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‘Geritol-drinking, Lawrence Welk-watching Americans over thirty’ he claims are hungering for

‘cheapie game shows of their own’ to match the TV networks then current obsession for under-30

shows such as The Dating Game. Among his suggestions are The Middle-Aged Game (contestants try

to tie their shoelaces without bending their knees and prizes include a trip to ‘the Betty Crocker bake-

off’); The Brutality Game (‘forty Chicago policemen against a happy studio audience full of pacifists,

hippies, college professors’), hosted by ‘Dick Daley’, still Chicago mayor the year following the

riotous Democratic Convention of 1968; The Divorce Game (‘hosted by Zsa Zsa Gabor’); The Wife-

Swapping Game (‘a weekly mass orgy...opportunity for audience participation there’); ‘And finally

the living end— The Burial Game...hosted by Vincent Price.’ Rather sophomoric humor but

entertaining nonetheless. Collings12 suggests this column ‘reads almost like an early sketch of ideas

for’ The Running Man, in which ‘the true villain is the Network’ but that seems a stretch.

March 13, 1969. Still in a satiric mood, King launches a defense of mediocrity (!) claiming it

has been given a bad name and there is a ‘Plot afoot’ to do away with it. ‘In view of this grave

emergency I am hereby taking it upon myself to declare National Mediocrity Week’, he writes, asking

all to ‘do your part to help give mediocrity a good name.’ Among King’s recommendations to assist is

attending the cinema to see ‘ Born Wild, from American-International, those fun-loving guys that

brought you Attack of the Giant Leeches, Dementia 13, and The Young Animals.’ King would speak

with admiration of this production house and their product in both Danse Macabre and On Writing.

Having given the game away by stating Born Wild ‘is pretty good’ with ‘a refreshingly honest eye’ he

goes on to recommend Tammy Wynette’s new album, Stand By Your Man (‘You’ll like it. You’ll

probably hate yourself, but you’ll like it.’); and ‘now that your mind is hopelessly rotted...a mediocre

novel... Boys and Girls Together by William Goldman.’ A fine novelist, dual Academy Award

recipient Goldman is one of the great post-war screenwriters, responsible for Butch Cassidy and the

Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men, A Bridge Too Far, The Ghost and the Darkness, The

Princess Bride (from his own novel) and The General’s Daughter. He has also penned a remarkable

three screenplays of King novels— Misery, Hearts in Atlantis and Dreamcatcher.

This technique of reviewing movies, music and books together (as well as with television)

would repeat itself throughout King’s career, most notably in The Pop of King columns in the

Entertainment Weekly of the early- to mid- 2000s. His wide knowledge of all these forms of

entertainment would feature in (indeed trademark, along with the ubiquitous use of brand name) his

fiction forever.

March 20, 1969. This week King plays the nostalgia card, asking readers if they remember not

silly things (‘how to factor a quadratic’) but ‘important things—like for instance, what was playing

the first time you took a girl out on a real bona-fide date....’ Instantly, we see the King who captured

our imaginations in such classic tales as The Body and It—invoking visceral memories of our (in this

case his generation’s) childhood, as he remembers, among others, American Bandstand (‘when the

girls wore bobby-sox and danced with each other’); and ‘ At the Hop by Danny and the Juniors (I

kissed my first not-aunt-or-mother female while that song was on the radio—she had beautiful blonde

hair and M&Ms on her chin. She was nine and I was ten).’ ‘Those were the days’ when you had to

have a Davy Crockett hat, a waffle ball and a hula-hoop (‘I think the bitterest moment of my tenth year

came when my hula-hoop rolled out into the street and got squashed by an unfeeling oil-truck’), King

says, ‘You must be able to remember the things that turned you on back in the good old days before

pot...and Jimmi (sic) Hendrix.’ He then called for those with such memories to send them to him care

of the newspaper.

March 27, 1969. From this issue of The Maine Campus David Bright13 had been elected editor

(according to the paper ‘a formal orgy was held in celebration’). King would create an eponymous

journalist character for The Dead Zone and The Tommyknockers as a nod to his former colleague.

