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.”

The election was two days away. I figured that was enough time. We spent nearly every afternoon on campus, and we had access to poster board and markers. We knew all the locations to post the information. Of course, it wasn’t sanctioned.

But, hey, this was Fairbanks. And we were fixtures. We’re expected to cause trouble. So we made about 14 posters in an hour with blatant messaging designed to shock and awe our audience. Julie did the borders. She made them flowery. I did the lettering. Torg drew the Schmuck.

The posters were crude but could be seen from a distance. Black on white. One said “Vote Puck Schmuck. He got us out of Vietnam.” Another said, Vote Puck Schmuck. He’ll give you free lunch.” We also had one that said, “Schmuck says don’t eat yellow snow.”

We had 14 and started running out of message material. Often we spoofed the messages on the other candidates’ signs. Mad Magazine was a big influence. In fact, one poster said “Vote Puck Schmuck. What, me worry?”

The three of us screamed across campus and put up the signs. They were everywhere, in the cafeteria, various lounges, the dorms, various buildings and even one outside.

We were laughing hard by the time we completed our guerilla marketing campaign. The next day, I saw the student who was expected to win the race tearing down a couple of our signs. He was swearing and had a big crowd around him. It made me a little angry.

“I’ll bet my opponent did this,” he said, red faced. The student association candidate was a big guy with black hair. He was doing his best to grow a beard but it wasn’t very full. I thought it was a lame attempt. He never suspected kids had done it.

After he left, a couple students made fun of him.

“What a jerk,” a woman said. “There are more signs.”

Her compatriot pulled the poster from the trash and rehung it, a little worse for wear. “That should do it,” he said. “Puck Schmuck gets my vote.”

By election day, we were excited beyond expectations. None of us thought we’d care. Then we did. When the results came out in the campus paper, our candidate didn’t make the count. However, there was a comment from the University of Alaska president admonishing “whoever tried to tamper with the election process” and promising an investigation.

That got us kind of scared. Then, like all kids, we forgot all about it until our next Puck Schmuck campaign. One of the hippies saw us hard at work on a mimeograph master making card-sized political messages with our cartoon’s image.

We created hundreds of the little cards, painstakingly cutting out each one. We used various colors of paper. Mom had a mimeograph, the hand-cranked self publishing tool that predated a copy machine. It aided her efforts raising money for the day care center. She used it to advertise various event and fund-raisers.

David, he was from New York, spotted our handiwork. He started reading. The cards were essentially miniaturized versions of the posters. However, this time we were running Puck Schmuck for class president at Main Junior High. We were in seventh grade. It was deep winter, and we had idle hands.

“I wondered who did this,” David said, wagging some of our Schmuck cards in his hand. We were in Mom’s basement office in the day care center. It was a mess of stacked paper and doors converted into desks.

We just looked at him, uncomprehendingly.

“You did the ASUAA write-in,” David continued. “The administration was pissed about that. They interviewed all sorts of people. Turns out your guy won the election.”

“Won?” I asked. A big smile plastered itself on my face as well as Torg’s.

“Heck yes. Nobody liked the guy who ‘officially’ won. He’s a real schmuck.” David was Jewish. He encouraged our Yiddish conversation. “But they didn’t acknowledge your accomplishment because of its counter-culture implications.

“The administration got real anti-hippy real fast. They really didn’t like that you had Puck Schmuck giving the peace signs. Too anti-Nixon.”

The news rejuvenated our efforts. We figured we were a shoo-in to win at Main Junior High. The next day while on bathroom breaks, Torg and I slipped Puck Schmuck cards into nearly every locker in the school. The school wasn’t all that big.

We heard nothing until several days later. The intercom lit up for a special message from the vice principal. He vowed to get the perpetrators of the “Schmuck thing” and “you know who you are.”

I was in math class. I looked up. I kept a straight face. But I was pretty happy. “Schmuck strikes again,” I mumbled.