The Subtext in Casper the Friendly Ghost

When I was a kid in the 1960s  and 1970s, my favorite comic book title was Harvey, with its odd jack-in-the-box logo and its fantasy characters (Casper the Friendly Ghost, Spooky the Tuff Little Ghost, Hot Stuff the Little Devil)

Harvey also produced comics about human kids, like Richie Rich, Little Dot, and Little Lotta.  Casper the Friendly Ghost was about a ghost boy who lives with three nameless adult guardians in the Enchanted Forest (Not to be confused with the inferior Charlton knockoff Timmy the Timid Ghost).

In Casper’s world, ghosts were not dead people, but beings in their own right, who are born, grow up, take jobs and houses, and eventually grow old and die.  Their main pastime and means to social prestige is scaring, but Casper refuses to scare. 

Gay-coded, but no sissy or milquetoast, Casper is a strong-willed nonconformist, a Vietnam-Era pacifist who refuses to follow the hawkish status quo of ghost society. So strong are his principles that even when his life is in danger, he refuses to “boo” his way to safety.

Casper has an ally and confidant in Wendy, a blonde-haired, blue-eyed witch girl in a red jumpsuit who lives with three guardians of her own. They are not romantically involved; they are merely friends and comrades, thrown together by their common disdain for the social institutions that tell them they must scare. Neither expresses any heterosexual interest. (The 1995 movie starring Devon Sawa turned Casper heterosexual.)

But occasionally Casper moves beyond a simple lack of heterosexual desire to offer a glimpse of that other world. His efforts to bond with other beings (almost always male) sometimes transcend the merely friendly, especially whe the objects of his attention are perfect strangers whose struggles may cost him his life.

He accompanies Oliver Ogre on a perilous journey to the moon (Casper 113, January 1968), and helps an ancient Egyptian pharaoh regain his throne from a villainous usurper in (Casper 117, August 1968).

 When his new friends are adult humans, pixies, or Greek gods, drawn with the hard tight chests and rippling biceps more commonly associated with the DC and Marvel lines, it is easy to locate romantic attraction among his motives.

We see similar gay subtexts in “The Evil Planet” (Casper in Space 6, June 1973): Casper dreams that he has joined the deep space expedition of Crash Hammerfist, a Buck Rogers-type adventurer drawn as a brawny muscleman. They land on The Evil Planet, where flying bird-men abduct Crash’s female companion, Gale. While Casper calmly evaluates their options, Crash goes to pieces:

Crash: This is a disaster! Look – my cape is ruined! I can’t explore this evil planet looking like this!

Casper: [Trying to keep him focused on the crisis.] Is Gale your girlfriend?

Crash: No. . .she’s my seamstress. She made this entire outfit. [Hand swishily on hip.] Do you like it?

Casper: [Looking decidedly suspicious.] Er. . .yes.

At Casper’s urging, they ignore the soiled cape and set out to rescue Gail. They discover that she is being forced to compete in a beauty contest; the winner will become the wife of Emperor Zinzang, a young, slim Castro Clone. 

 When Crash bursts in, flexing his muscles and issuing taunts, the Emperor seems quite impressed, if not downright attracted; he forgets all about the beauty contest and challenges the superhero to single combat. They spend several panels lunging, grabbing, and jumping on top of each other, in the process accidentally shredding their outfits so the interplay of their muscles becomes even more evident.

During a lull in the battle, the Emperor explains to Casper that he really likes Crash, and he’s not evil, he’s just crazed with power – he received a year’s worth of invulnerability for his 27th birthday, and he’s been behaving rudely ever since. But in a few minutes he’ll be 28, normal again, and Crash will annihilate him.

Casper suggests that he call a truce and apologize for abducting Gail, and then he and Crash could start over as friends. The Emperor agrees.

 Then, abruptly, Casper wakes up. We never find out if the Emperor selects a wife, or if Crash and Gail ever leave the Evil Planet. Should we attribute this sudden jerk into “reality” to the writer’ incompetence, to running out of space in the issue, or to the realization that the only logical conclusion to the story as portrayed involves Crash and the Emperor arm in arm, watching the sun set on the Evil Planet?

