DAYS OF GRIMLOCK, ELVIS PRESLEY
AND ROY THOMAS
BY
"RASCALLY" ROY THOMAS
AND
JOHN "THE MEGO STRETCH HULK" CIMINO
I always seem to get asked a lot about my relationship with comic legend Roy Thomas, and while I am his full-time manager and agent, we are really close friends and brothers at heart because we have a lot in common. First off, we were both former school teachers and both HATED it and wanted to move into the world of comics. Roy obviously became one of the most important icons in the history of the medium; co-creating some of the most iconic characters in comics such as Wolverine, Carol Danvers and Ghost Rider. I didn't have his talent, but did pretty good in the industry myself by being a regular contributor to a bunch of comic magazines from TwoMorrows Publishing and in the process, opening a bunch of opportunities for my daughter Bryn, who has incredible talent (Roy's words, not mine). Her magnificent story can be read at this link: "Waltham eighth grader gets artwork published in national comics magazine." And her cute interview for the highly respected WORD BALLOON podcast can be heard here: Paul Kupperberg DC Bronze Age Revisited-Bryn Cimino Welcome to Comics. But before either Roy or myself got into the teaching field we were both trying our luck in the music arena.
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| My daughter, Bryn Cimino and Roy Thomas |
For 10 years (1993-2003), I was the singer in a underground hardcore band called GRIMLOCK and got pretty successful putting out a good body of work during those years; a demo cassette, a 7" record and three albums (A big shout-out goes out to KNIVES OUT RECORDS for currently re-releasing our discography and merchandise and making us bigger and more popular than we've ever been). Roy was always impressed with the success I had in music and showed his support by buying our albums and shirts. He even posed for a picture with one of my albums and the picture was so good that it will be available as a special limited insert card in the re-release of our CRUSHER album coming in late 2019 (check the KNIVES OUT RECORDS page for details). But I impressed Roy because being a hardcore Elvis Presley fan since the '50s and starting up a few bands himself, Roy's REAL dream was to be a rock n' roll star touring the world. Even more so than writing comic-books (yup, you heard that right). While I wanted to be a comic-book star like he was, rather than in music. This weird dynamic gave us a very interesting bond that has blossomed into a true friendship.
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That's me riding the crowds at the Tower Theater in Salt Lake City, UT in 1998
My "king of kings" shot at the Worcester Palladium in Worcester, MA. in 2003
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| Roy Thomas holding the GRIMLOCK CRUSHER CD showing his support in 2017. |
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But enough with my ramblings, let's
have the master himself tell you his side of the story and you'll see a side of Roy Thomas
rarely known or written about. And maybe, just maybe you'll understand why he's always wearing my damn GRIMLOCK shirts. It all started with this email:
Today I ran across this slightly expanded version of an article I wrote a couple of years back for the Jackson, Missouri, newspaper. They printed it... without payment (so I still own it)... and I had to nag them to get a copy, but I'm glad I did it... even though I'd done it largely so my mother could read it, and they hung onto it for a year before printing it, and she died in the meantime. It was meant to remember two vanished Jackson landmarks-- the long-gone Palace Theatre where I ushered, etc., for years, and the Roll-O-Fun, the skating rink that had just recently been torn down. I thought you might get a kick out if... quite a contrast, I'm sure, with your activities with GRIMLOCK.
Roy
Of Silver Screen—And Silver Skates
A pair of vanished landmarks of the Jackson that I, and an ever-decreasing number of others, remember from the 1940s through the 1960s… in my case, before I wandered off to New York and Los Angeles in search of fame and fortune (still looking!) in the comic book field and even, briefly, in the movie industry.
I read with extreme interest, over a year ago now, my old high school friend Beverly Hahs’ excellent piece on the Palace Theatre and all the worthies who worked her lobby, projection booth, aisles, and balcony before she disappeared forever, after all those years of being nestled between Ideal Grocery on the corner side and bars with names like Breezy’s and Blick’s on the other. Beverly forwarded to me the Cashbook Journal’s invitation to write my own reminiscences of the Palace, where I worked at least half a dozen years… and I was mentally gearing up to do so when my class-of-’58 fellow JHS graduate John Short mailed me a copy of its Jan. 28, 2015, edition. And there at the bottom of page 1 was an article on the demolition of the Jackson Skating Rink—or the Roll-O-Fun, as it was known back in the day.