The previous week had been ‘very good’, according to King: ‘It restores your faith in human nature to

realize how many people remember Chubby Checker, the Dovells and Annette Funicello....’ he says,

referring to his request in the previous week’s column for nostalgic memories from his readers.

Among those he received were of music, lyrics, ‘groovy clothes’ (‘crinoline petticoats...saddle

shoes’), radio serials and Saturday matinee movies. Of particular interest to King fans is this: ‘Or, as

Miss Smith says, “…best of all, those old horror programs you were sometimes allowed to listen to

[on the radio].” Can you remember the sound of the creaking door that started Inner Sanctum? I Love

A Mystery? Or how about that graveyard voice that told you you were about to listen to “another story

calculated to keep you in... Suspense!”’ King would revisit this point in the elegiac chapter, Radio

and the Set of Reality, of his non-fiction study of horror, Danse Macabre. This column concludes,

‘Somehow everything seems to get just a little dirtier and more selfish as we get older. It’s good to

remember other times, once in a while.’ Classic King (both Collings14 and Spignesi15 relate this last directly to King’s novel It).

April 10, 1969. Having started the previous column (a fortnight earlier) with, ‘This was a pretty

good week’, this piece begins, ‘You say it’s been a bad week?’ If so, Doctor King prescribes a new

movie, where ‘everybody hates everybody’, The Lions in Winter (sic, in fact ‘Lion’). Of this now

classic movie, starring Peter O’Toole, Katharine Hepburn and Anthony Hopkins 16 in but his third

movie role, King says, ‘The dialogue is lusciously biting, and the acting is poisonously perfect.’

While stating the ‘cast do excellent justice to James Goldman’s juicy screenplay’ he says it ‘peters

out without resolution and seems rather pointless’, saying it is not as good as ‘Zifferilli’s (sic) Romeo

and Juliet’, or Rachael, Rachael, two other nominees that year for the ‘annual tool’s clambake, the

Academy Awards’. 17 He also recommends The Riot, a prison movie from Frank Elli’s book, which

King had read, saying it was ‘a tough, hard novel and a good one’. Although Gene Hackman had a

role King preferred ‘the inmates better. They just stood around and looked like inmates’, whereas

King felt Hackman was simply reprising his role in Bonnie and Clyde.

King makes a number of errors of fact in these columns, some minor, some not. In this case

minor—the movie was actually titled Riot, although the novel was indeed The Riot; he misidentifies

the key character as Cully Bristow, rather than Briston; and another movie as I Was A Fugitive From

the Chain Gang, rather than I Am A Fugitive etc. This is excusable if we consider that King’s role at

the time was to pass his UMO courses and entertain his readers, rather than act as researcher for

Leonard Maltin. So as not to distract readers we will keep the balance of such errors to the footnotes!

April 17, 1969. The previous weekend King had been in New York City, ‘courtesy of United

Artists’ who’d invited writers from ‘perhaps forty college publications’ to visit the city and see two

of their new offerings, Popi and If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium. He notes this was his first

visit to ‘Fun City’ in four years, ‘and it’s a strange scene for a country boy who grew up in a small

Maine town where there are more graveyards than people.’18 Of the movies he says, ‘They both

almost work. Almost.’ Popi is said to be the better of the two, starring Alan Arkin (‘probably the best

American actor now working’), although King finds it lacking (‘the disquieting moral of the story

seems to be that poverty and squalor can be fun’). Of It’s Tuesday etc. King says it ‘is a sleazy little

farce...It has its moments, but too damn few of them.’ We guess the kind people at United Artists did

not invite the humble Maine Campus correspondent back!

Gotham did not come off well either: ‘As for New York City itself, well, as New Yorkers

would undoubtedly say about Orono, it’s a nice place to visit, but I’d think I’d go crazy if I had to live

there...You can get seven TV channels, but the air smells bad. At the risk of sounding hopelessly

rustic, I like it better up here.’

King’s Ubris is the Best Ever was also published in this edition (see the Book Reviews

chapter).