Peter McEnery: The First Gay Teenager

In Victim (1961), 21-year old Peter McEnery played the first explicitly identified gay teenager in film, a working class boy named Boy who commits suicide in prison.  His affluent, middle-aged lover, Melville Farr (gay actor Dirk Bogarde), tries to uncover the blackmail ring responsible for his death.  Portraying gay men as victims rather than monsters was revolutionary, and paved the way for the decriminalization of same-sex acts in Britain in 1967.

Peter moved directly from an amazingly courageous role to Disney, becoming an Adventure Boy with the two usual attributes: a muscular physique and heterosexual obsession.

In 1964, he starred in The Moon-Spinners as Mark Camford, a young banker who gets involved with spies in Crete, and in the process falls for vacationing British girl Nikki (regular Disney star Hayley Mills).  No buddy-bonding, but quite a lot of shirtless scenes, and more suspense than one usually gets from Disney.

In 1966, he played the titular role in The Fighting Prince of Donegal: Red Hugh, the 16th century Irish prince who started a rebellion against the oppressive English.  Hugh falls for a girl (Susan Hampshire), but also buddy-bonds with an older man.

Maybe the parallels with Victim were too great, or maybe Disney was being extra-cautious after the accidental outing of Tommy Kirk.  For whatever reason, Peter never worked for Disney again.  Instead, he continued his career of gay-vague and not-so-gay vague characters.

In I Killed Rasputin (1967), Peter played Prince Felix Yusopov, who was bisexual in real life, the lover of Grand Prince Dmitri Pavlovich (and enjoyed dressing in drag).  The movie tries to closet him, and all but eliminates Dmitri, but still Peter manages to imbue his character with a homoerotic passion (and he dances with a man).

Other sexually adventurous movies followed, but the most famous is Entertaining Mr. Sloane (1970), based on the play by gay writer Joe Orton.  Mr. Sloane (Peter) is a male prostitute who moves in with a closeted gay man (Harry Andrews) and ends up the unwilling boy-toy of both him and his sister.

I haven't seen any of Peter's later works, mostly British television and tv movies, but some of them look interesting, and with ample buddy-bonding potential: The Cat and the Canary (which has a "gay" keyword on the Internet Movie Database); a version of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream; and Clayhanger, from a series of novels by reputedly gay author Arnold Bennett.

I have not been able to discover his real-life sexual identity, only that he was married to Julie Peasgood for a time, and has a daughter.  But with all of his gay-vague and gay roles, who cares?

See also: Fighting Prince of Donegal.

The Mighty Hercules

Before He-Man, there was The Mighty Hercules, part of the 1960s sword-and-sandal fad. He appeared on Saturday morning and sometimes Sunday morning tv from 1963 to 1966, and occasionally afterwards, in five-minute segments with stiff animation that seemed amateurish even to little kids.  With his square jaw, expressionless face, and black curlicue hairstyle, he  looked exactly like the Filmation Superman, but in a toga so his muscles would be visible.

Unlike the Hercules of Greek mythology, this Hercules ruled the kingdom of Caledon along with his two sidekicks: a teenage centaur boy who repeated everything twice ("Be careful, Herc!" "Be careful, Herc!"), and a young satyr boy who only tooted his panpipes. Some commentators have found a romantic subtext in the interactions between Hercules and the centaur-boy, but I don't remember enough episodes to be sure.

But I do remember the thrilling theme song (sung by gay-friendly Johnny Nash).  It was a tad risque, and it summed up all of the characteristics gay boys in the 1960s were looking for in boyfriends.

Softness in his eyes,
Iron in his thighs,
Virtue in his heart,
Fire in every part,
Of the Mighty Hercules.

The Penis Festival of Greece

In the Greek Orthodox Calendar, "Clean Monday" is the start of Lent, the season where believers give up something important to them to commemorate Christ's sacrifice on Easter.

In the village of Tyrnavos, about 200 miles north of Athens, the men give up penises.

