Buster Brown and Me-1965

 

One of the very first comic strip characters with staying power was Richard Felton Outcault's Buster Brown, seen here with his dog, Tige. Buster was created way back in 1902 and while the strips faded after a couple decades or so, a 1904 alliance with the Brown Shoe Company kept the characters in the public eye. 

By the time I came along in 1959, Buster was seen in print ads like the above (with famous little person Jerry Maren as Buster), in TV commercials, and in specialty comic books like the ones below. They weren't newsstand comics at all, but rather were distributed through various shoe stores carrying Buster Brown Shoes. 

In 1965, I was in Kindergarten and toward the end of the school year, our class put on a play--my first acting experience (outside of one line in a Christmas pageant). The play was apparently a standard one in Kindergarten circles and was based on a 1929 song entitled "The Wedding of the Painted Dolls."

 One of the song lyrics was: 

"It’s a holiday, today’s the wedding of the painted doll

It’s a jolly day, the news is spreading all around the hall
Red Riding Hood and Buster Brown
The jumping jack jumped into town
From far and near they’re coming here"

Me, I was cast as Buster Brown, a character I only knew at the time from shoe commercials. My mother somehow got hold of a brown Little Lord Fauntleroy-style outfit which was close to Buster's traditional look. I felt silly in it but I refused to wear a blond wig to complete the effect!

I've often wondered what I might have looked like had I gone whole Buster and today, thanks to ubiquitous AI, we have an idea.

 

Booksteve Bookseller Stories--Weird Books and the FBI

The weirdest books I ever saw come through our stores were a series of German photography books that featured real corpses posed in pleasant little tableaus, often depicting scenes from fairy tales as I recall. Surreal, but truly shocking and disgusting. I just wrote a few descriptions from memory but deleted them to spare you the images in your head. As bad as you might think they were, they were worse. Some guy special-ordered one and bought it. That’s when we found out there was an entire series of them and he ordered the rest, one by one. Years later, someone was arrested in Cincinnati for attempting to do that exact same type of photography in the City Morgue. I’ve always wondered…

Another WTF volume was a $60 coffee table photo book we stocked at Barnes and Noble which featured nothing but crystal clear closeup color car crash photos, complete with fresh bloody corpses. Presumably, these were police photos. How anyone got permission to publish them like they were flower arrangements or something is beyond me. 

It was always company policy that we could never even order the infamous TURNER DIARIES book but we did find ourselves often ordering THE ANARCHIST COOKBOOK for customers. For those unfamiliar with it, here is a description from Wikipedia: “The Anarchist Cookbook, first published in 1971, is a book that contains instructions for the manufacture of explosives, rudimentary telecommunications phreaking devices, and related weapons, as well as instructions for home manufacturing of illicit drugs, including LSD.” As I recall, It also has an actual recipe for marijuana meatballs. 

Anyway, company policy was that it’s not our business what anyone wants to read. Some of those ordering the book were police officers, who needed it for work. Others—like most of us booksellers—were likely curious as to what all the fuss was about. The FBI, however, were curious for completely different reasons. 

One day in the early 1990s—pre-Patriot Act—at the Florence Mall store, two Men-in-Black-style FBI men, complete with dark glasses indoors, asked to speak to the Manager. Brenda was off. I told them I was the MOD. They calmly but forcefully demanded to see all of our records with names and addresses of every customer who had ever ordered THE ANARCHIST COOKBOOK. I began sweating and shaking and stammered out an explanation that I couldn’t do that as company policy was that customers had the right to order whatever they wanted as long as it was not in and of itself illegal. 

They began to guilt me, bringing up various then-recent bombings on the national scene and quoting me statistics on the loss of life. I tried to tell them that we’ve had police officers order the book to help find out about how to stop such things. They then said they wanted those police officers’ names. 

I was scared half to death. On the one hand, they were right that people who ordered bomb-making books might seriously be planning to make bombs. On the other hand I was a strong believer in the right to read anything you please, for whatever reason, and that the government didn’t have the right to demand that information.

I gave them the phone number for Waldenbooks’ Legal Department and they left, saying they would return with a court order for the info they wanted.

