Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: There’s no-one else in this wonderful world …

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Mike Peterson Published: July 28, 2011 1 minute 0 comments

Thanks to John Deering of Strange Brew for providing the silly joke I was just in the mood for.

Smokey stars in about as many jokes and cartoons as he does public service announcements. He has got to be one of the most successful promotional characters ever created. When I was a little guy, I thought of Smokey right alongside Mickey Mouse or Woody Woodpecker. I doubt any kid ever thought about Woodsy Owl that way, or McGruff.

Wait. Come to think of it, I sort of put Elsie the Cow on that same level. I guess the answer is that advertisers in the 30s and 40s did a much better job of making these characters actually appealing rather than simply one dimensional and preachy. Maybe their clients said, "Give me a character people will like," instead of "Make sure you tell people …"

Wikipedia suggests that Smokey owes a lot to the famous World War I recruiting poster of Lord Kitchener, and I suppose that's true. There is something powerful in the personal appeal, in the direct address, that doesn't allow for a "Let George do it" cop-out attitude. Public broadcasting wishes they had someone with the personal charisma of Smokey the Bear or, in a pinch, Lord Kitchener, to get that message across.

It probably didn't hurt his initial impact that Walt Disney had just released "Bambi" two years earlier, in 1942. If you needed motivation to not cause a forest fire, that would likely do it. The Forest Service changed Smokey's motto to "Only You Can Prevent Wild Fires!" a decade ago, but we still think of those monstrous, crowning disasters, with all the animals racing for safety.

My first paying job was fighting a brush fire — not really a forest fire, though it was in the forest — that had been started by a faulty spark arrester on a train, which meant the fire was spread for a couple of miles down the side of the New York Central line. They made an announcement over the loudspeakers at school that any boy (!) who was 16 or older and didn't have any more classes that day was asked to volunteer to go fight the fire.

We got minimum wage — a buck-fifty an hour, as I recall — and all the bologna sandwiches we could eat, which, after you've been humping an Indian tank around for several hours is a lot of bologna sandwiches. The fire was long but not particularly wide and it was late spring when everything was damp enough that it didn't spread much and we were able to get it out fairly easily, the main issue being getting there. We got to ride down the line standing on the catwalk on the side of the locomotive, which was pretty cool.

The best part, though, was when the guy from NY Central was walking down the rails with the Forest Ranger, Paul, and they came to a spot where the fire had gotten to a telephone pole, burning into the creosote-soaked interior. Someone with a chain saw had cut it off just below the crosstrees and about a foot from the ground.

It turns out that, in this particular case, only the guy from the New York Central, in his suit and slippery, shiny black shoes, could prevent forest fires, and so his company was going to have to pay for this one, right down to the bologna sandwiches. He was, then, in a fairly bad mood before they got to the part where the wires were sagging down, attached to those floating cross bars. He just stopped and stared for a moment and then began to argue with Paul about why someone had cut down the pole, to which Paul calmly replied, "Because it was on fire."

Now, the guys standing around, sweaty and dirty and starting to feel the weight of a long afternoon's work, didn't have anything against this fellow, and they were polite enough not to guffaw. But he might have noticed a few people suddenly turning their faces away and he might have heard a suppressed snicker or two.

Only you can prevent forest fires. Only we can put them out. Stand back, there, Oliver Wendell Douglas, and let us undo your company's handiwork.

Anyway, I could really bring this thing full circle if the Miracles had recorded this song, but, of course, it's the Platters.

I guess only the Bear can be Smokey today.