So they have a Penis Festival, or Bourani, at the end of their month-long Carnival season.

Bourani is actually a spinach soup. On Clean Monday all of the "initiates," including visiting tourists, have to drink it from a penis-shaped ladle, then sip tsipouro, an alcoholic beverage, from a penis-shaped cup, and finally sit on a penis throne.

You can bring a friend; couples are welcome.

 Meanwhile the men who have already been initiated stand around with penis-shaped scepters singing obscene songs about penises.

There's a parade of penises and other caracatures, and  many vendors plying the crowds with penis-shaped candy and toys.

Such an obviously homoerotic festival has ancient roots.  It was originally in honor of Dionysus, the ancient Greek god of wine and carousing.

Several puritanical Greek governments have tried to banned the festival, but it keeps going on in secret.

It's mostly men, but women have been allowed since 1980.

While you're in Greece, be sure to fly down to Crete to check out the artifacts of the beefcake-heavy Minoan Civilization.

Bill and I Fall Asleep Reading Uncle Scrooge

When I was a kid in the 1960s, it was hard to find comic books.  I didn't get a regular allowance until junior high, and when I did manage to earn a quarter or a dime, Schneider's Drug Store would be out of my favorite titles. I depended mostly on gifts from my uncles, or hand-me-downs from my cousin or the big kid down the street.

So one of my fondest childhood memories is of the summer of 1971 -- a few weeks before my Aunt Mavis took us to see The Time Machine.  My boyfriend Bill, my brother, and I went to the Denkmann Elementary School Carnival, and  I won a whole box of Disney comics that somebody donated-- Donald Duck, Walt Disney's Comics and Stories, Uncle Scrooge --  over 20 in all.

In those days new comics cost 15 cents, so that was quite a score!

I could do without the Donald Ducks, with Donald being forced to sit on a chair at the Bon Ton while Daisy tried on hats, and the Walt Disney's Comics and Stories were uneven, but each of the Uncle Scrooges was a gem.

In each issue Uncle Scrooge traveled to a far-flung corner of the world with Donald and his grand-nephews (Huey, Dewey, and Louie) to manage his various business enterprises or acquire more wealth.

They are captured by the Harpies while searching for the Golden Fleece.
They rocket to a solid gold moon created by a Venusian explorer.
They find the Mines of King Solomon.
They visit the kingdom of Tralla-La in Tibet.

History, astronomy, mythology, chest-pounding adventure, either before or at the same moment that I was discovering Treasure Island, King Solomon's Mines, Coral Island, Journey to the Center of the Earth, and the books in the Green Library!

It was a male-only world, with no damsels in distress to be rescued and no girls waiting back home at the adventure's end.  Uncle Scrooge is elderly, his life nearly over, and he has never expressed the slightest interest in a woman.

But my memory has another layer:

I did not read the comics alone.

Bill invited me to stay over at his house so he could "help me" read, squeezed into his small bed in the room down the hall from his big brother Mike.

I read long into the night, long after Bill loosened his grip on a comic, his eyelids fluttered shut, and he began to snore. Once he shifted position until we were pressed together, his soft chest rising and falling, his lips parted slightly, his face illuminated in the golden light of his cowboy lamp.

When I was ready to sleep, I lay against his chest, and he put his arm around me.

I had slept over with Bill many times before, and I would sleep over again, but that was the only time we slept in each other's arms.

In Search of Greek Men

My semester of New Testament Greek 30 years ago didn't help me much in my search for modern Greek beefcake.  I looked with the key words ομάδα κολύμβησης, κολύμπι  κλαμπ, γυμναστήριο, and so on, and came up with some pictures, but no idea where in Greece most of these guys are from.  Or if they're from a Greek article about sports elsewhere in the world.

1.  Niced tanned physique, rare in swimmers who mostly work out inside.

2. A buffed guy in the crowd.  The backpack draws attention to his pecs.

3. The caption says kortsilas-sixroniki, which are not Greek words or Greek name.  I can do without the jazz hands.

4. Giannis Antetokounmpo was born in Athens, Greece to Nigerian immigrant parents in 1994, and began playing professional basketball in 2012.  Currently he's playing for the Milwaukee Bucks.