April 24, 1969. In this column King revisits his invention, the Nitty Gritty Up Tight Society for a

Campus with More Cools, of which he had now risen to ‘President Emeritus’. This ‘group’ had first

appeared in his 22 February 1968 letter to The Maine Campus, From the Nitty-Gritty (see our

Letters to the Editor, Guest Columns chapter), when King was but ‘Secretary’. Back in satiric style

King claims the group now demands, among other things, courses on such minority areas as plumbing,

‘Mandarin Fingernail Growing, and an eight-week seminar on Why Macy’s Doesn’t Tell Gimbles’;

‘birth control vending machines in every dorm’; ‘a full-time limousine service on duty at all the girl’s

dorms’; the closing of the bookstore; and—the ‘nitty gritty’—the abolition of the University. On this

point, ‘we realize this sounds a little sweeping at first’, the NGUTSCMC argues, ‘there could be no

student strikes if there was no university’ and so, if abolished, no one would have to worry about it,

including the fact that it ‘is a contributing cause of inflation, air pollution and eye disease.’

May 1, 1969. Interesting biographical information comes to light in this column, in which King

talks about the liveliness of the poetry scene at UMO. He claims to have been lucky to attend a

Contemporary Poetry course during the ’68 Fall semester—lucky to have been taught by Burton

Hatlen and Jim Bishop (‘a couple of the brightest men the English department here has’) and ‘because

it was an opportunity to read poetry by a group of writers who aren’t dust yet.’ King said the course

was a real ‘learning experience’, compared to the normal ‘confusing welter of requirements, survey

courses, and plain old tommyrot....’ Of the poets read in the course King says ‘one of the best’ is Ron

Lowenstein, ‘a juicy poet, real and alive, with guts and energy enough to be optimistic in a society

that may not deserve such feelings’ and recommends his upcoming reading at the Union.

King has published a small amount of poetry19 (as has Tabitha King, most in their university

years) but perhaps the greatest discovery in this milieu was his future wife. Hatlen (a noted King

critic) and Bishop also strongly encouraged King’s writing, for which we are all eternally grateful.

May 8, 1969. This column begins in classic horror tones, ‘Want me to tell you a bad thing?’ He

sees students and faculty on campuses worldwide devoid of purpose, many of them under excessive

stress (‘Some riot. Most don’t. We just get a little more desperate’). He is haunted after seeing a girl

at dinner burst into tears and run from the room, then ‘everyone started talking again’ and someone

grabbed her dessert. But it’s not the ‘pressure-cooker’ that scares King, it’s the fear that the ‘effect

doesn’t stop with graduation.’ He then lampoons ‘Sally Socialite’, a girl who will marry, have three

kids and join the suburban grind (‘one morning she will wake up forty, wondering whether she did it

all on her own’); and ‘Henry Harried’, the studious type who will end up in a profession and ‘have

his first mild heart-attack at thirty-seven.’ The sudden realization of a teenager or twenty-something

that the future may not be the stuff of dreams is not original by any means, but we see it here strike

King with some force.

In a reflection of his lifelong fascination with the man in a high place with a gun (appearing in

fiction in one instance as Cain Rose Up, first published in the UMO magazine, Ubris for Spring,

1968) he speculates on how one might handle this angst: ‘Maybe you get loaded on Thursday

afternoon. You might develop a decided hostility in class. You might drop out. You might even start

looking at the Stevens Hall tower and wondering—just wondering, mind you—how nice it might be

to climb up there and pick a few people off.’ But, if you are like our columnist, you put on Dylan,

singing Ballad of a Thin Man and listen closely.

May 15, 1969. In this powerful column King reports his thoughts and reactions during a campus

anti-Vietnam War march, which took place on May 8 (the march is covered extensively in this issue

of The Maine Campus). Among other marchers is the aforementioned Campus editor, David Bright

(he also spoke at the following rally). King’s first word is ‘Ugly’ and that word is repeated four more

times (it is literally the last word), each time in larger and bolder print. There was much antagonism

towards the marchers (from townsfolk, fraternity members and other students20) and King reports,

‘Somebody belts me in the gut. It surprises me more than hurts me. I want to weep. I wonder what is

happening to me.’ The most powerful section of this column reads: ‘[The march] halts. There is a

brief confrontation. I don’t know what is said. All I see are fraternity sweatshirts. Behind them I see

Gestapo figures burning books and Jews. I do not see political belief. I see only a terrible amoral

castration.’ Before the final ‘Ugly’ King writes (Constant Readers will recognize a biblical name,

also a real small town in Maine, which now represents a lost place of light and legend): ‘A uniform

means training in the art of murder. Will my son have to kill somebody in the name of national pride?

