Discovering TV and American Culture
“Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.”
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
founding father, inventor of the lightning rod, bifocal glasses and the Franklin stove, pioneer in the discovery of electricity, cowriter of the Declaration of Independence, first U.S. ambassador to France, and signer of the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution
After a year, my mother and I were finally able to move into an apartment a few blocks away from the yeshiva, at 99 South Ninth Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Rent was thirty-five dollars a month.
We had few luxuries at home, but we did have a small television set. Once we got that TV, it felt like the world had suddenly opened up to me. I watched the evening news. I watched Superman. I watched cartoons. I watched movies. I learned more from television than any other medium I had ever encountered. More than books. More than teachers and school.
Television opened my mind to fantasy. To science fiction. To reality, through news coverage. Television was immediate. And Adventures of Superman in particular was a revelation—oh my God, that man is flying through the air, and he’s not from America—he’s an immigrant, just like me! What television did and continues to do for me is to show me that there are no limitations to the imagination. There is no idea that is too outlandish to pursue—in business, and in life.
I’d spend my entire day at yeshiva, so I didn’t have much time for TV watching on weekdays. But on the weekend—yes, even on the Sabbath, which for us was observed on Saturday—I would be glued to the TV set, often all day and as late into the night as I was allowed to watch. I would stay up and watch the screen go blank when the four or five local stations we had in those days went off the air.
Television also taught me how to speak with a “mid-Atlantic” accent. Mid-Atlantic is the sound of American English as spoken by newscasters around the country, whether they’re from the Deep South (where a newscaster would never say “y’all”) or the North (where a newscaster would never say “yo”).
Having come to America not speaking a word of English, this fascinated me. So I started to mimic how TV newscasters spoke. I also noticed that they were always dressed better than the people on the street, and that they seemed to have an air of authority. So I learned to speak like them, without an accent, and even today, I’ve heard people comment that I sound like a TV broadcaster.
In 1959, a year after our arrival in America, I remember going to a friend’s apartment in Brooklyn and seeing a tall pile of comic books stacked in a corner. I had never seen or heard of comic books before that day. At that point, I was still enrolled in yeshiva and trying to get a grasp of English, and I spoke what little English I knew with a deep Israeli accent. My friend and I sat down in front of this big stack, and he handed me my first comic book.
I still remember it clearly. It was World’s Finest Comics, and it included Superman (the man I had seen flying through the air on television) and Batman. I was awed by the fact that these weren’t just regular people. They were extraordinary people, leading extraordinary lives. And there was always good and evil.
I was hooked. I devoured comic books. I still do. So does the rest of the world, apparently. Comics, once a relatively small underground movement, are now recognized as an influential cultural and commercial force. Comic Con, held annually in San Diego, has grown from a one-day gathering attended by 145 people into a four-day event attracting hundreds of thousands of people, on a par with the Cannes Film Festival, and has inspired numerous spin-offs around the world.
In fact, the cultural power of the world of comic books, fantasy, and sci-fi can be seen in its current influence on pop culture, inspiring multimillion-dollar franchises such as Star Wars, Superman, The Avengers, Avatar, and The Lord of the Rings. All of those blockbuster Hollywood franchises arose from the same world of fantasy, sci-fi, and comic books that once seemed “kid stuff.”
That first World’s Finest comic book launched my love affair with comics. And as with any area that I become passionate about, I became voracious for the most minute trivia. I can quote you psalm and verse from the old testament of comic books. Off the top of my head, I know the history of the Hulk: the original gray Hulk, written by Stan Lee, drawn by Jack Kirby, and inked by Dick Ayers, which evolved into the green version, and then the red version, and I can tell you in which issues of The Incredible Hulk Steve Ditko took over art chores. Yes, the Spider-Man artist actually drew the Hulk for a while! And I can tell you all about Iron Man, who was likewise drawn by Jack Kirby and Dick Ayers, and I can tell you on which issues Don Heck later took over as artist. These were my modern myths, my Samsons, my Davids and Goliaths. These became my templates for good and evil, my archetypes of virtue.
In point of fact, I originally started doing my trademark “rock on” hand gesture—usually referred to as the “devil horns,” which can now be seen in just about any sports stadium and rock concert around the world—in 1973 as an homage to Steve Ditko’s Dr. Strange, who used the hand gesture to invoke his Magicks (“may the dreaded Dormamu invoke his wrath upon thee”). When Ditko’s other creation, Spider-Man, shot his webbing from his wrist, the same hand gesture was used, but upside down.
What’s more, I couldn’t have imagined in my wildest dreams that America would allow me to actually become a comic-book superhero. KISS comics was published by Marvel Comics in the late seventies and became their biggest-selling comic book—at $1.50 a copy, when other comic books sold for twenty-five cents. The KISS comic book was magazine size, not comic-book size, so that it could be racked next to Time and the like. I’m proud to say that I got to fight Dr. Doom and meet the Fantastic Four with my bandmates in the first issue.
I also could never have imagined that someday I would have my own Simmons Comics line and the freedom to create my own comic-book characters and titles.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
I was nine years old in 1959, and attending yeshiva six days a week. When I wasn’t in yeshiva studying, I was at the library, which was about three blocks from it. I was delighted to find out that everything in the library was free. I didn’t understand the historical significance of that then, but I do now.
For the first time in my life, I was in a place where the poorest of the poor and the richest of the rich have the same access to all information for free, on a level playing field. Without censorship. Without book burnings by the Nazis. Without being burned at the stake by those with different religious beliefs. Complete freedom and access to all information, art, and culture from around the world.
Then and there, I promised myself that I would educate myself, and that I would never stop educating myself. It was my responsibility to keep learning. I would spend hours at the library on the weekends and read everything I could get my hands on. Books on dinosaurs. Books on history. I almost read the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica. And all for free.
The reason I’m telling all of you this is that I want you to take this point to heart and make you understand that it’s your responsibility to educate yourself. It’s not important if you lack qualifications—go out and learn, and you will slowly amass qualification. No one is born qualified to do anything—it is all earned through hard work and education.
I had my beloved books. I had comic books. I had television. These were all part of my self-education. What more could I possibly need? I suppose I was sheltered, but my mother only had my best interests at heart in sending me to yeshiva. She wanted me off the streets and safe from early morning until late at night, when she returned home from a hard day of work. She would be up by the crack of dawn and home by seven at night, making the trek from Jackson Heights to Brooklyn every day to sew buttons for less than minimum wage. In that interim, she wanted to make sure I was safe—there were street gangs in our area, and being Jewish was not a popular thing. It has never been a popular thing. Arguably, it still isn’t.
At the time, Williamsburg was a place where different cultures worked and lived together: Jews, African-Americans, Puerto Ricans, and others. In today’s parlance, you might call it a ghetto. Incidentally, most Americans are not aware that ghetto was originally a Venetian term used to describe the segregated neighborhoods where Jews lived. So this term has special significance to me.
Here’s the background: During the Italian Renaissance, when Jews were making headway in the Italian city-states as craftsmen, traders, and merchants, the only part of the city in which they were actually allowed to live was in the getta, an area far from the center of town and where bricks were baked for buildings. There were huge brick ovens and men worked around the clock. Needless to say, the living conditions were horrible; there was smoke in the air day and night. This is where the term ghetto was born. And in World War II, when Polish Jews rebelled against the Nazi occupation, they were segregated into a section called the Warsaw Ghetto.
My mother worked six days a week in a sweatshop. No minimum wage. It was the only job available to her in New York with her skill level. She would lift a winter coat off a hanger, carry it to her Singer sewing machine, sew six to eight bottoms on that coat, hang the coat back on the hanger, and move it to another section. Then she would repeat that process, over and over again.
She made half a penny per button. So, if my sweet mother took down a coat, sewed six buttons on it, and then hung it up again, she would make a grand total of three cents per coat. Somehow, she was able to clear $150 a week doing this backbreaking work six days a week, and she was able to pay rent, buy food, and keep us clothed.
My mother was the best role model for a work ethic I could ever have. Through her, I was able to understand the value of money.
At the age of fourteen, I promised myself I was going to make something of myself, if only to make sure my mother would never have to work again. Within eight years, I would be able to substantially improve my mother’s life. A few years after that, she would never have to work another day.