5. A Greek swim club.  I like the one guy who is not wearing team speedos.

More after the break.

Falling Asleep during "Troy: Fall of a City."

I went into the Netflix tv series Troy: Fall of a City expecting a vast canvass, a lot of spectacular special effects, and nonstop beefcake.  After all, a new take on one of the most familiar stories in the world has to have something to justify the retelling.

The first episode was promising, Paris Prince of Troy meeting a mysterious group of beings who might be gods.  Zeus (Hakeem Kae-Kazim) asks him to choose who is superior: Hera (power), Athena (wisdom), or Aphrodite (beauty).  When he chooses beauty, the others in a rage vow to shatter his world. 

Very interesting, very evocative.  It goes downhill from there.

Troy is the story of a battle between the gods, with humans their unwilling pawns.  Paris, the Prince of Troy, kidnaps Helen, Princess of Sparta, to the consternation of her husband Menelaus (Jonas Armstrong, above).  The Spartans and their allies lay siege to Troy, a siege that lasts for ten long, gruelling years.  In the Iliad, Homer covers only a few weeks in the story; his Odyssey focuses on the minor character Odysseus (Joseph Mawle, left) trying to get home.  Other ancient authors have filled in the rest, explored interesting byways and asides, speculated about the lives of the characters before and after the War, given other minor characterstheir own epics.  You couldn't cover all of it in a hundred tv series.

Troy: Fall of a City tries to.

The result is a jumble of people, name upon name splattering across the stage: Troilus, Menelaus, Xanthus, Diomedes, Ajax, Aeneas, Agamemnon, Thersites.  Their stories are minimized or ignored.  The famous are shuffled off to the side.  Hesion (who?)  gets as much air time as Priam.  

I have no idea who is who.  I've read The Iliad, The Odyssey,  In Search of the Trojan War, The World of Homer, and several books on ancient Greek mythology, literature, culture, and history.  Half the time I have no idea what's going on.  

The war itself is minimized -- very few battle scenes, mostly at night -- to make room for a domestic drama.  

Helen has not been kidnapped; she has chosen Paris due to "true love" -- they discuss how much they love each other a lot .  Plus she likes Troy because it is a haven of women's rights, with none of the sexism that is endemic in Sparta (no, Homer doesn't mention that).  But some of the Trojans resent her; she has trouble fitting in (understandably, since no matter how many times her allies say "You're not responsible for all of this," she absolutely is).  

A soap opera.  

There are lots of gay characters in The Iliad, but none here (that I know of; there's not much time for romance).  Achilles (David Gyasi, left) has a bisexual three-way.

Not a lot of beefcake.  Most modern movies and tv shows populate the ancient world with Boris Vallejo-style super-bodybuilders, but here we see only occasional nondescript physiques, like Tom Weston Jones as Hector.

  The muscular cast members keep covered.

And the gods appear only briefly.  This is a naturalistic Bronze Age soap opera.

A very, very dull one.

An Old Steve Reeves Movie

20 years before Arnold Schwarzenegger personalized the bodybuilder, a decade before William Smith brought bodybuilding Western heroes out of the closet, Steve Reeves became an icon for gay and straight men -- but mostly in Italy, with his voice dubbed in by someone else.

Born in 1926 in Montana, Reeves developed a massive physique during the 1940s, when it was still considered a weird affectation.  After minor roles in U.S. movies and tv sitcoms -- and physique shots in Bob Mizner's pro-gay Physique Pictorial -- he moved to Italy, where the peplum or sword-and-sandal genre promoted Italian nationalism through man-mountains in togas who wandered around the ancient world, fighting oppressors.

Reeves' Hercules (1957) became a sensation, even after it was released in the U.S. in 1959, and spun Reeves into a sequel, Hercules Unchained (1959), as well as a Hercules fad in comics and on tv.

 Soon Reeves was playing every ancient hero the studio could dig up or invent, 15 in all: Goliath (not the Biblical Goliath), Glaucus (from The Last Days of Pompeii), Morgan the Pirate, The Thief of Baghdad, Agi Murad,  and Phidippides  (I've never heard of most of them, either).