Both theatre and roller rink loomed large in my own and others’ pasts, so I hope readers will indulge me while I dredge up my personal memories of both. For me, at least, the Roll-O-Fun sort of picked up where the Palace left off.
I’d been going to movies at the Palace since 1943-44. The first movie I recall seeing there (or anywhere) was “Tarzan’s Desert Mystery” starring Johnny Weissmuller, when I was three. The clunky giant spider at the film’s climax made such a strong impression on me that I couldn’t resist mentioning the experience to the fabled Johnny/Tarzan himself one night in 1975, when, as guests at a Texas comics convention, the two of us and Johnny’s diminutive European wife sat nursing our drinks in a hotel disco. Well, his wife and I nursed ours, but Johnny packed ’em away, probably to dull the pain he felt since a bad fall after which doctors had predicted—inaccurately—that he’d never walk again, let alone swing on vines or give out his trademark Tarzan yodel. But I digress, as is my wont.
It was around 1954 that I began working at the Palace, originally as an usher. Bill Heyde and Linton Loetje, two years ahead of me at JHS (which I began attending that year after graduating from St. Paul Lutheran School), were already employed there. Bill, the brilliant son of a greatly respected English teacher, became a particular friend and even role model of mine. Kent Wilson, son and grandson of the Palace’s owners, was on staff, as well, as his younger brother Jimmy would be later. I’m a bit hazy about who else worked there in ’54, except of course Grandpa Kent and his daughter Marian—and Howard Jaeger, the friendly but firm manager and ticket-taker—and Hugh Blackman, ensconced in the little projection booth way at the top/back of the balcony—and raspy-voiced Bertha Hartle, who seemed to have sold tickets in that front booth forever and who’d go on doing so till near the very end.
I don’t recall a lot of “hard facts” about the Palace that weren’t ably covered by Beverly… just that it contained several hundred seats (I’m told its total capacity was 550), perhaps a quarter or so of which consisted of the balcony. That balcony, for the first year or three I worked there, still had what was then called a “colored section,” up in the far right corner and set off from the rest of the balcony by a railing, the only place African-Americans (the term then was “Negroes,” of course) could be seated. When it was full—and it only had a couple of dozen seats, all of them made of wood—no more tickets could be sold to African-Americans. That section was already an awkward anachronism by the time I arrived, but it didn’t instantly die with the 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing segregated schools. It did fade away over the next few years, though; and while I’m sorry to admit that previously I’d accepted it as just “the way things are,” I don’t recall anyone on staff expressing regret when it was done away with and “Negroes” were allowed to be seated anywhere in the theatre. Nor do I recall even one unpleasant incident after the movie house was fully integrated. I’m kinda proud of the Palace, and of Jackson, for that.
As for the owners: I don’t recall a lot about the grand patriarch, “Mr. Wilson,” as he was always called, except that he was given to sitting in the theatre’s back row and watching bits of the movies—usually with an unlit cigar in his mouth. He could be gruff, but not in a nasty way. But far too soon came the night in March 1955 when we learned that he, his daughter Marian, and her sister Irene had been killed in a car wreck on a rainy night, coming back from a business trip to St. Louis.
Suddenly Marian’s three children—Marilyn, Kent, and Jimmy—were the owners of the theatre. It was soon being managed by Marilyn’s new husband, Marvin Proffer, a SEMO grad, who also took charge of the family’s other major holding, Jackson’s weekly newspaper the Missouri Cashbook, as it was then called. The Cashbook offices were on the opposite side of the street from the Palace, and up a ways. There was often friction between Marv and us employees, but a lot of that was just him being the boss and us being a bunch of teenage slackers. One of the main things I remember about Marv was that he insisted that, if we ever had to scrawl out a sign to tack up somewhere, we use the spelling “Theatre,” not “Theater.” “Nobody in the business ever spells it ‘theatre’!” he would insist. I’ve never spelled the word “theater” since, if I can help it.
