All posts in Brush With Local Greatness

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?

When I got to Ken Bethea’s house, I didn’t know where I was. My son had got­ten invited to a birth­day party for a lit­tle girl in his Mother’s Day Out pro­gram and all I saw was her first name, sans last. The house, located near ours, is prob­a­bly 40 years old and is homey, but it was the lit­tle things that I started to notice. Old 97’s posters, framed over an old piano, were the first clue. A gui­tar in the cor­ner, pic­tures of a guy that I rec­og­nized from CD inserts. But the dad of the lit­tle girl in the MDO pro­gram looked older, a lot older, and I sur­mised that his brother was Ken Bethea, the gui­tarist for one of the few musi­cal acts to break out of the Dal­las club scene, the Old 97’s.

My wife, the ballsy one, asked the dad if his brother was in the Old 97’s.

“I don’t have a brother,” he said, sort of stand­off­ishly. “And I’m in the Old 97’s.”

So that was it. The pic­tures were of Ken and his wife, but before the gray­ing hair. Case solved!

He was genial enough. While we both chomped pizza and cake we talked about “Heroes” and a group watch­ing party that a local comic book shop puts on at the Mag­no­lia every Mon­day night. He talked about a Chili’s ad that they had done (a lot of money for one day’s work) and were happy with and how they were going to tour the fol­low­ing week. Maybe it’s just the way he talks, but he kind of had that “bask in my glow” way of speak­ing, and some of the other dads who were there were giv­ing him those puppy dog eyes, which I thought was kinda gay, but, think­ing about it, Ken has attained a dream that all men at some point in their lives dream — he plays gui­tar in a band that tours and puts out albums that you can buy on Ama­zon. And the band is mar­gin­ally famous.

I wasn’t going to tell Ken that I had all of their albums up until Fight Songs (which bor­dered on being too poppy for my tastes) and sing their songs loudly as I drive because I didn’t want to be one of those peo­ple that slob­bers all over celebri­ties. He’s not flashy like lead singer Rhett Miller, who I remem­ber from high school when he went to ESD and dated a girl in my class. It looks like Ken leads a pretty sim­ple life, with his wife and 2 kids. We just chat­ted and it was alright. Pretty nice guy.

It ended kind of weird though. I have one other tan­gen­tial link to Ken — he dated a friend of mine’s wife. Not when they were mar­ried, of course, but before all of the mat­ri­mony stuff. When he found out that we knew him through our friend, he started telling a story to us about when he dated her. Ken said it was dif­fi­cult going out with her, since he had the band and would be back in Dal­las for a week before head­ing out on the road again for another month or so and he didn’t really know if he should call her his girl­friend or not. It all ended badly and he felt more than a lit­tle respon­si­ble for the whole mess, which, accord­ing to our friend, he did cre­ate. He said to say hi to her when we saw her.

When you know these peo­ple as peo­ple the high sheen of what they do seems to come off a lit­tle bit and you real­ize that the peo­ple that Enter­tain­ment Tonight and gos­sip rags hold up as famous are just peo­ple who want to have lives also, and they screw up rela­tion­ships and stuff like that too.

But he does play a pretty mean gui­tar. And I like the pil­low that says “Buenos Dias” on it in their house. Where can I get one of those?

About 12 years ago I was work­ing at the Book­stop near the Inwood the­ater in Dal­las and it was my first real job out of col­lege. I was a super­vi­sor there, and one of the things we would do, and if you’ve been into any Barnes & Noble you’ll know this, was put out staff rec­om­men­da­tions. I had rec­om­mended some Bizarro comic strip books in the past, and one night while work­ing the cash reg­is­ter a woman came and paid for her books with a check that said it was from Dan and (Some­body) Piraro. Don’t remem­ber her name.

Dan Piraro was the cre­ator of the Bizarro comic strip, and I knew that the name wasn’t very com­mon, so I care­fully asked, “Is this the Dan Piraro we all know and love?” And she answered that yes it was. Dan’s wife called him over and I said how much I liked his comic and he thanked me. They left, but later I put out another staff rec­om­men­da­tion of “Best of Bizarro, Vol­ume 1″. The card that I put with the book said, “If Dan Piraro is cool he will sign these.” And he obvi­ously was cool, because he did sign them, all of them. I of course snatched one of the auto­graphed copies up. Still have it, too.

He didn’t look like the pic­ture I’ve included at the time, he looked much more eccen­tric, with long curly hair and a goa­tee. The pic­ture next to this makes him almost look Dad-like.

The next time I saw him in our store he was buy­ing a “Do Your Own Divorce in Texas” book. I hope that wasn’t con­cern­ing the woman who’d called him over to say hi to me.

UPDATE :

On April 9 of this year I got up the gump­tion and wrote Dan from the email address given off of his website –

Dan,
About 12 years ago I was work­ing at the Book­stop near the Inwood the­ater in Dal­las and knew that you occa­sion­ally came into our store. I had set out a staff rec­om­men­da­tion of your Best of Bizarro (the first one) and my card under­neath it read “If Dan Piraro is cool he will sign these.”

Suf­fice to say, you were very cool and signed all of them. I still have one, even though my wife won­ders why I keep it around.

Just wanted to say thanks for that.

–
– Glenn Vance

I had no idea if he would write me back…but three days later he did.

Thanks for the note, Glenn. It was awfully nice of you to thank me after so many years. Hope all is well with you and yours and that you are find­ing life to be grand and groovy. I lived in Dal­las then and live in NYC now. You still in Dal­las?
Dan

Holy moly. He was engag­ing me in con­ver­sa­tion. So I told him about my wish to get my mas­ters and PhD in His­tory and then teach. I thanked him for writ­ing me back and told him to have a good one.

And he wrote back again!

Good luck with your pro­fes­sor­ship. Sounds like a good career and one that hardly ever includes being paged in the mid­dle of the night. As long as you stay away from the co-eds. : )
d

How freak­ing cool is that?