of equal parts Colgate toothpaste, Ban Roll-On Deodorant, chewing-gum-flavored self-righteousness,
and a kind of hysterical virginity....’ Among other groups King says SDS 28 has ‘an air of jovial
insanity’; The Maine Outing Club ‘exudes brawn and clean-living charm’; the ‘sole purpose of Maine
Masque’ was to protect itself from the Campus drama critic and his ‘mad tirades’. King’s ‘pet
peeves’ though are the administration-oriented groups such as the Senior Skulls. Fraternities would
have been included in this list had not King noted an attempt to shed ‘the I-Am-Superior-To-The-
Rest-Of-You-Slobs image’. Condemning elitism in no uncertain terms King writes, ‘But it’s a shame
—a dirty, bitter shame—that the All-Maine Women, Senior Skulls and the rest, have won their
tawdry symbols in such a mean and pointless way, that they feel compelled to wear them, and that the
prize has proved so ultimately meaningless.’ One suspects the older, wiser King is quite a bit more
tolerant, or at least understanding of difference; this column reflects the ‘outsider’ in the young King
and, perhaps, his background as a hard-scrabble rural boy, making good against the odds while
observing the ‘born-to-rule’ mentality of these particular campus elites.
October 9, 1969. King reviews the seminal movie Easy Rider here, correctly identifying that,
‘It states a purely American situation in purely American terms. And, for me, at least, the most
startling thing about the picture was the way it points up the gap between generations in America
today.’ Like many movies that challenge and change mass-thinking Easy Rider is not as easily viewed
today as by those living the societal context it portrayed but it has not dated in quite the way other
controversial movies like Kramer vs. Kramer have. King says of the sudden intrusion of a drug
culture into mainstream American movies that the most shocking aspect is not the drugs, but the fact
that in the movie ‘drugs are as much a part of life as cigarettes, the automobile, and the corner
drugstore. If you aren’t into the drug scene, this calm acceptance comes as a neck-snapping surprise.
Nobody preaches drugs in Easy Rider, drugs are just there. And the inevitable conclusion is that they
are here to stay.’ Prescient, huh?
King also argues the violence in the movie is but a result of highly realistic clashes of culture:
‘The resultant tension and impending violence, the sense of total alienation between young and old, is
familiar to any young person who wears longer hair or sports a beard.’29 He opines that the movie
presents sex as being ‘all over the place’ and ‘free’, meaning the cultural clash here is when Dennis
Hopper and Peter Fonda’s characters find it unusual to pay for the pleasure when ‘everyone else is
giving it away....’
King felt, ‘Most adults aren’t going to like Easy Rider...And the kids aren’t going to be able to
understand their reaction.’ King says one character, eleven years from seeing the actor play his own
Jack Torrance on screen, is ‘… played with magnificent verve by Jack Nicholson…’ Considering
King’s unique view, originally an observer of American culture, then as reflector of it in his fiction,
and finally as creator, this is a very important column and it is a great loss it has not received wider
circulation.
October 16, 1969. 30 Here King returns to his October 3rd theme of campus life, claiming that,
apart from the aforementioned SDS, the Student Action Corps and the Student Senate (very active in
anti-War politics at the time and sponsors of the previous day’s Moratorium), ‘this is a pretty
apathetic campus.’ King tells his presumed apathetic readers that while they’ve been watching TV a
picket-line has been operating at a local market, trying to get California grapes off the shelves, in
support of striking grape-pickers in that state. Another example of King’s growing social
enlightenment, the column cogently argues for improved conditions for the largely Mexican-American
workers who performed such labor, in poor conditions on extremely low wages. King asks students
to sacrifice but one-and-a-half hours of their time two nights a week to the cause. Piqued, King claims
(probably another example of why he does not want these columns reprinted) that both the store
owner and those customers who cross the picket line ‘look like fat cats’ and that customers who shop
there ‘make somebody hungry every time they buy a steak or a frozen dinner or even a pack of
cigarettes, you wonder if they’re evil, pig-headed, or just plain stupid.’ For such a logical thinker,
this last appears to be a major lapse.
