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.

You can tell a great deal about somebody if you know what heroes he holds dear. It's like knowing who he hangs out with and in what pub. It’s as good as stalking him for a week through the gutters of the city - or through the coffeehouses or the jazz clubs, as the case may be. We are what we eat, for sure, but we are who we emulate, just as certainly. So, let's get started analyzing Jay (this is, after all, the UNauthorized auto-bio) by detailing who some of his heroes are, were, have been. And why.

Jay’s favorite heroes have rarely been who you might expect, definitely not the usual crowd. But then, Jay’s not the usual lot himself, he urges it to be said. “I’m not noted for conformity.”

First off, the Man of Steel. Nope. No way. Jay's peers admired Superman - that is, if Jay can be said to have had any actual peers. Jay’s "contemporaries," we’ll call them with a wicked grin, took their hero worship seriously. They donned capes fashioned of faded beach towels and were able to leap tall sand sculptures in a single bound. They were faster than a speeding Lionel train set. Big fat hairy deal.

Jay, on the other hand, didn't consider the Caped One eligible for hero worship, much less emulation. On the contrary, he considered Superman’s other half, Clark Kent, the stuff of wannabe dreams. Clark was so immensely coooool. Definitely the stuff of hero-hood, au contraire the brash Superman. The oh-so-cool Mister Manners could do the presto-change-o thing in a handy phone booth, stomp the appropriate villains, and reappear all pressed and clean with his reporter's notebook full of pithy information. And just in the nick of time for the first-edition deadline at the ol’ Planet. Talk about a nose for news!

When Metropolis - the town, silly... When Metropolis was threatened, and Superman’s talents were called forth, Clark was a sure follow-on, dependably scooping up duhh-on-the-street interviews, gathering background information, and oh, by the way, saving Aiken - oops, Metropolis - from harm in his other identity. He never even got winded. Must've never got long-winded, either, ‘cause the editors never appeared to give him any grief about eating up too much space on the front page.

Through it all, and “it all” was quite an ordeal every afternoon on television, Mister Kent managed his double identity without ever requiring the services of a therapist. The Phone Company might have been a little peeved from time to time, but they never let on. His bosses at the newspaper, supposedly none the wiser about his double identity, either never suspected or were too busy with their editorial pens and chose to ignore their reporter’s cute tricks. So, Clark gracefully held onto his job at the newspaper office, gathering the scoops in spite of constant interruptions for saving the town or the dunce Lois from doom. Or themselves. Now THAT was a hero!

Would Clark make a go of it at CBS News now? CNN? Mister Mild Manners probably wouldn't last ten minutes or one dead princess, whichever came first. Something about mild manners and shoving a microphone into a grieving face would probably not click. Besides, the world was easier to save back then, when the good and bad guys were easy to tell apart. And politics weren’t required.

Jay admired not only Clark's dual role, but also his very mild manneredness. Clark Kent was truly a gentle man, keeping his powerful alterself a secret even when showing off would have been soooo much fun.

During most of Jay's early years he was beset, tortured, taunted, and otherwise made miserable by aggressive male contemporaries, not to say peers. So, it’s hardly surprising that his hero wasn't the swashbuckling aggressor half of the Superman bundle, but the debonair Clark. The fact that Clark made his way as a newspaper reporter was even better. Ah, the stuff of heroes: pad in pocket and press pass tucked into the ubiquitous hat, but secretly attired in tights underneath the Fifties’ most conservative suit. Let the next-door neighbor boys and the down-the-street brats emulate Superman with their striped towels, their blue pajamas, and their short flights off high porches. Jay wore glasses and carried a notebook.

Maybe it sounds dramatic from this perspective, but even in Jay’s days as a child he wanted a career in communications. Printing and publishing, maybe, newspapering, bookwriting, even radio. Not television, but that would have been okay if none of the others came through. As it turned (turns?) out, Jay eventually achieved plenty more things that hadn't been invented back in the days of leaping over low hedges with the imagination on high beam. Yes, there was electricity, and you didn’t have to fly a kite to get a charge out of it.

Jay was good enough at some things to make a go of them later in life, and bad enough at lots of things to develop a serious aversion to being laughed at. Kite flying was one of those latter. And basketball. And baseball. And... well, lots of other things.