After they left, I was quickly on the phone with the Legal Department myself, where I was thanked for standing up to them. The Legal Department said that they were likely phishing (although that term was not yet in widespread use) and, without any specific current need for those names and addresses, would probably not have been able to get a warrant or a court order. I think I hid in the back room most of the rest of that day. We never head from them again regarding THE ANARCHIST COOKBOOK although it was later added and then dropped from the Do Not Special Order list several times 

Booksteve's Bookseller Stories--Demoting Myself

BY REQUEST, HERE'S MORE FROM MY BOOKSTORE MEMOIRS.

In 1986, our District Manager gave us a form to fill out about our career aspirations. As Assistant Manager at the Crestview Hills store, I wrote that I hoped to someday get my own store. Then the District Manager’s husband sadly developed a brain tumor and she was, of course, distracted. She later told me that this was why I was passed over for promotion when a few months later my manager, Brenda, was given the much more successful nearby Florence Mall store.

As you might imagine, I was NOT happy.
 
This situation was made worse with the arrival of a new manager to take over my store. Let’s call him “Bob.” Bob was short and had a huge, almost fake-looking mustache and smelled of cigarettes all the time. In time, he would come to leave a lit cigarette burning in an ashtray just inside the door to the stockroom so he could slip back there and sneak puffs constantly.

Bob was also a massive control freak. On day one, he said he was not going to make any major changes right away. On day two, he handed me a legal pad page filled with changes he wanted implemented immediately.

The one change I remember: Company policy said that all cash had to be face up in the cash drawer. Makes sense. Bob decided that he wanted all COINS face up as well. At all times. I assumed that was a joke, but no. The other employees asked me to talk to him. I did. He said MORE changes would be coming soon.

With Brenda, I could usually talk her into seeing things my way if I felt it was important enough and pushed hard enough. With Bob, he took away more and more of my power as assistant manager and treated me just like another bookseller.

Speaking of other booksellers, most of them quit in fairly short succession, to be replaced by his hires, the most forgettable—and forgotten—employees I ever worked with.

A few of our regular customers complained to me about Bob, too. Bob was also gay and very effeminate and that (and worse, the cigarette smell) didn’t sit well with some of our older regulars who missed Brenda and the more knowledgeable booksellers she had hired.

The next time the District Manager came in, she asked how things were working out between Bob and myself and I let loose about my feelings toward him as a manager and asked her flat out why I was passed over. What had I done wrong? She told me that the form I had filled out never said I wanted to be promoted. I told her it did. She happened to have those forms in her briefcase and took a look, after which she profoundly apologized to me. Damage done, though. I was stuck. But not for long.

I didn’t drive then so I took the bus in to work every day. Sometimes on the bus I’d run into a guy named Mike whom I had known for years. Mike had gotten a job as a full-time bookseller at the Florence Mall Waldenbooks so he was working there with Brenda but not getting along with her, while I was feeling increasingly stuck and depressed with Bob. One day, Mike told me he was turning in his notice.

About a week later, I decided when I got off work one day to take the bus out and see a movie at the Florence Cinemas. The bus stopped at Florence Mall so I dropped in to see Brenda for the first time since she’d left. She was in the middle of interviews to find a replacement for Mike but she told me she wasn’t finding any good candidates. After our brief visit, I went on to the movie… but a plan formulated in my head.

The District Manager said she felt like she owed me, so she, and Brenda, agreed to go along with my idea. I demoted myself and transferred over to the Florence Mall store. There, as just a bookseller, I had less responsibility…but more money! Turned out that since the Florence Mall store was a larger and much more successful store than the dead-end mall I was coming from, the pay was higher! Considerably higher!

 

Luckily, I got along well with Paula, who was then Brenda’s AM. In fact, Paula treated me almost as a second assistant and would often ask my advice.

Within a few years, Paula was promoted to manager of her own store—ironically the Crestview Hills store I had come from! At that time, I was once again promoted to Brenda’s assistant manager. In all, I spent nearly nine pretty happy and successful years at that store, the highlight of which was meeting and working with Rene, the woman destined to be my bride.

Oh, and Bob? I worked with him once more, at a different location, just to help out one day when somebody quit. I heard later that he was fired from the company for theft.