October 23, 1969. For the only time in one of these columns King writes of one of his great
passions, baseball (other such works are included in our Baseball chapter). This loving testimony
(‘Baseball’s a groove’) ends with King describing a sign he’d seen in the fourth game of the World
Series, reading ‘WHEEEEEEEEE!! It’s the same way I feel when I have a slice of Mom’s apple pie
with milk, or listen to little kids say the Pledge of Allegiance. It’s part of tradition. It’s something in
this dirty old world that’s just good.’ The piece celebrates the New York Mets victory in the Series
(King claiming to have been a fan since the club’s inauguration—not surprising as he was later a
card-carrying New York Yankees hater) and perhaps the best part is King’s hilarious evaluation of
events from the bumbling on-field career of Marvelous Marv Throneberry, a Mets first baseman
during the club’s initial wilderness years (according to King, he once ran from home directly to third
base on an easy triple and was called out for leaving the baseline).
Ki ng’s No Vietnamese Ever Called Me Nigger was also published in the Moratorium
supplement of this edition (see our Opinion—Radio, Music, Film and Television chapter).
October 30, 1969. The Nitty Grittys return here (see the 24 April 1969 and 18 July 1969
columns), worried about how quiet the campus had become. To their knowledge no one had been
pelted, no angry delegations had descended on the bookstore and the Maine football team had even
won some games! As ‘we of the Nitty Gritty, etc do not plan to stand by and watch peace creep
insidiously’ over the campus, they have ideas, ‘which you must promise not to breathe to a soul.’ The
new Dean, ‘consistently fair’ and with ‘an active interest in student affairs and problems’ must go—
driven out by an Olive Bomb, the explosion of which would pelt him with ripe olives and drive him
to a mental breakdown, allowing the return of the previous Dean, ‘who was immune not only to
coated olives, but to sour grapes as well.’ Next on the list is the newspaper’s editor, David Bright,
apparently planning a reversion to conservative values who, it was planned, would be locked up with
the editorial writer and cartoonist of the Bangor Daily News31 (thus curing ‘him of his nasty
tendencies’). The English Department, for planning a ‘POETRY!!’ festival; and the University
President are also targeted in this satirical piece.
November 7, 1969. 32 In this early role of music critic, King reviews his ‘best albums of the
year’: a tie between Dylan’s Nashville Skyline and Abbey Road by the Beatles (their best ‘since
Sergeant Pepper, which was probably the greatest rock (?) album ever cut’). His best singles are:
The Ballad of John and Yoko (by the Beatles—‘a fabulous look into the turmoiled mind of John
Lennon, and his own brilliant riposte at those who condemn his rather strange relationship with Yoko
Ono’); Simon and Garfunkel’s The Boxer; Sugar Sugar by the Archies (‘Okay...it may even be a (sic)
baby-bopper stuff. But what’s wrong with that? You just have to dig it’); and Creedence Clearwater
Revival’s Green River (‘the strongest piece of bayou rock they’ve ever done’). The worst albums
and singles are also panned.
November 13, 1969. King starts this column stating that no one likes the cops—from the New
Left, through the Supreme Court to average Joes with parking tickets. So, who does: ‘Well, I do.’
King expresses his frustrations with the New Left’s portrayal of all cops as ‘pigs’ and their defense
even of those who shoot them. He then makes a cogent case that they are grossly underpaid and have
to work dealing with such appalling things as ‘pre-teen girls who have been raped, mothers who have
beaten their babies to death...covering maimed and burst bodies after traffic accidents’ and so on. In
this ‘dirty old world’, while the New Left ‘exist with their heads in the rosy clouds of Marxism,
socialism, liberalism, urban reform, social reform, world reform, and spiritual reform, the cop has
got...to make sure the rest of us aren’t robbed, raped, kidnapped, conned or killed.’ He then
recognizes there are bad cops (for instance, ‘in Alabama, where some...black people (and whites,
too) have been beat on’). ‘The wonder is there aren’t more bad ones.’ Closing, he says: ‘Okay, that’s
it. But the next time you open your mouth to talk about pigs, you better have a specific one in mind and
stop making these stupid and ugly generalizations.’ Here we see the thinking King telling it like it is—
despite likely disagreement from many of his radicalized readers.
