Godfather of the T

Godfather of the T

By Ed Staskus

   The one and only time I met Daffy Dan was at a party in a 4^th floor warehouse studio on Superior Ave. between downtown Cleveland and the Innerbelt highway. There was a car-sized freight elevator in the back, but the front stairs were what all the partygoers used. They were ready for a drink by the time they got upstairs. The studio belonged to Joe Dwyer, somebody I had gone to high school with, who was an artist and was making artworks in the studio. He also threw parties there, especially on Halloween, which it was the night I met Daffy Dan.

 

   When I was introduced to him I realized who he was right away, if only because I had seen the custom-made fifteen-foot tall caricature of him on the front of the warehouse building across the street. The sign next to the cut-out said, “The Creative Studio of Daffy Dan’s.”

 

   He was on the short side and wore his hair long, over his shoulders, and parted in the middle. He was 28 years old, slightly older than me. He had a handlebar mustache. It was the kind of mustache lawmen and outlaws wore in the 19^th century. He wasn’t wearing a costume for the Halloween party. He had on faded blue jeans and a sports jacket over a  t-shirt. The t-shirt featured WWMS-FM, the town’s number one rock ‘n’ roll radio station. Their buzzard logo, a top hat in one hand and a walking stick in the other hand, was in the middle of the t-shirt. “Ohio Tuxedo” was in bold red letters above the smiling blonde-haired buzzard.

 

   A campaign-style button was pinned to the lapel of his jacket. It said, “If your t-shirt doesn’t have a DD on the sleeve, it’s just underwear!!” The two exclamation points meant he meant business. Daffy had a can of beer in his hand. Every few minutes somebody stopped and said hello to him.

 

   “How did you get into the t-shirt business?” I asked. I was interested because I wasn’t in any business of any kind. I floated from one job to another and was consequently relatively poor. Even though Daffy didn’t have a degree of higher learning, after a few minutes of talking to him it became clear he was far from a few cans short of a six pack.

   

   “I dropped out of high school my senior year and went to work in the record store business,” he said. “I started to carry some rock group t-shirts. I got a catalog of shirts from who knows where. Other record stores started coming to me and asking me where I got them from, and rather than telling them, I looked up a dealer and started to wholesale them.”

 

   Even though he looked as counter-cultural as the best of them, he was bright as a button when it came to commerce. He was the city’s godfather of t’s. His medium was the message, and the other way around.

 

   “Before long I started to realize, wait a minute, those dealers aren’t doing it right. I can do it better. The rock group t-shirts just took off like a rocket. That was 1973. We located our storefront over on Clifton and West 104th St., and that's where we really started. From the beginning we marketed ourselves as Daffy Dan's from Cleveland, Ohio. We opened a single store in 1973.” There were now five of them, with four more planned. “It isn't tourists, either. It is Clevelanders buying Cleveland-themed t-shirts and merchandise. It’s a phenomenon.”

   

   The slogan of Daffy Dan’s first store was, “If You’ll Wear It, We’ll Print It.” By the time I met the man behind the phenomenon he was moving more than 40,000 t-shirts annually. One of his most popular offerings offered up the legend, “Cleveland: You Gotta Be Tough.” Andy Gibb’s face was a hot potato plastered on bosoms far and wide, followed in popularity by Darth Vader and Farrah Fawcett-Majors. “It’s not a fad,” Daffy said. “Blue jeans and t-shirts have become the American way of life.”

 

   Back in the day t-shirts were called tunics. Into the 19^th century they were simply called undergarments. The first t-shirt was created when a union suit was cut in half with the top long enough to tuck into a waistband. The U. S. Navy put them into circulation as crew-necked, short-sleeved undershirts during World War One. Work parties in steaming hot engine rooms took to wearing them all the time. Farmers adopted them during the Great Depression. They were cheap and lightweight. The first printed t-shirt was an Air Corps Gunnery School t-shirt issued in 1942. In the 1960s they got more popular as souvenirs, advertisements, and self-expression billboards. A friend of mine had one that said, “My parents went to Disneyland and all I got was this lousy t-shirt.”

 

   Plain white t-shirts started to go out of fashion, even though they are versatile, like a blank canvas. Everybody has got something to say. If you don’t declare what’s on your chest you end up looking like nobody. That’s when you get a t-shirt with an iron-on monkey and the caption, “Here Comes Trouble.” There is no sense messing around. One of Daffy Dan’s t-shirts went in the out door. “I am a Virgin. This Shirt is Very Old.” Another one of them was a sideways entreaty for hugs and kisses. “Turkeys Need Love Too.” One got right to its own bad-tempered point. It said, “Go to Hell.”

 

   “I love you, Daffy Dan,” Marsha Greene said years later. “You were with me through my teenage hood. I loved wearing your t-shirts. They made me feel proud and you were considered one of the cool kids when you wore a DD t-shirt back then. They helped my self-esteem.”