The job of movie usher is a vocation all but extinct in movie theatres nowadays, and it faded out even in the Palace’s later years. One usher for the balcony, and one (or, on weekends, two—one for each aisle) downstairs… using their flashlights to help patrons to their seats and shushing the noisier patrons, mostly (but not always!) kids and teenagers. From the knuckle-dragging specimens of the latter, we’d sometimes receive unveiled death threats in response to our admonitions. The theatre could still get a bit crowded during the mid-’50s, an era when the farmers and townspeople still roamed the main streets in droves on Saturday nights… and Lord help us if a “Ma and Pa Kettle” movie was playing! Then there’d be standing room only, and we ushers would have to split up couples when singleton seats opened up here and there. There was a movie about mule-farmers—“Scudda-Hoo, Scudda-Hay,” with Lon McAllister—that drew such crowds they had to bring it back for a rare second engagement, though I think that was when I was just a kid patron, not an usher.
Homecomers [a carnival that came to town once a year, setting up its rides and attractions in the town’s main streets] was a problem, too, one late-summer week a year… with so much noise from the rides and the carnival hucksters who filled the street right in front of the Palace that the sounds often drifted inside.
My classmate Jim Sawyer was another guy who worked there by the late ’50s… there were probably others I’ll remember as soon as I’ve handed in this article. I’m told that, by the late ’50s, there was a girl or two on stuff… but I’ll have to confess that I don’t remember them. Maybe it’s because I was going steady by then.
Increasingly by the latter ’50s, I, like others, filled additional jobs at the Palace… as popcorn boy, then also as soda-and-candy seller when Marv added a soda machine and candy shelf on the opposite side of the lobby, near the water fountain, bathroom, and stairway. Later, I even sat in the front booth and sold tickets from time to time, spelling Bertha; my mother Leona Thomas had done the same thing earlier. The one thing I refused to do was learn to run the projector, as I didn’t want to be stuck in that little booth up at the back of the balcony, changing reels every twenty minutes (or seven, after a cartoon). Even if I hadn’t screwed it up (which I would have!), it would’ve ruined the magic of the movies for me. Hey, even Hugh Blackman wasn’t perfect. One night circa 1960 when I was in the audience watching “The Old Man and the Sea” based on the Hemingway novel, Spencer Tracy was wrestling with that “big fish” he’d caught—a reel change came—and suddenly there was cowboy Alan Ladd walking into a ranch house. The previous theatre showing “Old Man” had shipped one wrong reel (and not that right one) to the Palace, so while seven minutes later it was back to fishing and fighting off sharks, the handful of Jackson patrons that night never did get to view the omitted reel. Luckily, I’d seen the movie a few weeks earlier in a Cape Girardeau theatre.
One thing none of us employees liked (out of probably way too many things) was having to change the marquee and out-front posters and lobby cards when the feature changed—which was three or even four times a week in the days when the theatre was open seven days a week. We’d argue about which of us had to get up on the rickety ladder to change the lettering on the marquee. Naturally, since the top line would generally herald the star, and the bottom line the movie’s title, our favorites were shorties like “Alan Ladd” in “Shane” or “Rock Hudson” in “Giant.” Sometimes we’d have to omit a word or two from the title to squeeze things in. We went crazy on the rare occasion we needed a “Q” or a “Z”—’cause I’m not sure we always had two of each of those letters, one for each side. God forbid we should ever need four of those letters! We always lusted after swiping the little lobby cards with their scenes from the movies, but we never did. Well, I never did. Too chicken. I can’t really speak for anyone else.
All of us hated being drafted for clean-up duty on weekends, but once in a while we had to come in and push dust around, at Marv’s command. One Saturday morning circa 1960, I was helping out, as was younger employee Gary Friedrich and someone else—and Marv, bless him, had just painstakingly waxed the entire lobby floor. Really got it spic and span… gleaming! He was so proud. But there on the floor, right next to the machine, somebody set a big fat bottle of Coke syrup—that ultra-thick quasi-liquid that was to be poured into the soda machine to mix with carbonated water and come out as Coca-Cola. As I walked by it, the side of my shoe clipped the bottle just right… and the bottle shattered. That gooey syrup started spreading darkly all over Marv’s nice clean lobby floor, not unlike the Blob in that recent movie starring young Steve McQueen. And Marv, understandably, just lost it. He screamed at the top of his lungs about how he’d never seen anybody so &$*@% clumsy as me in his whole life—and, well, maybe he hadn’t. Gary was trying so hard not to laugh that I thought he’d choke. Marv wouldn’t let me help him clean up the mess—he just sent me home, so I couldn’t break anything else that day.