This piece was reprinted as The Black Cat column in the Rockland, Maine Rockland Courier-
Gazette for November 22, 1969, along with a letter from a fellow UMO student, William A.
Philbrook. In a letter to the editor published in The Maine Campus for December 11, 1969 and
headed King Cat, King took great exception to what he regarded as misrepresentation of his views by
Philbrook (for full detail, see our Letters to the Editor, Guest Columns chapter). Rocky Wood
secured a copy of this reprint from the Rockland Public Library’s microfilm files in September 2005.
Before that the date of publication was unknown in the King community and copies had never
circulated. Those interested in securing a copy may visit the Public Library, which currently does not
charge for printing from the microfilm.
December 4, 1969. Back in satiric mode King recognizes that while everyone thinks the world
is in trouble—each for different reasons, ‘It’s a little bit frightening to wake up in the middle of the
night and realize that you may be the only one on earth’ to know why—in this case, because nobody is
drinking water. The substances they do drink (a range of brand-names; the ‘Commies are drinking
vodka’) are damaging their urinary tracts and therefore, ‘Let’s ban everything but good old American
down-home water!’ If President Nixon and other power brokers and celebrities could be induced to
drink plain water they might end up embracing—‘So let’s get together right now. Remember: / Today
the urinary tracts—tomorrow the world!’ Little more need be said.
December 11, 1969. This column presents King’s ‘first annual’ trivia contest, ‘because
absolutely nobody asked for it,’ and offers as first prize a tour of Veazie (a town bordering Orono and
likely the model for the Cleaves Mills of The Dead Zone), ending ‘at my apartment, where I will
regale you with anecdotes out of my colorful past’ and, as second prize, a ‘hamburger with me at
Farnsworth’s Cafe’ (this Orono fixture, still under Farnsworth family management and serving value-
for-money burgers, is now Pat’s Pizza). The questions matter little here (except they were serious and
not jocular) excepting one: ‘What was The Fugitive’s real name?’ King clearly enjoyed and retained
his interest in this classic TV series, as he wrote the Introduction to The Fugitive Recaptured: The
30th Anniversary Companion to the Television Classic.33
This edition also carried King’s letter to the editor, King Cat, mentioned earlier in relation to a
reprint of his November 13, 1969 column in a small-town newspaper ‘down-state’.
December 18, 1969. In this column King delves into what was once known as Fortean
phenomena34—unexplained incidents. Among these are disappearances—Judge Crater from a New
York City street35 and Ambrose Bierce (author of The Devil’s Dictionary) in Mexico; a rain of frogs
(the feature of King’s short story Rainy Season); UFOs (see Dreamcatcher); telekinesis (Carrie);
and ghosts. Odd though these may be, King argues that ‘it’s probably nonsense’ (although he goes on
to indicate he doesn’t really believe that) but this is not the real significance of this piece.
In one of the most important Garbage Truck paragraphs to the study of King we read the
following:
“In the early 1800’s a whole sect of Shakers, a rather strange religious persuasion at best,
disappeared from their village (Jeremiah’s Lot) in Vermont. The town remains uninhabited to this
day. On the night before one of my high school friends died in a car accident I dreamed of a hideous
man with a scarred face hanging from a black gibbet against a green sky. The incident sticks in my
mind because the hanged man was wearing a card around his neck bearing this friend’s name. I woke
with a sweaty premonition that on the night before I kicked off I would dream the dream again, only
this time the card would bear my name.”
First, this is obviously a precursor to the novel ’Salem’s Lot and its related story Jerusalem’s
Lot (in the short story the entire population of the town disappeared; in the novel the town was
abandoned after an infestation of vampires). Also, in the novel, we read that all the residents of
Momson, Vermont disappeared in the summer of 1923—in early drafts of the novel the town infested
by vampires was actually Momson, Maine. Clearly this concept fascinated King but research turns up
no actual story or even urban legend relating to a Jeremiah’s Lot, although there are plenty of
disappearing population stories—real, hoaxes and fictional—in US records.
