Broadcast Debut

In a work conversation a couple of months ago, I used the term "Popeye Moments” to describe feelings of exasperation, where screaming Popeye the Sailor's catchphrase "That's all I can stands and I can't stands no more," seems like an appropriate response.

Often this is a precursor to a vigorous, occasionally uncharacteristic, response to a stressful situation.

Fittingly, one of my earliest Popeye moments that I can recall was directed at a member of Popeye’s family...actually it was? an actor who portrayed? a live-action version of Poopdeck Pappy (Popeye’s dad in the cartoons)?on a Norfolk, Virginia-area television station.

We left that area when I was quite young, though Poopdeck Pappy was one of two children’s show hosts that I remember from that market.? I didn’t mind Pappy, though the other host I recall was a man in clown makeup (oh ffs!), I used to run from the TV when that show “Bungles”? came on.

When I was not yet 3 years old, and was seated in a shopping cart in a store–the Commissary (grocery), or the Exchange (department store)–on the naval base in Norfolk, when a man with a white beard, clad in dress blues,?approached my father with a microphone and asked him a few questions.

I recognized that it was Pappy from (black and white) TV, but seeing him in three dimensions, and in color, were a bit unsettling for my young mind.

I stared at him as he and my father chatted for a few moments, then he asked me: “Hey son, how’d ya like to meet Bungles?” and he tipped the microphone toward my tiny mouth.

And then I saw him, that damn TV clown, and he? was approaching me, doing his trademark, pinky finger-only wave…it might as well have been Pennywise crawling from the sewer with a knife.

I'd had all I could stands and I couldn’t stands no more.

A tiny mouth no more….I screamed ("bloody murder" according to family lore) into the microphone. I take it Bungles was accustomed to this reaction, because he did an about-face and (I assume) went off to terrorize another toddler.

My father matter-of-factly informed Pappy "He's scared of clowns." I am confident that Pappy had already reached that conclusion.