Interview with
Joe Wehrle Jr.
Christmas Spirit in a Speakeasy
Cartoonist Spotlights
Bob Vojtko
Zinographies
Edward Bolman
Mike Cody
Hunt Emerson
Brad W. Foster
Doug Holverson
Richard Krauss
Rick McCollum
DC McNamara
Dave Miller
John Porcellino
Poopsheet Foundation
King-Cat
Michael Roden
Dave Sim's Cerebus
Dan W. Taylor
Bob Vojtko
Joe Wehrle Jr.
Conducted in November 2007
Interview with Joe Wehrle Jr. Part 1 of 4
In 1981, Joe Wehrle Jr. (pronounced "Wer-lee") placed an ad for his Cauliflower Catnip Big Little Book in Alan Light's adzine, The Buyer's Guide. It caught my eye and I immediately ordered a copy. When it arrived it met every expectation the advertising promised. Wehrle had successfully captured the quality, tone, and charm of the BLB era with a brand new offering some 40 years later. I've treasured this engaging small press classic ever since. For the next few years I kept my eyes open for Wehrle's next project, but I never spotted one. Years later with a renewed interest in small press, I contacted Wehrle through his Pencil Portrait Gallery and he graciously agreed to be interviewed.
Punxsutawney is a small town with national fame thanks to Groundhog Day. What was it like growing up there?
It really didn't seem out of the ordinary, growing up in Punxsutawney. I don't think there was as much fuss made of the groundhog legend back then. And I didn't have much to compare my life with except family TV shows, and you know how realistic those were fifty years ago!
At about the age of five, as I was running around the living room one morning and jumping over tented newspaper sheets from the night before, I caught sight of a grim, zip-a-toned figure leaping from a wall on the jam-packed comic pages of the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph. It was the Phantom! I was never the same again.
Sometime later, on the back of a milling company truck, my father brought home a small shed from his family's property, and we kept chickens for a year or so (even though we were situated right on the main street of town, across from an auto dealer and near a series of stately mansions. The old man always liked to think of himself as a farmer. He once said he thought it would be nice to move out on a farm when he retired, but my mother replied she'd be worried about who'd take care of him way out there, and he said, "Oh!" and the matter was dropped. When she died at a fairly young age, he remarried, bought a piece of land, and eventually had a small bungalow, which he always referred to as "the farm," built out in the sticks). Anyway, when the egg-laying tapered off, we got rid of the chickens, and he took down the wire fence that had enclosed the small yard they strutted around in during the day.
It didn't take me very long to commandeer the abandoned structure as a clubhouse. The two chicken roosts, one just to the right inside the door and the other on the opposing wall, made excellent benches just the right height for grade school butts to roost. I moved my growing comic collection in there, and the neighborhood kids spent much of their summers reading about Superman, Batman, Dick Tracy, Tarzan, Blackhawk, Plastic Man—you name it. Very little of the money I cadged went for candy or popsicles. It mostly went to support the publishers of twentieth-century hieroglyphics, all in color for a dime.
Behind our yard was a large field (to give you an idea of the size, there's a shopping mall on the site today). The area was cleared of trees when the flood control dikes were built in the 1940s. You could walk from my backyard across the alley and through the field, climb the graduated side of the dike, stand on top and watch the Mahoning Creek hurrying on by.
We spent a lot of time playing in the field, making up adventures, sailing balsa-wood airplanes, flying kites. One year we tromped a flat circle in the weeds and called it a wrestling ring.
I could usually pin the neighborhood kids and make them surrender, since most of them were a year or two younger than me. One week, though, a kid my age from way up the alley, taller, big-boned and heavy, got me in a headlock I couldn't break. He kept saying, "Give up? Give Up?" I think I felt that capitulation would disgrace the leadership position I held in the neighborhood (if only because of my age), so I kept refusing. He then started to grind my head into the ground with his elbow. I thought I felt a faint cracking inside my skull, and I began to get scared, but still I refused to "give." Exasperated, finally, he shouted, "Geez! I can't be wrestlin' YOU all day! I gotta go home 'n EAT!" So he got off me, stomped through the field and headed up the alley, while I slowly climbed to my feet and tried to regain my bearings. For some reason, my mother got very upset when I recounted this story at home.