Second, the dream. In Danse Macabre King has this to say of a dream he later used in a famous
scene (or, as we shall learn, two): ‘… the most vivid dream I can recall came to me when I was
about eight. In this dream I saw the body of a hanged man dangling from the arm of a scaffold on a
hill. Rooks perched on the shoulders of the corpse, and behind it was a noxious green sky, boiling
with clouds. This corpse bore a sign: ROBERT BURNS. But when the wind caused the corpse to turn
in the air, I saw that it was my face—rotted and picked by the birds, but obviously mine. And then the
corpse opened its eyes and looked at me...Sixteen years later, I was able to use the dream as one of
the central images in my novel Salem’s Lot. I just changed the name of the corpse to Hubie Marsten.’
Followers of the Dark Tower Cycle will also recognize in the first part of this dream the hanging of
Hax, the traitorous cook in The Gunslinger, meaning King has actually mined the one dream at least
twice.
Compellingly written, in the style readers worldwide would come to know, it would be of value
to fans and researchers everywhere should King allow this column to be reprinted at some point.
January 8, 1970. ‘So there are your 60’s. / Put ’em in the memory books, folks. They’re all
gone. But it was some kind of decade, while it lasted.’ King says if you try ‘very, very hard’ you can
probably remember ‘what you looked like and thought like and dressed like in 1960’: he ‘was a
thirteen-year-old kid running around with a flat-top haircut.’ Our favorite author had spent his
‘decade ending holiday at a dance in my home town’, where a friend suggested a time traveler from
1960 would be shocked at the decadence of the later time, and the change that had been wrought in
that short period.
King claims the three landmark movies of the 60’s to have been The Wild Bunch, Bonnie and
Clyde and The Graduate; notes the movies had introduced the new rating system of G, M, R and X ‘to
cope with the problems of a new sexual expression’; and points out that, ‘isolated from our disturbing
times’ many movies, books (such as Portnoy’s Complaint) and much art ‘contain many indicators of
a culture that is going insane.’
January 15, 1970. The front cover of this edition is the famous ‘public service poster from the
makers of The Maine Campus’36 of a long-haired, crazed-looking King, brandishing a shotgun over
the demand, ‘Study, Dammit!!’
The column inside continues in a surreal vein, with King offering his ‘last Will and Testament’
(dating it ‘this 12th day of January, 1970’ he describes himself as ‘having no debts outstanding, never
having been convicted of a felony or misdemeanor, a resident of Durham, Maine, and freeholder in
that Town, registered voter’, etc. and signs it ‘Stephen E. King’ with a cross for ‘His Mark’). In full
voice he leaves the University English Department his assurance of a recommendation ‘should It
decide to move to another school’ and says he is grateful that ‘It managed to stay out of my way so
successfully.’ He leaves his ‘reams of yellow journalism’ to TheMaine Campus; to friend Flip
Thompson his car (‘which he has pushed many times’); and so on through a range of friends,
celebrities and even the despised (at the time) Bangor Daily News (to whom ‘I bequeath my
landlady’)! How about this clearly satiric line: ‘To Norman Mailer, Phillip Roth, and John Updike, I
bequeath the hope they will eventually learn to write like me.’
February 5, 1970. King returns to a critique of then current television (an almost eternal theme
for the man, who seems to devour American culture) saying it ‘is more hideous than ever…’ One
bright spot was the ABC Movie of the Week (ABC would be the network to carry most made-for-TV
King movies and mini-series), including The Immortal, ‘the best science-fiction drama I have ever
seen on television.’ Of the better shows King likes Mannix, ‘ Gunsmoke continues good, and
Raymond Burr as Ironside is often superb.’ Panned shows include Bewitched and The Flying Nun.
‘Television is a marvelous invention—its potential is endless, the possibilities fascinating. But it is
wet and sick and fat.’
This edition also carried King’s letter to the editor, Cancelled Stamp (for more detail see our
Letters to the Editor, Guest Columns chapter), which refers to the front cover poster of the man
himself in the previous week’s issue.