It is a sentimental thought, perhaps; there may still be balm in Gilead. But somebody punched me in

the belly....’

Clearly, the socially conscious, liberal King has now emerged, if utilizing the flowery prose of

an undergrad (compare these and later sentiments with King’s Opinion column in the 16 November

1967 issue of this same newspaper21). Of course, his Hearts in Atlantis novella springs from this

very period.

May 22, 1969. One of the least important of these columns, this is an (admitted) diatribe against

a student nominee for the Board of Trustees of the University of Maine. King’s objection to the

nomination relates to the particular gentleman’s refusal to accept the result of not one, but two votes

at a meeting of the campus Coalition for Peace in Viet Nam. Threatening to withdraw from the

Coalition the offender managed to overturn the majority vote on the third attempt, which King saw as

‘blackmail of the most vulgar sort. ’22 We also learn that another march (‘the orderly march’) was

held on May 15th, with King in attendance.

June 12, 1969. Taking the beginning of summer as key to a lighter tone King gives a preview of

the ‘coming attractions, here are some of the things you can look forward to—or not look forward to

—in the Garbage Truck this summer....’ These were to include a ‘review of the new Johnny Cash

show. An article on what the Fogler Library has in the way of pornography—and it has a plenty good

supply’, movie reviews, ‘an article on the controversial direction pop music is heading in, a direction

pointed out pretty clearly by the Beatles’ and other groups.

June 20, 1969. During the summer months the university newspaper was re-titled The Maine

Summer Campus, and subsequent Garbage Truck columns up to, and including, 8 August 1969

appeared under this masthead.

In this first of the summer break columns King returns to satiric mode, claiming to deal in a Dear

Abby manner with letters sent to him by certain women (‘When girls look at some male faces they

wonder about motel rates. When they look at my face, they wonder how much I charge for

consultation.’) While marginally funny, and other than as example of the dry humor for which the man

is known, this piece adds little to our understanding of King or his work.

June 27, 1969. In this column King suggests beating the summer heat by turning on a fan, getting

a cold drink (‘lemonade, or even better, a nice cold Bud’), waiting for the afternoon thunderstorm and

then diving into one of four books he recommends. Three of these are important to a study of King

— The Dead Beat by Robert Bloch (King would dedicate Danse Macabre to this outstanding writer,

and pen what was effectively an obituary on his death23); The Shrinking Man by Richard Matheson

(this is one of the ten important horror books from the period 1950-80 King covers in Danse

Macabre); and, wait for it... Dracula (selling at the time in a Dell paperback for the princely sum of

75 cents). Of this last (and only a half dozen years before King’s homage, ‘Salem’s Lot would hit the

bookstores) he writes: ‘This book still remains the piece to read if you go for this sort of thing. One

might go so far as to call it a monster piece.’ The remaining book was The Coffin Things by Michael

Avallone (‘the summit of Mr. Avallone’s rather checkered career as a hack writer for the paperback

market.’)

The prescient of Garbage Truck’s readers may have sensed in this column a trend in King’s

reading interests. It closes in what would become classic King style when addressing his ‘Constant

Readers’: ‘So now you know how to beat the heat. Curl up beside your favorite headstone and cool it.

Just get home before dark.’

July 4, 1969. On 12 June King had promised a column on the ‘controversial direction pop music

is heading in’ and he delivers here, crediting the Beatles (‘only spottily good musical artists’) for

having ‘changed it all’—‘They have revolutionized hair styles, yanked the average girl’s hem-line up

a foot since 1957, become a moving symbol in the new drug culture, and have even been part of the

wedge that has been breaking ground for a new morality that would have seemed science-fictiony ten

years ago.’ King argues that ‘only recently’ had the Fab Four ‘begun to revolutionize their own field

—pop music’, re-introducing the blues-rock beat from the original rock-and-roll and evolving to

more interesting lyrics (‘obviously John Lennon is as mad as hell’). In the process of making his

argument he reveals an extensive and incisive knowledge of 60’s rock, ranging through its trends and

both its popular and more obscure bands and byways.

