Tales of Misspent Youth (Part I)

In the early spring of 1987, two candidates were battling to be the next mayor of Des Moines Iowa. These men were George Flagg and John “Pat” Dorrian, and it was a special election to replace the recently-deceased Mayor Pete Crivaro. Dorrian was way ahead in the polls, but all over town were enormous yellow signs that read “FLAGG MAYOR” in big black letters. Nothing else, just a yellow background with a gigantic “FLAGG” in a sans-serif font and a smaller “MAYOR” centered below it.

Now I try to keep this non-blog non-political, so I’m not going to mention which political party Mr. Flagg belonged too. Besides, for the events I’m about to describe, our motivation was not particularly political. It was far more humor motiviated. But Flagg was an asshole, and that certainly didn’t hurt.

I think I was the ringleader on this caper, but it’s been 18 years and my memory is foggy. Other participants may believe it was all their idea. If so, they can get their own blog and write up their version of the events.

I’m going to use first names only to protect the guilty. There was me (that is Dave), Bill, Harry, Rob, and Joel. I think Kathy may have been there too, but that seems like a lot for one car. We were all around 17 years old, it was spring break and, as I’ve said before, there was never anything to do in Des Moines. We decided that those yellow and black signs were just begging for some creative modifications.

The first stop was a hardware store (may have been Menard’s) where we picked up 6 or 7 cans of spray paint. Apparently it was nothing unusual for 5 teenagers to be buying spray paint in quantity, late at night. Other adventures had us buying 10 dozen eggs or carts full of toilet paper. Never seemed to be a problem.

Again, some details are fuzzy, but I think Rob was behind the wheel of his bitchin’ Camaro on this night. Bill had somehow aquired (stole it from the dealership) a magnetic dealer plate, which was probably stuck over Rob’s real license plate. I know we used it a few times, this was probably one of them, but I can’t say for certain.

It wasn’t long until we found our first FLAGG MAYOR sign. They were fucking everywhere. We crept up to it, armed with our paint cans, and sprayed over the L and the first G, leaving a sign that quite clearly said “F A G MAYOR”. It was a thing of beauty. The spacing of the letters worked out very nicely and the paint color was a near-perfect match.

Five people turned out to be the perfect number. The signs were double-sided, so four people could spray (two per side, one on L, one on G) while the fifth played lookout. Somebody was spraying somewhat haphazardly, which prompted Harry to say “no, no, nice…even…strokes.” He demonstrated, slowly down one side of the letter, back to the top, and down again until it was very professionally covered.

I’m not sure how many signs we hit before we were done. The newspaper article said “at least 12″ but I think we got far more than that. We covered every corner of town. The sun was coming up when we got back to Bill’s house, which was nearly always home base because his single mom worked the graveyard shift.

Now, if this were the end of the story, I probably wouldn’t have written about it. Just some teenage vandals out having fun one night. But one of the candidates (can you guess which one?) took it to a whole new level.

We hadn’t been back home but a few minutes when Bill got a call from another friend telling him to turn on the channel 8 news. There was mayoral candidate George Flagg looking pissed. He wasn’t blaming teenage hoodlums like a rational man would. He was blaming his opponent, John “Pat” Dorrian, and demanding that he fix his signs. Apparently he thought that Dorrian’s master campaign strategy was to deface his signs. While I can’t remember Dorrian’s exact response, I believe the gist of it was “whatever.”

The Des Moines Register ran an article the next day, complete with a very large and very nice photograph of one of our altered (I like to think of them as improved) signs. We made the front page. A witness the reporter interviewed said it was “very neatly done”. Harry was especially proud of this.

Anyway, we thought Flagg was being a real dumbshit, so we drafted a letter to the Register claiming responsibility. The phrase “no political motivation” was used, which was mostly true. Bill came up with a brilliant paragraph that included something along the lines of “while we realize that what we did was immature, that’s no excuse for the candidates to act like children”. We typed it up in AppleWorks on Bill’s bad-ass Apple //e, signed it with our initials and sent it off. They didn’t print the letter, but Flagg shut the fuck up about his precious signs the next day, so I have a feeling they forwarded it to his people.

Dorrian went on to win the election and served two additional terms. He retired from office and now has a trail named after him that runs along the river through the heart of downtown Des Moines.

Eighteen years later I still look back fondly on this night, even though I’ve lost touch with most of the people involved. The one exception is Bill, who I still email regularly though I haven’t seen him in person for years. He helped me to recall a lot of the details of this story.

As an intersting side note, a few years later we learned that Rob, our faithful driver and co-painter that night, was gay. That made sense, given that every girl we knew wanted to totally fuck him silly. At any rate, he thought making the signs say “fag” was just as funny as any of us did.