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Back in the mid-1970s, downtown Fort Wayne was a different place. At night, instead of closing down, the city’s bars, restaurants, night spots and strip clubs came to life.
Ron Gregory, then a late-night DJ with WOWO-AM 1190, recalls that at one point there was a club downstairs from the radio station featuring dancers with names like Aqualung.
“It was wild. It was like New Orleans,” Gregory says. “There was always something going on.”
It was the perfect environment for a superhero to emerge, and though most Fort Wayne residents might not know it, there was one lurking in the shadows during that period.
Skunk-Guy.
Really.
Homegrown, just like Spider-Man and Superman, Skunk-Guy appeared on the streets one day in a homemade costume, complete with a mask, a cape, a story and a mission.
The tale goes that a young Fort Wayne man was caught in a transport beam with a skunk and emerged with the ability to stink like a skunk – or anything else he chose to smell like.
Another version had it that the same young man had been abducted by aliens along with a collection of animals, including a skunk. In the spacecraft, the skunk let loose and the aliens threw the young man out, leaving him with smelly other-worldly powers that he used to fight for law and odor.
But superheroes have to have a mouthpiece. Superman’s was the Daily Planet. Skunk-Guy used WOWO. He called Gregory on the air one night and told his story. Instead of hanging up on him, Gregory put Skunk-Guy on the air.
For the next two or three years, Skunk-Guy was an occasional telephone guest on WOWO. He lurked around the streets of the city at night, disguised in his homemade outfit, complete with gloves, mask and tights. Occasionally he’d pop up at popular restaurants and make unannounced appearances at WOWO remote broadcasts.
He recruited Skunk Scouts who wrote him letters through the radio station. Kids loved him and mobbed him when he appeared, tugging at his cape. Skunk-Guy even made it on television at one point.
Even the police knew him. They’d see him lurking in the shadows and nod. They dubbed him the Dark Knight.
All the while, Skunk-Guy, who was 14 or 15 when he started, managed to keep his true identity a secret. Oh, his parents and sisters knew, but they weren’t about to let anyone know they were related to Skunk-Guy. A handful of friends, maybe four, knew who Skunk-Guy was, but they kept quiet.
Within three years, Skunk-Guy, who never solved a crime and never really smelled like anything, disappeared with no one ever learning his true identity.
The originator of this strange superhero thinks back in amazement at what he was able to accomplish back then.
In the 1970s, Fort Wayne was what he called a sweet place.
No more, he says. Everyone is afraid of offending someone. They’re afraid of getting arrested. They’re afraid to live.
If a teenage kid showed up in a restaurant in a weird outfit with a mask today, he’d be slammed up against a wall or end up in the back of a police car in no time, charged with who knows what – attempted robbery, intimidation, terrorism, refusal to identify himself, false informing, conspiracy, you name it.
Yes, the superhero is dead, at least in the flesh-and-blood version.
But Michael Wilhelm is now trying to keep him alive on paper.
That’s right. Michael Wilhelm, then a Northrop High School student, was Skunk-Guy. Sorry to out you, Mike, but there’s no way to avoid it.
Wilhelm, who went to California after high school, studied drama and spent his time working in temporary jobs as he tried to break into TV commercials and auditioned for acting jobs.
A few years ago, now the father of a baby daughter, he decided it was time to go back home, be close to family and find an ordinary career.
That’s what he’s done for the past five years, but he never forgot the adventure of Skunk-Guy. He’s reworked the character some, and now he’s preparing a series of books based on the character, aimed at kids 8 to 13. The reincarnation of Skunk-Guy features a dysfunctional, Don Quixote-type teenage kid who, the result of a bizarre lawnmower accident, can make himself smell like anything he chooses.
The character, Norman Flinch, lives in an imaginary town that was just like Fort Wayne was in the 1970s, the sort of place where no one thinks anything of walking through the park at night, just to find some quiet and to meditate, and where superheroes occasionally appear.
Wilhelm, who had a book signing at Mitchell Books recently, self-published the first book and is essentially putting it out to get reaction, he says. But he is working with an agent in hopes of getting a regular publisher and wider distribution. His Web site is www.skunk-guy.com.
