Brush With Local Greatness, Vol. 3 : Jerry Haynes

I saw Jerry Haynes, aka for local Dal­las kids in the 1970’s, Mr. Pep­per­mint, in the park­ing lot of the Albertson’s talk­ing to an older man. At first I thought, “Hey, it’s Mr. Pep­per­mint.” Sec­ondly, I thought, “Wait a minute — he must live around here.”

Mr. Pep­per­mint was the host of Pep­per­mint Place, a local kids show in Dal­las that showed in the area from 1975 to 1995. Mr. Pep­per­mint, wear­ing his trade­mark white and red striped blazer, and his side­kick Muf­fin the Bear enter­tained me daily when I was a kid. Think of it as a local ver­sion of Cap­tain Kan­ga­roo, if you will.

Years ago when I worked at a book­store (where I met Bizarro cre­ator Dan Piraro) Haynes would drop by and browse the shelves. He was fairly hippie-ish, often with longish hair. Always quiet, he hardly ever spoke to any­body, which I never took as a sign of arro­gance but more of shy­ness. He was just a very unas­sum­ing, very tall guy.

He’s also is the father of Gibby Haynes, the lead singer of the But­t­hole Surfers. I remem­ber at the time that I learned this (from the news­pa­per, no less!) and they called his group the ‘B Surfers’. Ah…the naive quaint 1980’s. How we miss your cen­so­ri­ous ways.

But back to my story.

So as I’m get­ting the gro­cerys in the car and get­ting one of the kids into the car, I see him walk­ing behind the car. Where was he going? To his car, a green Ford Tau­rus. How un-pepperminty of him.

He gets in, I start head­ing home, he leaves and I get it into my head to fol­low him. I thought if he was going in the direc­tion of my house I’d fol­low along, but if he diverted from my pre-determined course and devi­ated, I’d break off the chase, resolved to never know where he lived. But when he started dri­ving I saw that he was going the way that I had intended to go in the first place. Very interesting.

So I gunned it and caught up with him. He drove really slow. And strangely, on the wrong side of the street.

But he kept going the same way I would have gone home. And he turned right where I would have turned right, and then he turned left onto a street near mine. Not want­ing him to become alarmed, I broke off the chase at this point. But I picked it up again when I real­ized that the street he was going down existed for only one block, and if he turned there he prob­a­bly lived on that block.

And he did. Dri­ving down that street slowly, I saw him park the car and get out and go into a house not 3 blocks from mine. Six tenths of a mile. How crazy is that?