A Father’s Day gift to his son — a tour of Mad magazine
This story was originally published June 25, 2016.
The front door was as white and blank as a new refrigerator's, its only sign a small, typewritten label taped above the vertical mail slot by the the doorknob:
PLASTICMAN ENTRANCE
«This must be MAD,» said my father.
Inside the lobby ofMAD magazine was an orange naugahyde couch, an old standing ashtray next to it, like the kind in train stations when people dressed up to travel, and a larger-than-life statue of Alfred E. Neuman, patron saint of adolescent parody, in a pith helmet and safari fatigues. Dad approached the nonplussed receptionist and, with all the insincere aplomb of the 1960s campus subversive he is and always will be, said directly, «We're here for the tour,» and waited for the answer.
We got it.
It was June 25, 1991, 25 years ago to this day. I had just graduated high school, and Mom and Dad's gift to me was a two-week tour of Major League Baseball in the northeastern and midwestern United States. That included two games in New York, giving Dad and me an afternoon in Manhattan in between and, from reading the addresses out of the front page of my favorite comic books, we went to midtown to see the home of the superheroes.
At Marvel, then 387 Park Avenue South, no luck. No tours without prior arrangements. At DC Comics, 666 Fifth Avenue, a very apologetic woman told us tours were on Friday (this was a Tuesday) and sent me along with brick-thick stack of their latest issues.
That left MAD, about a block away from DC, then at 485 MADison Avenue. Dad and I (Mom was home, supervising a kitchen renovation) sat on the waiting-room couch, perusing the latest MADs, locking eyes with Safari Alfred and his vacuous, careless stare. Then someone in the back told the
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