If you entered the field, turned right and walked the length of it in that direction, you came to a second field, separated from the first by a narrow drive that disappeared into the weeds before it got as far as the dike. This field was even more interesting, because it held the ruins of the old iron works.
What catalysts for the imagination lay here! An old rusted pickup truck hid a well-like hole that led into a low, dark, brick-walled passage. I slid under the truck when I first spotted the hole underneath, dropped down and crawled a few feet inside the tunnel, but I soon backed out because it was so pitch black and confining.
There were large chunks of curved brick wall or chimney section scattered around, and a deep, brick walled dropoff that seemed like the Grand Canyon to me, but was probably only the basement of the demolished main building. The tall weeds hid it, so that if you were running through them and didn't know about the drop, you could've gone sailing off the edge and fallen to your doom on the broken cement flooring below, but nobody ever did.
A large, free-standing metal contrivance farther along seemed more like a tank than anything else, though it rested flat on the ground. You could hoist yourself over the front edge, slide down an inclined metal flooring and sit where it rested against a vertical metal back. Or you could enter underneath through a small rectangular hole and hide out in the bottom, where there was almost enough room to sit upright just inside the entrance, but only crawling room beneath the incline. There were swastikas scratched inside the top section, and it was rumored that some teeners who called themselves the Nazi Gang hung out there.
One day when I was exploring by myself, I crawled into the bottom section of this thing, and crouched there on the rough ground, feeling safely shut away from the world. The next thing I knew, feet were clambering on the metal above me and I heard voices.
There was a narrow horizontal slot between the inclined plane and the vertical one, and I could see the rear pockets of two older boys as they sat against the back plate. I froze, motionless, breathing shallowly, hoping they would soon leave. I couldn't clearly make out what they were talking about.
After a few minutes, one of the boys shifted position, bent down and peered through the slot.
"Hey! There's somebody under here!" he exclaimed.
Like a rabbit I skinned out the bottom opening and scrambled away through the spindly weed trees before they had a chance to see which way I went!
Possibly the most interesting feature of the second field, as we called it, was a tall cement tower, possibly twelve feet high, with a diagonal shaft running through the interior. The shaft was too steep to mount unaided, but someone had shoved a very long board inside, and it was possible to pull oneself up the shaft by clinging to the board and using hands and sneakered feet to climb along it to the top. I always had the feeling that the masses of cement surrounding me might cave in and crush me like an eggshell! Once up there, though, you could sit on a flat ledge with your legs dangling over the side of the tower, master of all you surveyed.
This stuff is all gone now, but much of it was still in place until after I was grown and newly married, so one day I took my young wife to tour that rubble and ruin, and I think she understood the attraction.
As to the Punxsutawney Groundhog, they definitely do a lot more promotion of the legend now than when I was a kid. I remember seeing photos in the paper back then of someone hoisting the poor beast up and declaring that he had seen his shadow (or that he hadn't). And I know there was an annual banquet, but that's mostly all we were aware of.
Now it's a real tourist attraction, both on February second and for the Groundhog Festival in June, the Chamber of Commerce sells thousands of dollars worth of Groundhog merchandise, there's an official Groundhog Ty Beanie Baby every year, and a specially-labeled beer. I even did a comic one year, featuring a groundhog detective, but I think it was a bit too far off the beaten path for most of the local populace. Most would rather have had a coloring book.
We went up to the Knob one Groundhog Day before dawn. I hadn't had enough sleep or anything to eat, and I could feel the icy cold seeping into my bones. Everybody around us seemed to be jumping around gleefully and hoo-rahing, but I thought I was going to pass out. Never again!
Part 2: Cauliflower Catnip
When Punxsutawney's famous Seer goes missing, an out-of-town detective is discreetly hired to stand-in for the upcoming Groundhog Day.
The young detective is visited by a mysterious stranger.
The Seer is nowhere to be found, but a little girl may have spotted a clue!
The detective and a posse of groundhogs are anxious to solve the disappearance of the famous Seer.