But I still think the bottle must’ve had a weak spot, because I didn’t kick it that hard.
One habit Gary and I in particular had, that Marv could never break us of, with cajoling or threats: we wanted to see movies as early as we could, so we’d often drive over to Cape to see them (as per “The Old Man and the Sea” above). By contract, there was at least a week or two delay before a movie playing at the Esquire or Broadway (or even the Rialto—forget about the low-budget Orpheum) could play in Jackson, and Marv didn’t like it being known that some of his staffers were seeing movies earlier in Cape. Our argument that we wouldn’t be paying to see the movies in Jackson anyway fell on deaf ears…we were setting a bad example for other Jacksonian teens, apparently… but we kept on going, and just tried to avoid talking about them near Marv. But he knew.
As TV increasingly kept people away from movie theatres, attendance gradually declined at the Palace by the late ’50s. Somewhere along the line, Howard was finally let go, probably as a cost-cutting move, and Marv—or even one of us popcorn/soda boys—had to take tickets. I remember how proud I was when I learned to tear the tickets in two while holding them in just the one hand! We’ve all got to take our triumphs where we can find them.
Gary and I had become really good buds by that time, despite his being 3-4 years younger than I was. (He still is.) I had pretty much control of my family’s 1952 Chevy (zero to 60 in about as many seconds), so he and I and some other guys, not all of them Palace staffers, would tool around after the show closed for the night, pooling our resources to buy a dollar’s worth of gas. Palace employee Ronnie Lowes was one of us… we called him “Gus-Gus” after the chunky mouse in “Cinderella,” and he kind of got to like the name. We called ourselves “the Gaberlunzies,” an archaic word that meant “wandering beggars.”
Jim (“Crunch”) Wilson, one of the Palace’s owners as well as a staffer, often accompanied us. His brother Kent and Bill Heyde and Linton Loetje had long since moved on to universities out of town, but starting in ’58 I was commuting from Jackson to SEMO every day, so I wasn’t going anywhere until at least ’61, when I planned to graduate in three years by going during summers. One Saturday morning in there somewhere, Marv dispatched Jim, Gary, and me—and maybe one other person—with orders to go find a Christmas tree for the theatre. Since we weren’t given any money to buy one, we knew that meant we should chop one down at the side of some back-country road. Jim had an idea where, so we were soon chopping away. Alas, the farmer who owned the land spotted us from a distance. We sped off with the tree, but he must’ve recognized Jim or “my” car or something, because by the time we got back to town, he’d already phoned the theatre and Marv had already agreed to pay him for the tree. I suppose things could’ve gone a lot worse for us tree-thieves. But we were only following orders.
One evening in 1959, when I was the official ticket-taker, I had Gary spell me while I walked up a few doors to Fulenweider’s Drugstore to check out the week’s new comic books. I was enthusiastic about the fact that super-heroes were making a comeback, starting with a revived version of DC Comics’ super-fast Flash from the 1940s… and that night, I stumbled across a new incarnation of another childhood favorite: Green Lantern, whose power ring could create anything he could think of. Gary and I both read the comic that night. Gary never became the comics fan I was, but he’d read Mad as a kid, just like I had. Still, if anybody’d told us that night that, a decade later, the two of us would already be looking backward at several years spent as comic book writers and even editors, we’d have thrown them out of the Palace on suspicion of being drunk—or worse.
Sometime in ’60 or early ’61, I finally decided to quit, even though I really needed the meager bit of money the job paid, since I wouldn’t graduate till that July. I was really teed off at Marv about something—maybe rightly, maybe wrongly… it doesn’t really matter. So, anyway, there was this thing I did that really made Marv see red: I was given to doing hand-stands on the bullet-shaped trashcan in the lobby, and he had chewed me out about it once or twice. So, the afternoon I decided to quit, Marv walked in to find me doing one of those trademark hand-stands, and he couldn’t believe his eyes. I leaped down and told him I was quitting, and I walked out, feeling very proud of myself. (In retrospect, it’s hard to see anything to be proud of, but I was young.)