February 12, 1970. ‘It just makes me feel angry and sick.’ What does? King is furious in this
column about what he sees as hypocritical criticisms of his generation, such as of their long hair:
‘Can you imagine a country supposedly based on freedom of expression telling people they can’t
grow hair on their head or their face? Since when have we descended to the point we care more about
what people look like than what they think....’ he writes and uses Albert Einstein, Abe Lincoln and
David Ben Gurion as examples of those who would be replaced by the likes of James Earl Ray, Lee
Harvey Oswald, Eichmann and George Rockwell in such circumstances. He pans then President
Nixon’s ‘silent majority’ (some of the criticism here is over the top, perhaps another example of why
King does not allow reproduction of these columns). He points out the absurdity of a society that is
high on booze but bans drugs; and one that virtually lionizes gun-based violence but finds sex and
nudity obscene.
Frustrated, King concludes, ‘At a time when society needs its young more than ever before—the
new ideas, the new life-styles, the fresh approach—this same society seems hysterically bent on
perpetuating its own mordant mould. I don’t understand. But I do know this bull won’t go down with
me.’ King was right—his generation did usher in a new liberal social attitude and America did need
it. What King later saw as that same generation’s long-term failings comes in for explicit criticism in
hi s Why We’re in Vietnam short story from the Hearts in Atlantis collection. The great divide
between social mores continues in America today—under the crass but somehow accurate term,
‘Culture Wars’.
February 19, 1970. In this piece King is encouraging students to attend the free weekly horror
movies on campus. Interestingly he tells us that the previous Sunday37 he’d seen Dracula, with Bela
Lugosi38: ‘I was delighted...I’d never seen the film, but now I can understand why it has spawned so
many imitations.’ He recommends the upcoming Frankenstein (with Boris Karloff); Charles Laughton
i n The Hunchback of Notre Dame; The Pit and the Pendulum (‘this free-wheeling adaptation of
Poe’s story is probably better than any ever done’)39; and The Haunting, ‘to my mind one of the most
frightening (and artful) movies ever made.’
King had previously enjoyed showings of The Sand Pebbles with Steve McQueen, Rosemary’s
Baby and Psycho. He also suggests further themes to the powers determining which movies would
appear—‘some of the old gangster films, Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, Fred McMurray—or the
classic Westerns like High Noon and Shane. I’ve even got guts enough to suggest an Audie Murphy
festival....’
February 26, 1970. Staying with the silver screen this week King recommends George Kennedy
(‘a fine and honest actor’) in Tick…Tick…Tick, showing at the Brewer Cinema. For some reason he
states Robert Duvall plays a role as Kennedy’s ex-deputy, although research shows he did not appear
(he also misspells Fredric March’s first name, understandably as Frederic; and the movie is normally
listed as tick…tick...tick). He says the movie ‘treats some of the problems of white-black relations in
the south with clarity and humanity’, and calls it ‘part of a dying breed—just a plain old good movie.’
March 19, 1970. This column is unique in that King reprints a letter he’d written (most likely to
his long-time girlfriend, Maureen Babicki, as it begins ‘Dear Maureen’) on February 16, 1969 (‘the
day of The Big Snowstorm’) but never posted (‘I don’t mail about 90% of my correspondence, which
is probably just as well’). As there’d also been a huge snowstorm the previous Sunday, he thought it
fitting. King says he hates snow and winter, ‘but something like this just overwhelms you, makes you
love it...maybe every snow-hater harbors a secret love for big blizzards.’ This scenario would appear
in King’s storytelling—most particularly in Storm of the Century, The Reach and one of his most
famous novels. King also writes, ‘…in my head which is always filled with middling-strange
thoughts’; and, in evocative description, of the isolation and slow death suffered by an imaginary
group snowed-in on campus (resonating with imagery that would later appear in the aforementioned
novel, The Shining); and this: ‘In a lot of my writing I’ve been worried about the morbid, about
Things that Lurk. Maybe those things—my big snowstorm, for instance—are only part of an urge to
externalize the internal monster in us all.’ An important column to King research, this is one that could
certainly do with a wider circulation.
