Dinner time came and I hid the magazine under my bed.

After dinner I went a back to my room and read through the Mad version of the movie the Guns of Navarone.

By bedtime I had finished every page, panel and joke including all the Sergio Aragones Marginals.

The next morning presented the problem of what to do with the magazine.

I had thought that if I could smuggle it upstairs into the comic book drawer I would be safe.

But that meant sharing it with my brothers and I felt, it was MY copy.

I kinda made my bed, which I never did, and slid the magazine under the pillow and pulled the covers up over the pillow and tucked it in.

That was safe and sound for me.

That afternoon I got home from school.

I’M HOME, I yelled as I came in as any of my brothers and sisters would have yelled.

My Mom poked her had out of the laundry room (which is where she was if she wasn’t in the kitchen) to say hello and ask about my day and as I stood talking with her I looked at the laundry piled up and saw that it was all bedding from the boys rooms.

Mom just kept talking about this and that as my stomach dropped into my shoes.

She want back to her laundry and I walked into the kitchen and made noise getting some cookies and when enough time had passed I ran down to my room.

My bed had been remade with clean sheets and blankets.

I stood for a minute just looking.

Without moving into the room, I stood and looked at my desk and the bureau and the floor of the room.

Nothing.

Hoping beyond hope, I laid on the floor and looked under the bed.

Maybe when my Mom made the bed, the Mad Magazine had fallen out and landed, undetected, under the bed.

Nope.

I stood up.

I reached out and raised up my pillow.

There under the pillow, tucked under the blanket was my Mad Magazine.

Al Jaffee has died.

I remember him with very fond memories.

Some of which are about his stuff inside Mad magazine.

call it a weapon
it’s something used to injure
defeat or destroy

Oh, how I want to ignore the world and how I want to comment on words and word play and the like but the world keeps knocking down my door and takes over my mind so that I have to comment on the world with words or go crazy.

My brother Bobby was one of the last group of young American men to be welcomed into serving their country through something known as selective service or, more simply, the Draft.

As I understand it, every American male got a draft number assigned by their birthday.

I am not sure how often it happened that numbers were reissued but I clearly remember a night when I was about 6 or 7 that we all watched TV as draft numbers were selected.

In a big bowl were 365 small identical plastic containers.

In each container was a piece of paper with a month and day.

The date in that first container that was opened got the draft number of 1.

Say that that container just opened had the date July 17th on it, that meant that every year, when the 1st draft class was called up, all those young men who were 18 years old on July 17 should consider themselves drafted.

As the US Army needed men that year, more and more draft numbers and draft classes would be called up.

Any number lower than 50, you could plan on being in the US Army for at least 2 years.

50 to 100, well, things didn’t look too good for you either.

Above 100, you could take a breath.

Above 200 you could relax.

Bobby sat there and watched, waiting for October 6th to show up.

Bobby got a number in the ’80s.

He sat in a chair and stared at the TV.

“Look at that! Look at that!“, he said again and again.

Bobby turned 18 in 1968 but was enrolled in College and got deferments.

In the fall of 1972, after graduation from Western Michigan University, he got a letter of greetings from Richard Nixon, the President of the United States that informed him that his presence at Fort Knox, Kentucky was required.

He would spend that Thanksgiving season at Fort Knox.

And on December 28, 1972, the draft was suspended by that same President Nixon.

Myself, I thought it was kind of cool.

I was 12 and the idea that my brother got to go play army with all his buddies was okay with me.

We got regular letters and the occasional phone call.

I ate it all up.

He sent his score sheet from the rifle range.

He described testing gas masks and what it was like when you had to take off your mask.

He described eating Thanksgiving Dinner in an Army mess hall with Drill Sergeants yelling MOVE IT, MOVE IT, EAT, EAT, EAT!

He described leaning to throw a hand grenade.

Bobby was a pretty good ball player and had a decent arm.

He told how he was handed a grenade by his Sergeant and shown how to pull the pin then told to put the grenade on his ear to hear the timer.

Then he was told to throw it.

Not sure how much more incentive anyone needs to throw something than to hold a ticking grenade to your ear and Bobby got rid of it as quick and as hard as he could.

There was a pause, then an explosion far down the grenade range.

“Wow!”, said his Sergeant.

“Great throw!”

Bobby taught us some of the songs they sang on marching.

Some of the cadences.

He would rattle of a line or two.

“They say that in the army, the clothes are mighty fine. Both me and my buddy can fit into mine.“

Then he stop and say, “The next words get a little dirty.”

One thing that really stuck with me was that he got to use an M-16.

He was always careful to refer to it as a weapon.

That was part of the training.

It was a weapon.

It was a weapon, not a gun.

Bobby said that if the Sergeant heard you refer to your weapon as a gun, it was 25 pushups.

Twenty five pushups with your weapon on the floor under your hands.

After each pushup, you had to recite, “I am sorry I called you a gun, Weapon!”

That got me to thinking about words and word use.

It is not a gun.

It is a weapon.

A weapon as described by the online Merriam-Webster is something (such as a club, knife, or gun) used to injure, defeat, or destroy.

Injure.

Defeat.

Destroy.

I can’t do much about the nations obsession with weapons.

I can’t stop it.

But I can start using the right word.

It is a weapon.

Something used to injure, defeat, or destroy.

Not a gun.