And so ended my career at the Palace. I went back to see movies there occasionally (after a decent interval) and of course paid for my ticket. After a while, Marv stopped scowling at me every time I walked in, and a few years later, when I became a teacher or later a comics writer in New York, we were friendly. He even got me absentee ballots once or twice so I could vote in local (as well as Presidential) elections, until the time limit ran out on that.
The Palace itself by then had pretty much cut back to only being open on weekends… maybe Friday through Sunday… and a few years later, probably after I’d split for New York, it finally closed for good. I remember getting a sad feeling the first time I came home and there was no longer a Palace Theatre sign and boxoffice there. And you know what? I’ve never been back to Jackson since—the last time being five or six years ago, when my mother still lived there—that I didn’t drive down that street at least once, and get a lump in my throat for what wasn’t there.
My own connection with the Roll-O-Fun/roller-skating rink—and Gary’s, I suspect—wasn’t as long or strong as with the Palace, but for me, at least, it goes back to the early ’50s or so, which I think is when it opened. I could figure out the general era I did the most skating (my years in the 7th-8th grades, more or less) if I bothered to Google when Teresa Brewer’s pop song “Ricochet Romance” was a hit… I must’ve heard in a zillion times while rolling around the rink, and I loved that song.
Then, for a number of years I didn’t do much skating—other interests, don’t you know—and by 1962 I was a high school English teacher at Fox School in Arnold, just south of St. Louis County. But I still came to my parents’ home in Jackson many weekends, for a couple of summers I took graduate classes at SEMO, and sometime around 1962, Gary and a couple of “new guys” started a rock’n’roll band and Gary asked me to be the vocalist.
This harked back to 1958, when Gary, Palmer (Pal) Hacker, and I had been in a JHS skit shilling for Tom Heyde (Bill’s younger brother), who was running for student body president. As an early and avid Elvis Presley fan, since the day in early 1956 when I first heard “Heartbreak Hotel” on the radio at Kerstner’s drugstore), I’d charcoaled on a pair of sideburns and got a banjo to stand in for a guitar (not that I could play either), with fellow Elvis fan Gary on drums and Pal on piano. We were “Evitz Pretzel and the Trans-Jordanaires,” entertaining Washington’s troops at Valley Forge in between their ping-pong tournaments.
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| Roy Thomas in Evitz Pretzel and the Trans-Jordanaires in 1958 |
There’s even a crossover with the Palace Theatre here: later that year, after my piano-playing friend and classmate John Short had won the JHS talent contest homaging rocker Jerry Lee Lewis (as “Jerry Lee Moose”), Marv hired the four of us to do a special one-night live performance on its stage—to what turned out to be a sold-out crowd—even though we couldn’t get John’s piano up on the stage, so people had to stand to get a good view of him pounding away. (The movie that night was a totally forgettable feature starring David Janssen about a couple of kids lost in Japan that otherwise would probably have pulled a dozen people, so we felt good about that.) During that year or so, Gary, Pal, and I were also asked to do our act at high school dances, at a Rotary (Optimist?) lunch meeting, and even at the annual hosiery-mill party. (There, we purposely offended the hosiery-mill execs by covering an Eddie Cochran movie song, “You Gonna Make No Cotton-picker Outta Me,” whose lyrics we changed to “You Ain’t Gonna Make No Hosiery-Knitter Out of Me”—even though my mother worked there at the time!) We also placed third one night at a Homecomers talent contents before an audience of hundreds… and when a semi-professional group of hula-dancers won another night, we purposely offended the final night playoff’s judges by donning grass skirts and doing a song called “Hawaiian Rock,” which had been a mild hit for Tommy Sands.)