Here we see King in a mode he would follow for the next three plus decades—interested in,

analyzing and delivering pop culture. He ends, ‘Rock has come back home, and maybe this time it

really has grown up.’

July 11, 1969. When talking about inspiration for his tales King often mentions the ‘What if’

factor—‘A lady under the canopy was on her cell phone and the doorman was getting someone a cab.

I thought, what if she got this message on her cell phone that she could not deny and she had to attack

everyone she saw—and she started with the doorman, she ripped his throat out’24, was the inspiration

for Cell, for example. And there it was, plain as day in the hectic, wonderful heyday of change we

now view with such nostalgia—‘The man’s name is Neil Armstrong. If all goes well, by the end of

this month he and Buzz Aldrin will have walked where no man has walked before—on the surface of

the moon...But what if—/ And right here, a voice from the attic of my mind speaks up.’

In classic King fiction style he relates his ‘what if’ was ‘a strange dream’ he’d had: ‘I was

sitting in my living-room in this dream, smoking a cigarette, drinking a beer...and watching the first

live TV transmission from Apollo 11.../ Then it all changes. Fear grips me. Fear is reflected in the

faces of the men out there, beyond the point where anyone can possibly offer succor. All rationalism

is gone from that face. Only madness is left. And I know—somehow I know—what it is they fear in

this dream. Not little green men. A huge tideless wind has swept down on them and their puny ship, a

cyclopean gale from no place that is sweeping them in to the gaping, germless maw of deep space

itself.../ This is where the dream ends. I wake up....’

King puts this fear down as the same as those living in the time of Columbus—fear of the

unknown, but ‘… I only hope there is nothing waiting for us in the dark.’ For forty years King has

taken his ‘what ifs’, his dreams, and individual visions and used them as inspiration to build a mighty

catalog of fictions, for which we say thankya.

July 18, 1969. The Nitty Gritty Society (see the column for April 24, 1969) returns in this piece,

to hand ‘out its awards for the coolest movies of the last twenty-five years’ or so. This is a favorite

pastime in King’s non-fiction (see our chapter, Opinion—Radio, Music, Film and Television for

more examples). The Gritty Awards (or ‘Gritties’) include: ‘ Best line delivered by a male actor:’ a

tie between Mickey Rooney in The Last Mile, for “Looks like I just shot a priest”; and Warren Beatty

in Bonnie and Clyde after knocking back Faye Dunaway’s advances: “I don’t like boys, if that’s what

you think!” The same award for female actors: “Is something the matter, John?” by Marla English to

Lon Chaney, Jr., in The Werewolf, as he begins the change.

Now the sarcasm really cuts in—Donald O’Connor for Best Actor in the Francis the Talking

Mule movies; Barbara Stanwyck as Best Actress for her ability to fall downstairs in every picture

she ever made; and Elizabeth Taylor for ‘ Most Nauseating Actress’, she looks like ‘she just crawled

back in to the land of the living after spending two weeks with a sex-crazed python’ (no Michael

Jackson jokes please!). For King and Dark Tower fans this entry will hold great interest: ‘ Best Lousy

Movie: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1967)25, mostly for Clint Eastwood’s cigar, which would

have given a lesser man cancer of the lip two Italian Westerns before. Also for director Sergio

Leone, who has a talent for finding more ugly extras than anyone on the face of the earth—and zeroing

his wide-screen lens in on their beard-speckled faces for long, loving, drooly close-ups.’

On the ‘serious side’ the ten best movies of the period were, in the opinion of the Nitty Grittys:

Romeo and Juliet26, Point Blank, The Hustler, Psycho (‘Hitchcock’s best comedy of terrors’), TheLast Mile, Picnic27, Rebel Without a Cause, High Noon and Mildred Pierce. After listing these nine King left the tenth to the reader, suggesting they drop him a line—‘We’ll do a column on it. Might be

interesting.’

