With what seems like the “usual gang of idiots” running for president, it’s a relief to focus on Alfred E. Neuman, and take his advice: “What, me worry?”
Coincidence? I think not! — The Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, only an hour away in the lovely Berkshires!— has devoted its main galleries to MAD magazine, which is partly responsible for subverting and rotting the brain of The Jewish World’s publisher, beginning in 1962, when, as an innocent child, he bought his first copy for 25 cents — CHEAP— on a foray to the local c-store for a loaf of bread — or was it a quart of milk?—both 26 cents in those days.
More memories
Gasoline at the end of our street in Dover, NH, was 28 cents, and sometimes as low as 24 cents. In those days you sat in the car while the kid at the service station ran the gas —and checked your oil. The year my dad bought me a new black 26” one-speed Schwinn, a man’s haircut was $1, a boy’s 90 cents.
I had been exposed to MAD by cousins Lenny and Jerry Groopman (now a famous Boston doctor and book author who writes for The New Yorker) on a visit to Great Neck shortly before. My literate newspaperman father forbade me and my sister comics, and frowned on MAD, but I caught him reading it, and laughing.
—Jim Clevenson
Excerpts from “A Secular Talmud: The Jewish Sensibility of Mad Magazine,” by Nathan Abrams:
