My Uncle Arnold was an Influencer.
My mother’s only sibling, Uncle Arnold Kirkbride was an Influencer long before being an Influencer was even a thing. But he was not like the Influencers of today. Instead, he was an Influencer in what he encouraged me to do.
To begin with, he encouraged me to listen to music. He grew up listening to the country and early rock music of the 1950s. He collected singles and albums for years so that, by the 90s, his collection numbered in the thousands. When I was about twelve he shared that love of music by buying me my first radio. It was an old transistor type, small, and battery operated with a jack for a plug-in earpiece. When I was fifteen he upgraded me to a countertop GE model. It was larger, had a retractable antenna, and could either plug into the wall or run on batteries. It had great reception and it followed me through college (1976) and beyond. He later gave me my first stereo as a Christmas gift during my college sophomore year.
Uncle Arnold did these things for me and for my four brothers and sisters. But there is one special way that he influenced and encouraged me that has stayed with me all my life: Uncle Arnold gave me comic books, and (important note) he gave them to me when I was still in kindergarten.
Parents today might find the idea of giving comics to a kindergartener questionable at best. But I entered school at a late age, starting just two months before I turned six. And sometime during that first year, between the fall of 1963 and the spring of 1964, he introduced me to comic books.
One of my earliest memories, certainly my first memory of actually reading, is one of lying on the couch in my parent’s Tallmadge Avenue apartment in Akron, Ohio, looking at one of his comics. It was a Superman comic, and though I didn’t really know what was going on in the story, I was fascinated by the colorful pages.
I can still recall one panel in particular. Superman is punching a flying rock into pieces. There are words in a puffy white cloud (a word balloon) near his head. I clearly remember seeing and sounding out the word “meteor.” (Note: Mom had been teaching me and my sister sight words, so this was easy. Meteor starts with “me” and ends with “or”).
At the time I had no idea what a meteor was or about flying rocks, but Superman punching one was super-cool.
That brings me to today’s drawing.
Unlike the symbols we all know now, this is a pastel rendering of the very first as it appeared in Action Comics #1 (1938), Superman’s initial comic book appearance. Created by Cleveland, Ohio natives Jerry Siegel (writer) and Joe Shuster (artist), the stylized “S” sits on a yellow shield similar to a police badge. I’m not good with pastels but the bright colors and smudges give this a childlike crayon-made look. I like that.
Superman's symbol has changed many times in the more than 80 years of his history. Variations in style helped to adapt the character and story for decades of new readers. They also made the symbol more suitable for changing print, film, and animation requirements.
This actually is NOT the symbol I saw in my 1963-64 dive into comicdom. The one I saw back then was similar to the one worn by George Reeves in TV’s Adventures of Superman (1952-1958).
Later in life, my mother related that I and my younger brother and sister destroyed most of the comics Uncle Arnold loaned us. That was a shame for him. Some of those comics were early editions of Superman and Batman.
My Uncle Arnold Kirkbride passed away in 2019. He was 81. From his obituary: “ Arnold retired from Goodyear and enjoyed a lifetime hobby of collecting records and had an endless love for his music.”
His wife, Juanita, passed in 2014, and my mother, his sister, in 1997. But my uncle’s love of music and reading lives on in me.
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