I had a moment today which got me thinking about the things we are nostalgic for from our childhoods and how frankly odd a lot of them are when removed from that context. The moment began with my daughter noticing one of my favorite pairs of dress socks. They are bright yellow with a design that looks like they’re patched with red material. They also have a clown face on the side of them.
These socks were a gift from my late mother.
They also feature a Seattle-area celebrity, J.P. Patches.
And so my daughter asking me, “Daddy, why are you wearing clown socks?” got me started on explaining that these socks were a gift from grandma and that this clown was from a show that was on TV in Seattle for almost 25 years and then I got started explaining the premise of the J.P. Patches show to a five year old. Who promptly tilted her head in the “What are you talking about?” look that kids do so well.
If you’re from Seattle, and you’re at least in your 30s, you’ll probably already be chuckling realizing the first sentence that I used to describe J.P. Patches. If you aren’t, well, you’re in for the same treat of getting to ask questions about why this show would be such a cultural touchstone that my daughter surely was.
Because you see, J.P. Patches is a clown. He is a clown who is the mayor of the Seattle City Dump, where he lives. He lives in a shack in the middle of the dump, to which many locally and nationally famous people, from Washington State Governors to the Harlem Globetrotters came to visit him. He also had his girlfriend Gertrude, who was played by Bob Newman in a wig made of a mop head dyed red. Newman also played pretty much every secondary character on the show.
This show, about a clown mayor living in the dump, ran on Seattle’s KIRO TV from 1958 until 1981. Chris Wedes, the comedian beyond J.P. Patches continued portraying the clown both for local events and as a way to cheer up sick children at the local children’s hospital until 2011. So he’s like a local Fred Rogers or Levar Burton to a lot of people who grew up in Seattle, just a nice guy who made kids laugh and smile.
So yeah, I got to tell my daughter the story of how her great grandma, her grandman, and I have very fond memories about a clown who was mayor of the dump. And that is a weird sentence to say and it got me started thinking about a bunch of other cultural touchstones I have as someone who grew up in the Northwest as a kid mainly of the 90s.
Of course, there’s the Animorphs because what says “story targeted at late elementary school” like body horror and war crimes? (I say this entirely facetiously because the books are fun to read even today and interviews with Katherine Applegate are a pleasure to read through and see that you don’t always need to hope you never meet your heroes.)
As a gamer who started with the Super Nintendo and Genesis, there’s also stuff like Earthworm Jim and Toe Jam and Earl, which I suppose could be extrapolated out to the whole 90s gross-out humor trend.
So I suppose it’s not just clown socks, but a lot of things that I enjoyed as a kid and continue to enjoy that seem weird to people who don’t have that rose-tinted joy associated with them. And I suppose as someone who moved from the Northwest to the Midwest, I probably cause a lot of other people to have that sort of moment of looking back at regional favorites without the favoritism for the first time.
As individuals out there enjoying things, I suppose we don’t necessarily pick what the cool trends of the day, the year, the decade are. Nor do we really think about them in the moment. We just have the oddness of the things we enjoyed reflected back at us when we explain them to someone who didn’t have the same experience with them we did.
Featured image is a photograph of the sculpture Late for the Interurban, featuring J.P. Patches and Gertrude, located in the Fremont Neighborhood of Seattle. The sculpture was placed to commemorate the 50th anniversary of J.P. Patches airing in Seattle. The photograph was taken by wikipedia user Bachcell and is used pursuant to CC-BY-SA 3.0.
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