• A Heartwarming Tale of Staggering Niceness

    Date: 2012.07.12 | Category: Journalism | Tags:

    To say that Dave Eggers is a great guy seems like a super-sized case of stating the obvious. After all, this is the man who, at 21, raised his 8-year-old brother after their parents died; who co-founded 826 Valencia, which has turned into a national organization that helps kids learn to read and write; who writes books on topics he cares about, without any commercial considerations; and whose latest charity, ScholarMatch, makes me wish I had a million dollars to donate to them because it’s such a heartwarmingly good cause. (I have attended a bunch of 826 fundraisers, so I guess I’ve helped a tiny bit.) Basically, reading Eggers’ bio will make pretty much anyone feel like a slacker by comparison.

    However, before Eggers was the philanthropic/publishing powerhouse he is today, he drew a weekly cartoon called “Smarter Feller” for the SF Weekly alternative newspaper. (They’re not currently online, but thanks to archive.org, you can enter the Wayback Machine and read a bunch of the strips here.) He had an obsession with the ads for the Gold Club (a local gentleman’s club whose pitchman was a surprisingly avuncular-looking bald man), iced oatmeal cookies, and putting non sequiturs into the mouth of a grinning handbag called Steve. Before I moved to the Bay Area, Joe used to clip the strips out every week and mail them to me in Baltimore.

    Back in December 1996, Eggers’ strip (here it is!) announced that he was going to start selling Smarter Feller T-shirts. I have no idea how many were sold, but Joe bought two of them and gave me one for Christmas that year. Joe has worn his regularly over the years, and it still looks pretty good; I kept mine mint in box, as a collector’s item, along with my “Frankie Say War! Hide Yourself” shirt. (Yeah, you can buy those now from CafePress, but mine is an original!) Anyway, when San Francisco Chronicle blogger and reporter Peter Hartlaub announced a “favorite T-shirt” contest, I wrote up a little blurb about the Smarter Feller shirt and sent it in. Hartlaub e-mailed me back, asking for a photo, so when Joe came home from work, I had him put the shirt on and took a quick snapshot with my phone. I didn’t know the photo was going to wind up in the actual newspaper, or I would probably have paid a bit more attention to the lighting and composition.

    There were nearly 100 entries and we did not win the contest (this lady did), but Hartlaub sent me another e-mail asking me for my home address. I figured I’d won something — as an ex-journalist, I know that there’s usually all sorts of weird promotional swag sitting around newspaper offices — but I definitely was not expecting what turned up in the mail on Tuesday. It was a Priority Mail box with a McSweeney’s return address, and contained a Dave Eggers shower curtain and a personalized drawing. Seriously, how awesome is this?!? I figured since the photo and story ran in the paper and not just online, there was a pretty good chance he would see it, since he does live in San Francisco, but I never expected this. It was a very, very sweet and meaningful gesture and I am delighted that Eggers apparently got a kick out of my contest entry.