March 26, 1970. This column deals with what is now the arcane campus education structure of
the time—King says he’s out of touch having ‘been student teaching for the last eight weeks’ but has
opinions of his own. Pressure is on he says (as a result of a moratorium) but not to destroy the current
University structure or to ‘headhunt’ for individual faculty victims, nor to wreck specific colleges, but
to find ways ‘to make the University better.’ His ‘particular hobby-horse is the question of
requirements’ and he calls for the axing of ‘this particular form of campus insanity’ and goes on to
explain his reasoning, which is of little interest here.
April 9, 1970. In one of the least important of these pieces King wonders what would happen if
campus personalities replaced stars on certain TV programs, which would then be moved to Orono.
April 16, 1970. Here King tells of his change from Republican supporter (he says that in May of
196940 he was ‘fully behind Richard Nixon’) to Independent—‘I have not disowned the Republican
Party, but last fall since it seemed that the Republican Party had disowned me, I recanted and
registered in my home town as an Independent. This may seem like a small step to you, but to
establishment pro-American me, it was a major step. I have always been a conservative and I remain
conservative but my, how like a radical that makes a person seem in the America of 1970...How did I
become a scummy radical bastard? Well, I started out with the belief that America was and should
again be a country of individuals, a country where one isn’t the lonliest (sic) number but the most
important. This doesn’t seem like a radical idea—it is the basis of the Declaration of Independence,
the Constitution, and even the Articles of Confederation—but in 1970 it seems to make you a scummy
radical bastard.’
King argues this means ‘you can’t accept the draft...that you use whatever stimulants amuse
you...you must read, live and decide on all questions of morality without the benefit’ of a list of
community organizations such as ‘B’Nai B’Rith, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the
Catholic Church....’ He says America could be a good country again when ‘we realize that the real
American Way (if there ever was such a thing) is to think and feel for yourself, not to leave it up to
some juiceless fool in Washington.’ King here reflects the old-style Yankee Republicanism in which
he was raised; and notes both the solidity of his core values, and the move toward the different
political accommodation he found necessary to his adult life.
April 30, 1970. In a fluffy and now largely irrelevant piece King talks about the American
‘sport’ of girl watching, gives some tips and a basic rating system. It seems this week, in one of his
last columns, King had run out of much to say.
May 7, 1970. In the penultimate regular column King writes, ‘Well, this is almost it—the
garbage truck is almost out of gas. / Barring accident, death, or insanity, I expect to graduate in a few
weeks.’ King relates some of the political events of his childhood—the ‘constant, vague anxiety about
the Russians’; the 1956 Hungarian revolt against Communism; Sputnik; and the Francis Gary
Powers/U2 affair, along with his unquestioning pro-American approach to them, that is until he found
his Government lying to him over Powers (‘I can remember being angry at my country’) and began to
consider how he could ‘detect the lie’ if offered by government or politician, yet ‘I love my country
as much as anyone else. Love, by the way, is exactly the right word here; because it seems more and
more that this is an irrational feeling which flies in the face of all logic and sense.’
King claims here of Sputnik, ‘I was waiting in the barber shop to get a haircut when that
happened.’ Later, in Danse Macabre, he would relate being in a movie theatre at the time. One
wonders which is correct while excusing one of America’s great writers of fiction from fictionalizing
his own memories, most likely without realizing it, from time to time.
A special edition of The Maine Campus, dated May 8, 1970 and titled The Paper, carried a
satirical piece by King under the title, A Possible Fairy Tale. 41
May 21, 1970. This column, the last to appear as King’s Garbage Truck, is the only one King
has given permission to be reprinted outside The Maine/Summer Campus, for its appearance in
Maine, the University of Maine alumni magazine (Fall, 1989).
King announces his upcoming graduation (and ‘birth into the real world’). At the time he
weighed 207 pounds, was 6 foot 3 inches tall (‘I didn’t know they piled it that high, either!’) and had
a ‘hairy’ complexion. His favorite films of the time were They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, Bonnie
and Clyde, M*A*S*H, The Wild Angels, Attack of the Giant Leeches and The Ballad of Cable
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