When did it all begin? (07/23/2008)

It's hard to know where this whole thing started.

You could say it started in 1960. That's when some young people said they saw something that looked like a monster rising out of a pond north of Portland.

You could say it started in 1966. That's when my high school class graduated, and we've kept in touch electronically and otherwise for decades.

You could say it started just a few years ago. That's when Duane Harter launched the Hollow Block Monster Car Show, an event commemorating that crazy few weeks of monster madness back in 1960.

The Hollow Block story has best been told by the late Tom Casey, who did a piece on it in 1982 that we reprinted in the sesquicentennial edition in 1986.

The thumbnail version, for those of you under a certain age, looks like this: Kids think they see something in a pond. There's a media flurry that looks calm by today's standards. Pond is drained, and a dead calf is found. Best theory is that the bloated carcass of the calf floated to the surface and scared the heck out of the kids.

The pond was called the Hollow Block because it was on the site of a former tile factory that turned Jay County clay into tile and hollow block building materials.

But the thumbnail version doesn't really do it justice. If you were a kid in 1960, living on a diet of comic books and sci fi movies at Saturday matinees, the Hollow Block Monster was something that would live in your imagination forever.

As Tom noted in his 1982 piece, The Blob happened to be playing at the Sky-Vue Drive-In in Portland when the monster was "sighted." So the golden era of bad monster and scary movies from the 1950s and early 1960s would be always linked with the Hollow Block.

For the class of 1966, it's safe to say, the Hollow Block Monster was one of those local cultural touchstones we could all relate to.

And as a class, we tend to keep in touch.

My best recollection is that this latest chapter started when Kit Galloway complained about the Wikipedia entry for Portland on the Internet. Kit's a class of '66 guy and an electronic artist with an international reputation. So when he complained about a gloomy picture of an empty Meridian Street on the Wikipedia entry, local folks went to work. It wasn't long before a nice shot by Rebecca James was substituted.

But while Kit moseyed around the Internet, he noticed that Duane Harter's Hollow Block Monster Car Show was set for last weekend.

And he went to work.

Boy, did he go to work.

Using computer skills I can only dream of and a somewhat twisted imagination, Kit concocted his version of what a movie poster would have looked like at the Hines Theatre or the Main in Dunkirk if Hollywood had gotten its hands on the Hollow Block Monster.

In doing so, he sampled and altered chunks of more than half a dozen movie posters from the era, including several I had seen as a kid. He also incorporated images of the Jay County Courthouse and downtown Portland buildings, and he put a PHS letter sweater on a central figure in the poster.

It truly must be seen to be believed.

Only a handful of the finished posters exist.

I dropped one off to Duane Harter on Saturday at the Hollow Block show.

The Jay County Library has a copy for its records in thanks for all the help Shirley Dollar provided Kit in his research.

Another will be matted and framed and hung at John Jay Center for Learning as a piece of local nostalgia.

And yet another was given to the Jay County Historical Society's museum. The historical society's biggest problem will be to make sure that future generations know Kit's creation is a fake. It's so real-looking it might be taken for the genuine article 40 years from now.

A few others may surface in the future, but only if they can be sold to benefit charity.

That's the way Kit - and the Hollow Block Monster - want it to be.

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