So now, circa 1962 or maybe late ’61, Gary asked me to sing with his new band—the Gaberlunzies, what else?—though we later had to change our name to the less inspired Galaxies because no one could spell or even remember “Gaberlunzies.” Singing was all I could do, since I didn’t play an instrument. The lead guitarist was a tough but likeable Elvis lookalike from Cape named Rocky Bierschwal, who was fresh out of reform school (he’d spend a few spells in prison later, I’m sorry to say, but he was a great guy), and a quiet SEMO student named Frank. Somehow, I even got the band to pay for my microphone.
And our main weekly gig was—the Roll-O-Fun, under Woody and Jean Seabaugh.
Oh, we played other spots in the Cape area and even occasionally further afield, but the Roll-O-Fun was our venue most Friday nights, after the skating had ended for the evening. In the early days before the two of us broke up, my longtime girlfriend Linda Rahm (who lived just a few hundred feet up the hill on West Main) would sit on the sidelines slipping me a thermos of hot tea to keep my throat from going raw. Rocky, convinced I was actually sneaking in liquor, once grabbed the thermos and swigged down its contents—only to promptly spit it out: “It’s $#%&% tea!”
We had good crowds, generally, even if I recall we rarely wound up with more than $10-$20 apiece for the four of us. For me, though, it was heaven. I never liked being a teacher… and I think I probably liked singing rock’n’roll even more than I’d later like writing comic books. The teenage dancers were just a blur to me, because I refused to wear my glasses when I sang. Rock’n’roll singers didn’t wear glasses—except for the late Buddy Holly, and I’d never liked anything by him except “That’ll Be the Day”—so I preferred being half-blind than being some “four-eyes” up there at the mike.
Our staples were songs by Elvis and Bobby Darin, among others—and Gary and I would team up occasionally on duets like “Paula” and “Speedy Gonzales.” The band usually played only a handful of instrumentals (“Walk Don’t Run,” “Sleepwalk,” etc.), so I rarely got a chance to dance.
Things were usually pretty uneventful during our Roll-O-Fun stints, but we had our moments—like when Rocky took offense, one night while we were setting up, at some insult Gary spat at him and got him down on the floor, somehow managing to pummel him without really hurting him. “I just had to teach him a lesson,” Rocky told me softly after he’d allowed Frank and me to pull him off Gary—something we couldn’t have done with a derrick if he hadn’t let us. Rocky got easily bored, though. I think we were able to prevent him from ever actually splitting totally during one of the breaks, but from time to time he was known to sit on the amp with his back to the dancing floor while playing.
Woody and Jean were nice to work for, even if we kept trying to pry more money out of them. They were fair, and they never tried to take advantage of us. The only time I recall Woody being unhappy with me was when Linda showed up once wearing a new style of “hip-huggers,” with a bare midriff; he kept mumbling that he wished she’d “pull her pants up.”
We played the Roll-O-Fun and a few other area spots for a couple of years—and then the Beatles happened, at the turn of ’63-’64. Since no one in the band but me wanted to sing, we couldn’t really do their songs well… and over the next few months, we sort of went away.
The Roll-O-Fun itself, I’m glad to say, lasted some years longer. Beholding an empty lot where it used to be wouldn’t fill me with quite the same sense of loss as does the irredeemable black hole left by the demise of the Palace Theatre… but there’d be a pang there. No way there wouldn’t.
But Gary and I—and I hope Marv and Bill and Jimmy and “Gus-Gus” and Rocky and Frank, as well—remember the good times, while the bad memories mostly fade away like morning dew.
Thomas Wolfe said you can’t go home again, and it’s hard to argue with the title of a book by a major American author.
But he forgot one thing: you don’t have to go home again, if that home is forever emblazed on your memory and your heart.
The Palace Theatre and the Roll-O-Fun skating rink—long may they wave!
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| Roy Thomas, me, Belmark Sinnott, Jim Tournas and Joe Sinnott (in the middle) at EAST COAST COMIC CON in 2018. How many legends can you count in one picture? |
LINKS TO OTHER "MEGO STRETCH HULK" AND "RASCALLY ROY" HERO ENVY ARTICLES...
THE ROY THOMAS SPIDER-MAN COSTUME
THE UNCANNY BUT TRUE CREATION OF THE WOLVERINE
THE LAST SPIDER-MAN DAILY NEWSPAPER STRIP
