A Certain Encounter: Spiderman 1977

By Craig: It was the news of the week. At least it was for a couple of 9 year old kids during the late summer of 1977. What was it? Was it President Jimmy Carter signing over the Panama Canal to Panama? Maybe death of the king of rock and roll, Elvis Presley? Perhaps it was the launch of Voyager II, a satellite that would eventually visit the gas giant planets of the outer solar system in the following decades? No...it was none of these things. In fact, these newsworthy events, at the time meant practically nothing to Craig and Jay, two brothers who anxiously awaited the arrival of one of their heroes. We had seen the sign in the window of the local bookshop. In big bold letters it read:

"Coming Saturday at Book Corner! The Amazing Spiderman!"

   Noon until 3:00 P.M.

 

 

     I don't exactly remember if these were the exact words that were boldly printed on the advertisement. It has been over a third of a century, but the effect that this notice had on me was electrifying. Spiderman? from the Marvel comic books, coming to our little town? Actually, he was coming to the next town which was a little bit bigger than our town which was only able to boast of having one gas station, but still...he was coming. Of course, even at the age of 9 I knew, as did my brother, that Spiderman was a fictional character coming from the imagination of Marvel creator Stan Lee. We had quit believing in Santa Claus the previous December when our 12 year old uncle, who we now refer to as "The Great Dane" broke the heart wrenching news to us by using some simple arithmetic to prove to us that it was impossible for ole St. Nick to visit every house in the world in one night. In fact, the logic was so absurdly simple that I can remember sitting there stupefied, wondering why I had not previously thought of it. So, we knew that the Spiderman that was coming to Book Corner that Saturday afternoon was just a regular guy dressed up to look like the superhero. Still, for some absurd reason we felt compelled to go.

 

 

     My son is the same age now as I was on that Saturday afternoon back in the late summer of 1977. Yesterday, we took in the new James Bond movie, and afterwards we walked over to the Books-A-Million so that I could get a cup of coffee. While I was enjoying my cup of Joe, my son was fishing through stacks of old comic books that had somehow found their way into the store. They were $1 a piece and I noticed that he had picked out three of them. He showed me an old copy of The Avengers which I thumbed through while he went through the other stack. Marvel Comics...suddenly I was transported back to 1977. It was a sunny Saturday afternoon. my mother had pulled the puke brown Pinto into the parking lot of the Stop & Shop where the little book store sat wedged in the strip mall between a package store and a pharmacy. A crowd of about 100 people had gathered around a pickup truck, mostly kids about our age with a parent who waited anxiously for the arrival of the hero of the hour. My brother and I ran to the scene where we took a spot somewhere along the outer perimeter of the crowd which was bustling with excitement. Suddenly, a meek, emaciated figure in a spiderman costume emerged from the bookstore. He walked over to the pickup truck and began signing a few comic books for kids. "Was this it?" I thought, with disappointment. This guy was a joke. There were some chuckles and snickering while a few people in the crowd left shaking their heads in disbelief. What did they expect? Did they expect a grand entrance...perhaps he should have come swinging down from a web from the top of the building into the back of the pickup truck. Would this have met with peoples absurd expectations? A few hecklers in the back of the crowd began making jokes at the expense of this sad excuse for a spiderman. This went on for a few minutes while the gaunt looking fellow in the Spidey suit continued signing autographs and talking to some of the younger kids who in no way questioned the legitimacy of his identity.

"HA! HA! look at this guy!"

One of the hecklers had become blatantly rude and obviously felt no compunction about relating his sentiments to the onlookers in the crowd. At this point, I could only see the top of Spiderman's head. However, I noticed that the head had suddenly turned from a downward position where it had been concentrating on signing autographs to a position where it now scanned the crowd. The murmur in the crowd began to die down...almost, as if there was some unconscious inner feeling among them that something of great magnitude was about to happen. And suddenly, something did happen. The sickly looking man in the Spiderman costume was soon standing in back of the pickup truck. I was unsure of how it happened, but there was a transformation of sorts. The man in the Spiderman costume stood up to his full height. His bearing became one of strength and fortitude. Standing in the back of the truck he towered over the crowd around him, making everything around him appear small. He was meek and emaciated no more. Muscles bulging from his biceps and chest.

YOU!!!!!!!!

Spiderman, yes, Spiderman, not a guy in a costume was pointing toward the rude heckler.

"If you don't like it you can leave!!!"

The crowd was silent. The heckler, a burly looking young man with a stubble of beard, perhaps in his early 20s, stood looking dumbfounded. If this man had been asked to speak at this time, I seriously doubt anything would have been able to issue from his mouth. Spiderman stood there for a minute glaring after the heckler who meekly shuffled away from the scene of his humiliation. A cheer arose from the crowd, and soon every kid there was mobbing the webbed hero shaking his hand and getting his autograph. The seeds of doubt, erased for the moment anyway, for nobody, at least on this day, denied the authenticity of this man's identity. He was Spiderman.

 

      I found myself back in the present day, sipping coffee and watching my own son thumb through the piles of comic books. Time has a funny way of making things seem irrelevant. 35 years have now passed since my encounter with Spiderman. That same week Voyager II left the Earth headed toward the outer reaches of space and the unknown. It is now approximately 9 billion miles from the Earth, or twice the distance from the orbit of Pluto. If left undisturbed, it should pass by the bright star Sirius some 296,000 years from now, long after all memory of anything related to Spiderman or myself is eradicated from the face of this planet.