July 25, 1969. Freshman Orientation reminds King of his own first days at UMO (in 1966),

although he now feels ‘like a dinosaur—a large hairy dinosaur that may have out-lived its time’. He

recalls, ‘There I was, all alone in Room 203 of Gannett Hall, clean-shaven, neatly dressed, as green

as apples in August...I was sure my roommate would turn out to be a freako, or even worse,

hopelessly more With It than I...Those were the days, all right. You could wake up in the morning

without having your mouth taste like the bottom of a birdcage....’ and continues to reminisce on the

lost days of respect for convention, along with the misconceptions of freshmen. ‘I remember my first

date up here. I shaved three times in twenty minutes, and that was just to call her up and ask her.’

August 1, 1969. Uniquely for Garbage Truck this column was reprinted in the newspaper (in

that case reverting to the academic year title of The Maine Campus), in the September 25, 1969

issue.

The column features a diatribe against the Pope (Paul VI) and, at first glance, birth control. King

says the Pope is the last person on earth he would want to be (he could even stand being Richard

Nixon—which, considering King’s withering opinion of that particular President is saying something

—as ‘anyone who eats meatloaf with catsup every Thursday night can’t have too much on his mind.’)

According to King’s Methodist turned campus liberal worldview, ‘Nobody likes the Pope; not even

his own priests like him much.../...the main reason I’d hate to be Pope isn’t because he’s unpopular.

It’s because I think he’s probably right. I think birth control demeans the act of sex and makes it

fundamentally purposeless. Sterilized sex is a little like jumping in your car...and driving like hell in

neutral....’ Leaving religion aside King questions the ‘moral unfairness’ of who exactly is using the

pill—not poor women with large families, but the middle-class—he goes on to agree (tongue

possibly, but not obviously, in cheek) with Norman Mailer (‘a writer for who I have a great deal of

respect’) who is for legalized, no-holds barred abortion but not birth control. King appears to argue

this is a matter of morality—‘In the last analysis, it seems to me that birth control is a little gutless.

Babies are serious business. It doesn’t seem right to laugh them away with a little round plastic case.

So, if the population must be controlled, it seems to me that legal murder—abortion—is the only

really moral way it can be done. If nothing else, it would force the person involved to come to a

serious decision about birth control—and death control.’ It is probably columns like this that have

made King determined not to allow reprints of the Garbage Truck columns for a wider audience.

This one is a hot potato, and can be read from different perspectives, making it dangerous, especially

in today’s America—near fatally divided as it is on ethical fault-lines, abortion the San Andreas of

them all.

August 8, 1969. The previous weekend King had read his columns in previous issues of the

Campus and formed the view some ‘of the stuff is good; some bad; a great deal seems to be rather

indifferent’, but notes he has been gratified by the general response—‘so many people seem to like

the column.’ He then decides to thank people he owes ‘an awful lot to’ for ‘things in general.’ These

include Maureen Babicki (King’s high school girlfriend—‘the most beautiful girl in the world’);

‘Carroll F. Terrell of the English department, who is an excellent critic’; Caroline Dodge, ‘who

turned me on to Tolkien’ (Dark Tower fans say thankya to Caroline); James Bishop of the English

Department (‘the most human and the most vital faculty member I have ever met’), and of whom he

argues proves ‘something good could come out of Old Town’ (also Tabitha King’s home); Dave

Bright (‘with whom I may some day share a cell in Leavenworth’—Bright announced at one anti-war

rally he’d rather serve there than in Vietnam); and Burt Hatlen (‘who challenges the intellect with

strength, vigor, and enthusiasm’). He closes, ‘Somebody told me the other day that he found this

column interesting but overly cynical. Well, I never meant it to be overly cynical—anyone who likes

the Pope can’t be all bad—right? If it has seemed that way, I’m sorry. I’ve got lots of reasons to be

anything but cynical. You just read through a lot of them.’

September 18, 1969. King returns after a six-week break with a light-hearted piece addressed

to that year’s freshman intake and which is one of the least important here. King advises that students

are now out on their own, in a position to test their judgment and about to suffer the stresses of

campus life, as a result of which they will likely change greatly. The following week’s column was a

reprint of the August 1st piece.

October 3, 1969. This week King explores campus student groups, finding members of All-

Maine Women, when ‘en masse’, to be ‘a little frightening’, projecting as they did ‘an aggressive air

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