Jay’s never been one to limit himself to a single obsession at a time, so the heroic Clark Kent shared Jay’s fancies with other personages of fact or pulp or electron beam. Not that Clark was ever really out there into obsession territory, mind you. Jay splurged extraordinarily conservative percentages of his meager allowance on a few Superman comics, expensive at mere dimes a pop back then, plus a few spinoffs like Superboy and Krypto the Superdog, but he didn’t bother with other heros' trappings in the high-tech-marketing-challenged Fifties. Neither did Jay-dimes land on those paradigms of herohood Batman, Spiderman, and the their ilk. Jay’s favorite comics were Little Henry and Dennis the Menace, heavier emphasis on the former.
The Jay Library and Archives, if one could ever exist, would contain few dog-eared dime wasters, because Jay’s other, dearer heroes didn’t have comic books to their credit. Something about the none-too-marvelous marketing potential of Benjamin Franklin, Mark Twain, Jackie Gleason, and W.C. Fields comic books, although they richly deserve such grandiosity.
Independent of his scandalous carryings-on in France, Benjamin Franklin was one of Jay's mild-mannered heroes. Franklin's start as a mere printer's apprentice interested Jay, who performed printer's apprentice tasks early on. But really, apprentice isn't quite descriptive of Franklin’s station in life. Franklin was a "printer's devil." That's the person in the print shop who returns metal type (now way obsolete) to the sorting cases after a job is printed.
Holy Gutenberg, Batman! Hand typesetting comprised sets, called "fonts," of single characters cast onto blobs of lead-and-tin alloy about an inch high. These were sorted letterwise in broad, compartmented trays, the famed “California Job Case” among them. To "set" type, a typesetter person (now also way obsolete) picked up each letter in turn and arranged them in word order, adding spaces, ruled lines, whatever, in a metal “composing stick,” a two-sided hand-holdable brass tray, there to be accumulated into a “galley,” a larger, three-sided steel tray that often wasn’t very hand-holdable, owing to the weight of its charge of heavy type, rules and spaces. Eventually, these "forms" were wedged into "chases," four-sided iron frames, placed in the printing press, inked and printed onto (at last!) actual paper.
It took considerable time to set type, so printers often kept intact any jobs that they expected to be reprinted. The rest of the “forms” were re-distributed to the typecases to be used again. The people assigned to the re-distribution task occupied a position somewhat lower than office cat: the printer's devils. If you worked really hard, put in extra long hours, and studiously kissed the correct cans, you could start as a printer's devil and end up as a typositor, or a printer, or something even fancier like ambassador to France, as it was with ol' Ben.
By all accounts, Ben's ambassadorship didn't result from his labors in the print shop, however. It was more the reward for his artistry with the stuff of type before type is set: namely, words. And that’s not to even mention the revolutionary ideas behind them. That if nothing else qualified him for Jay-hero-hood. Benjamin fought with words battles that might’ve otherwise been relegated to flying lead - and not the kind from which type is made. He was inquisitive and inventive, notwithstanding being somewhat sight-impaired (Jay relates, as he’s worn thick glasses since Third Grade), and also self-made, wise, and witty. Jay heard about Benjamin’s better deeds at school, of course, churning out the requisite book reports, bio’s and essays.
Ben’s shadier doings were conveniently skipped in the schoolbooks, so Jay learned of these on his own. Ben’s hero status remained, nonetheless, unimpaired. If anything, he earned Jay’s additional respect for doing as he pleased at a time when nonconformity in matters moral was rewarded with a chunk of rope formed into a final necklace.
All around, Ben’s easy to like as a hero, and so is Thomas Jefferson. Tom, however, tainted lofty principles with tacky travesty, and practiced different preaching from what he treatised. Indeed, Tom let Jay down, bad. The more Jay’s learned about the real Thomas, the less Jay’s inclined to reserve him any space in emulationville. Thomas carried on something awful about ending slavery right at the outset of these United States. Yet, the man kept slaves. Kept them, even though he could’ve easily afforded to free them, setting an example for others to follow.
Maybe in Virginia it was just “done,” and you could argue (feebly) that freed slaves in a slave-holding society would've put them at great risk. However, such was hardly the case in France while the French were annoying themselves and the rest of the world with their own confused revolution. Two-faced Thomas didn’t seem to notice, though his slaveholding rightfully ruffled French feathers.
The public didn’t seem to notice Tom’s indiscretions in the White House, either, but that was before television, and CNN et al weren’t there for obsessive-compulsive blow-by-blow instant-replay descriptions, either. The supremely homophobic Tom is therefore way far off his original pedestal in Jay’s mind, respected only grudgingly for the beauty of his buildings. The rest of it was arrogant puffery, flowery prose that meant nothing to himself, inspiring as some of it was to others. The man should’ve stuck to architecture, and left idealism to those with conviction.