“….The yearbook for his DeWitt Clinton graduating class
of 1939 reveals an array of clubs in which he was a member,
from The Future Lawyers Club to the school literary magazine,
The Magpie, for which he served as — appropriately enough
— The Publicist.
He was fond of telling A Story about that job, one that,
in true Stan Lee style, deviated from The Truth :
He would tell of climbing a painter’s ladder
in the room where The Magpie operated
and painting the words “Stan Lee Is God”
on the ceiling, but very late in life,
when questioned about his use of
that nom de plume at such an early age,
he said he probably wrote “Stan Lieber Is God.”
Or maybe none of that story happened at all.
Whatever the case, his yearbook entry summed up
a philosophy that would stay with him for the rest of his life:
When asked for his life’s goal, he wrote,
“Reach the Top — and STAY There.”
Stan : Dr. Jones. You looking for me?
Jack : Belloq.
Stan : Good afternoon, Dr. Jones.
Jack : I ought to kill you right now.
Stan : Not a very private place for A Murder.
Jack :
Well, these Arabs don't care if we kill each other.
They're not going to interfere in our business.
Stan : It was not I who brought the girl into this business.
Please, sit down before you fall down.
We can at least behave like civilised people.
Jack : I see your taste in friends remains consistent.
Stan : How odd that it should end this way for us,
after so many stimulating encounters. I almost regret it.
Where shall I find a new adversary so close to my own level?
Jack : Try the local sewer.
Stan : You and I are very much alike.
Archaeology is our religion, yet
we have both fallen from the purer faith.
Our methods have not differed as much as you pretend.
I am a shadowy reflection of you.
It would take only a nudge to make
You like Me, to push you out of The Light.
Jack : ….Now you're getting nasty.
Stan : You know it's true.
Jack : ….How nice.
Stan : Look at this — It's worthless.
Ten dollars from a vendor in the street.
But I take it, I bury it in the sand
for a thousand years, it becomes
priceless... like The Ark.
Men will kill for it.
Men like You and Me.
Jack : What about your boss, der Fuehrer?
I thought he was waiting to take possession.
Stan : All in good time.
When I am finished with it.
Jones, Do you realise what The Ark is?
It's A Transmitter — It's A Radio,
for speaking to God —
And it's within my reach.
Jack : You want to Talk to God?
Let's go see Him together.
I've got nothing better to do.
Uncle Indy, come back home now!
Uncle Indy!
Stan : Next time, Indiana Jones, it'll
take more than children to save you.
Uncle Indy!
Sallah : I thought I would find you there.
Better than the United States Marines, eh?
Jack : …..Marion's dead.
Sallah : Yes,
I know. I'm sorry.
Life goes on, Indy.
There is the proof.
Jack : Uh-oh.
Sallah : I have much to tell you.
First we will take them home, and
then I will take you to the old man.
“But perhaps the oddest fact of all was the way the school, in Stan’s day, influenced the development of the American comic book. In addition to Stan, DeWitt Clinton gave diplomas to both of Batman’s creators, Bob Kane and Bill Finger, as well as to the first master of the full-length graphic novel, Will Eisner, who is often regarded as the greatest American cartoonist of all time. However, Stan never spoke of having any relationships with these men. Indeed, the only fellow student he ever spoke of at any length was a boy named John J. McKenna, Jr. McKenna never went on to fame or fortune, but he made an impression on Stan, thanks to his part-time job: selling subscriptions to The New York Times to fellow students. Stan waxed rhapsodic about this boy in Excelsior, devoting about as much space, if not more, to him as he did to his own family members. Here’s just a portion of the remembrance: I was one of the first to subscribe, but the main thing on my mind was, Man, if only I could address an audience as confidently as that and speak off the cuff as glibly as he. He spoke for about ten full minutes, looking his audience straight in the eye, never once fumbling or losing the attention of the class. I was terribly impressed by the smooth, easygoing way he made his pitch and the way he managed to hold the interest of the students while talking about a subject that normally would bore the pants off them. I decided that I wanted to be able to speak that way, to be able to hold the attention of an audience the way he did. There does appear to have been a New Yorker named John J. McKenna, Jr., whose birth date would make him roughly Stan’s age, but the rest of the story may well be apocryphal. What matters is that Stan devoted so much energy to conveying it to his fans. “He never knew it,” Stan wrote, “but McKenna, with his great gift of gab, who could make a tough teenage audience listen attentively to every word he had to say, was one of my first role models (after the aforementioned Leon B. Ginsberg, Jr., of course).” In this tale, Stan laid out a trio of traits that he valued enormously throughout his professional life: confidence, charisma, and salesmanship. McKenna knew how to generate demand and move product, and Stan wanted in on that action. In a very concrete way, he achieved that goal insofar as he said he subsequently got his own job selling newspaper subscriptions, albeit for the publication that had so lukewarmly reviewed him in that essay contest, the Herald Tribune. That was only one of Stan’s micro-professions in that era. Dress-cutting was a gig-based trade, without much in the way of stability, and Jack’s chronic unemployment during the years following the Great Crash of 1929 took a toll on the familial wallet. According to Stan, Jack once owned a diner—something relatively common among Romanian Jews—but it swiftly went bankrupt. Even while Stan was a student at DeWitt Clinton, he was regularly employed in one odd job or another, according to his recollections. The anecdotes about these jobs would roll out of him whenever he recounted his youth, their order getting mixed up, and it was always unclear which ones he did in high school and which came after graduation. There was the time he wrote advance obituaries about celebrities who had yet to die. There was the time the Goodman family apparently linked him up with a Jewish employment network that netted him a remote job writing publicity copy for a tuberculosis hospital in Denver called the National Jewish Health (“I could never understand what I was trying to do—get people to get tuberculosis so they go to the hospital?”), although the hospital tells me they have no record of his doing so. He said he did paid acting work in a theater program run by the Works Progress Administration, in no small part because a girl he liked was doing the same—but no record of his being employed there has survived, if there ever was one. He said he delivered sandwiches from the Jack May drugstore to the offices of Rockefeller Center and that he was faster than all of his fellow delivery boys. He spoke of working as an office boy for a trousers manufacturer and, feeling exploited and disrespected by the higher-ups, throwing a pile of informational papers into disarray after being fired. He said he worked as an usher at Midtown Manhattan’s Rivoli Theatre and once walked Eleanor Roosevelt to her seat, tripping over someone’s foot in the process. In contrast to all these jobs, school held little interest for Stan. “I didn’t hate being in school,” he would later tell an interviewer, “but I just kept wishing it was over and I could get into the real world.” That said, he did find himself involved in school life, albeit in an extracurricular manner.
The yearbook for his DeWitt Clinton graduating class of 1939 reveals an array of clubs in which he was a member, from the Future Lawyers Club to the school literary magazine, The Magpie, for which he served as—appropriately enough — the publicist. He was fond of telling a story about that job, one that, in true Stan Lee style, deviated from the truth: He would tell of climbing a painter’s ladder in the room where The Magpie operated and painting the words “Stan Lee Is God” on the ceiling, but very late in life, when questioned about his use of that nom de plume at such an early age, he said he probably wrote “Stan Lieber Is God.” Or maybe none of that story happened at all. Whatever the case, his yearbook entry summed up a philosophy that would stay with him for the rest of his life: When asked for his life’s goal, he wrote, “Reach the Top — and STAY There.”
Riesman, Abraham. True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee (pp. 36-39).