 

   The Halloween party had gone into overdrive. I suggested a quiet corner somewhere, but there were none. Joe threw an LP by Bobby “Boris” Pickett & the Crypt-Kickers onto the turntable. They started in on their smash hit ‘Monster Mash.’ The singer had a British accent with a sniff of Transylvania. “They did the monster mash, it was a graveyard smash, it caught on in a flash, they did the monster mash.” The speakers weren’t the greatest, but they didn’t have to be. They just had to hold out until the end of the night.

 

   “You silk screen a lot of rock ‘n’ roll t-shirts,” I said. 

 

   “Yeah,” he said. “When I was starting, the Agora was packing them in every night. I saw rock ‘n’ roll t-shirts as an absolute natural.”

 

   “Do you listen to rock ‘n’ roll?” I asked. “Do you go to shows?”

 

   “I go to music clubs or concerts every night of the week,” he said. “The offerings are spectacular. The Agora, of course, is at the top of my list, but there are a hundred clubs and concert venues, the Hullabaloo Clubs, It's Boss, the Viking Saloon, the Roundtable, Utopia, Atomic Alps, and the Plato. I go to them all. The music scene in Cleveland is like being a kid in a candy factory.”

 

   Joe slid another record on the turntable. It went round and round. It was the Rolling Stones belting out ‘Sympathy for the Devil.’ Mick jagger was in fine form. “Just as every cop is a criminal, and all the sinners saints, as heads is tails, just call me Lucifer.”

 

   “Did you really drop out of high school?” I asked. “I thought that’s something you’re not supposed to do nowadays, unless the Devil makes you do it.”

 

   “I was walking down the hall between classes at Shaker Heights High School when the baseball coach grabbed me,” Daffy Dan said. “He grabbed me by the peace sign hanging around my neck on a leather strap and led me to the office proclaiming that I would not be allowed to graduate with my class in June without a haircut. Mind you, this is 1968, and my hair barely touched my collar and was just a tad over my ears, but according to the coach, not up to the school dress code. The gauntlet had been thrown down, and I promptly withdrew. That was a proud moment in our household. Not! I was plumb nuts back then.”

 

   My mod girlfriend had wandered off, God knows where. The smell of weed was everywhere, even though it was decidedly illegal. Richard Nixon had declared a ‘War on Drugs’ a few years earlier. He said they were “Public Enemy Number One.” He didn’t say what was Public Enemy Number Two, although I might have suggested the White House burglarizing Democratic party headquarters. Daffy and I had to raise our voices to be understood. We lowered them between songs. 

 

   “How did you get your nickname?” I asked. He told me he had been at a friend’s house doubling down on his big idea of imprinting t-shirts. He was trying to raise capital. His friend’s wife didn’t think much of the business plan. “You’re daffy, Dan,” she said. It brought Daniel Roger Gray up short. “I stopped, speechless for a moment. That was it, Daffy Dan’s!”

 

   After the Summer of Love became a fact, entrepreneurs in California started producing t-shirts featuring motifs and emblems, especially anything associated with marijuana, hippies, the Grateful Dead, and Che Guevara. They silk screened their t-shirts, just like Daffy Dan was doing. When screen printing, a design is separated into individual colors. Water based inks are applied to the shirt through mesh screens, limiting the areas where ink is deposited. The most important factors are making sure the t-shirt is on a flat surface and that the stencil is positioned exactly where the artwork is supposed to appear.

 

   T-shirts with glow-in-the-dark charts of the periodic elements are silk screened in secret. “My customers are individualists and eccentrics who want something a little different from what you can buy off the rack,” Daffy said. “They want a work of art.”

 

   It was going on midnight when Joe slapped Screamin’ Jay Hawkins down on the turntable. “I put a spell on you because you’re mine, stop the things you do, watch out, I ain’t lyin’, I can't stand no runnin' around, I can't stand no puttin' me down, I put a spell on you because you’re mine.”

 

   I said good night to Daffy Dan and started looking around for my newish girlfriend. We hadn’t been seeing each other for long. “I wonder where she ran off to?” I asked myself. I didn’t find her. When that happened, she became my old girlfriend. I didn’t care all that much. She was a rich girl with conservative suburban parents. I wouldn’t have minded being rich, but not on her father’s terms. She was going to become him sooner or later.

 

   Out on the damp dark sidewalk I looked across the street at Daffy Dan’s Superior Ave. nerve center. His cut-out caricature was lit up by a floodlight. He had been lit at the party, although not by beer or weed. He was lit with going his own way. He had probably taken some wrong turns along the way but he seemed to have his eye on the prize. His path to flying colors looked somewhat different than most but that didn’t mean he was going in circles. He was no Daffy Duck

Photograph by Heather Hileman.

Ed Staskus posts on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com.