Puck Schmuck makes his political debut in Fairbanks

A cheap imitation, but you get the idea.

Author's note: Back when I was in seventh-grade, my friend Torg Hinckley and I created a character we called Puck Schmuck. He was a politician of sorts. A Zorro type inspired by our love of comic books. We ran him for election at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and our junior high. We thought it was funny. Nobody else seemed to.

I'm writing a memoir I suspect nobody will ever read. But here's a chapter from it.

After the resignation of President Richard Milhous Nixon on Aug. 9, 1974, we were all affected. The hippies celebrated. The press ran the story for months. And when President Gerald Ford was named, the entire country appeared to relax a bit. To me, it wasn’t that Nixon was all bad. After all, he created the Environmental Protection Agency, oversaw the first Earth Day, supported the Clean Air Act and, most importantly, stopped the Vietnam War.

But what stuck out to Torg and I was the image of Nixon flashing his peace signs. He did it regularly, usually with a big grin on his face.

About this time, Torg and I had gotten somewhat involved politically. I don’t mean we actually paid attention to politics, but we did start messing around in elections. Both our parents were politically active. They voted and made their thoughts known. His parents were liberal. My mom fancied herself a bit of a radical.

Our interpretation involved comics. We created a character who we called Puck Schmuck. Both of us were really into Yiddish words. They were so descriptive and rebellious. I mean, schmuck. It means a variety of things. But we fixated on it referring to somebody being a jerk.

We’d make lists of put downs, slang for genitalia, insulting racial and ethnic slurs. We were not politically correct. And it wasn’t a politically correct time. So we were terrible. We also watched a lot of Mister Rogers Neighborhood, Electric Company and Sesame Street. Maybe for balance.

I don’t recall how Puck Schmuck came about. Most likely it was Torg. He was quick and brilliant when it came to ideas. I loved it. Schmuck looked like a ghost, the old sheet over the head type. Actually, he looked just like the little phantoms the Pac Man creature chases on the video game. That game appeared several years later. I recall Torg showing it to me in an obscure quick mart store.

So Schmuck just remained our joke. We’d draw him a lot. He made commentary on various things. After looking at some of the cartoons we drew of the guy, a thought hit me. I figured to engineer a major prank. Our best yet.

“Let’s run Puck Schmuck for campus president,” I said one afternoon.

“What?” asked Torg. “Too stupid.”

“No, really,” I said. “It will work. Nobody likes the guy running. We’ll make a bunch of posters and encourage a write-in campaign.”