The plots were similar: Hercules, or Goliath, or Agi Murad fights to help a civilization throw off the yoke of a tyrannical oppressor, gets captured and tortured, rejects the advances of an evil black-haired woman and rescues and marries a good blonde-haired woman.

His lines were dubbed in English in post-production, so no one heard his real voice except in two American movies, the bodybuilder-exploitation Athena and the police drama Jailbait.

There is minimal buddy-bonding, as in the original Hercules, where the demigod tags along with Jason and the Argonauts.  But both Hercules and Jason fall in love with women, and at the end of the movie they part.

In Romulus and Remus (Duel of the Titans, 1961), Romulus (Steve Reeves) and Remus (Gordon Scott) are raised as brothers, and fight the evil oppressors together.  But then one becomes good, and the other evil, and they must duel to the death.

Gay fans had to make do with Steve Reeves' superlative musculature, which was displayed extensively in every movie.

He retired in 1967 after an injury,  and devoted the next 33 years to promoting fitness and raising horses on his ranch in central California.  No information on whether he supported his gay fans, but since they were an integral part of his fame, one imagines that he enjoyed  the homage in The Rocky Horror Picture Show , where Dr. Frank-N-Furter tells Brad and Janet:

If you want something visual, that's not too abysmal,
We could take in an old Steve Reeves movie.

Pete and Nick Spanakos, the Boxing Twins

Identical twins Petros (Pete) and Nicholas Spanakos were born on July 26th, 1938 in the working-class Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York.  They were the youngest of eight boys born to Greek immigrants Michael and Stella Spanakos, who owned the Paramount Restaurant on Court Street.

Topping off at 5'3", and the only Greek kids in Red Hook, Pete and Nick were often targeted by neighborhood bullies -- the Italians one day, the Irish the next.  Bigger guys were always calling them out, insulting them.

One day when they were 14 years old, they walked into a gym, and someone said "You guys want to try punching the big bags?"  They did.  They strapped on pairs of boxing gloves, and never took them off.

In 1952, they entered the Golden Gloves competition for amateur youth, making sure that they had different weights so they wouldn't have to fight each other (although they usually entered the same tournaments).

On February 21, 1955, they both won boxing matches on the same night.

They were fast and energetic, not hard-hitters.  But what they lacked in strength they made up for in sheer enthusiasm.  Over the next 10 years, they won 17 Golden Gloves titles.

Pete competed the 1959 Pan-American Games in Chicago, and Nick won a bronze medal at the  1960 Olympics. His roommate was the future Muhammad Ali.

  Later he fought the Greek champion in an exhibition round in Athens.

Pete and Nick used their boxing prowess to get scholarships to the College of Idaho, a private liberal arts college that has produced governors, journalists, and Nobel Prize winners, and then went on to graduate school.

Pete got a law degree and moved back to New York, where became a school counselor, later opening a school for South Bronx kids who had been expelled.  He bought a historic house in Sea Gate, Coney Island, and founded the Sea Gate Historical Society.

One of his close friends was Joe Rollino (1904-2010), the "strongest man in the world," who used to perform at Coney Island, lifting 635 pounds with one finger.

Nick got a Ph.D. in Business Administration and taught at SUNY for many years.   He recently retired to Miami Beach.

I can't find a lot of gay connection in their biographies, just some same-sex friendships.  But the beefcake was spectacular.

The Beefcake Paintings of Nikos Engonopoulos

Nikos Engonopoulos (1903-1985) was a Greek painter of the surrealist movement, a colleague of Max Ernst, Joan Miro, Salvador Dali.

But the work of other surrealists rarely depicted beefcake (even though Dali was gay).

Engonopoulous stayed away from beefcake during the 1930s and 1940s, and filled his poetry with images of desirable women rather than men.

  But near the end of his career he began to paint stylized, faceless men with broad shoulders and narrow waists, a reflection of standards of male beauty of his childhood.  And they all have penises.

Most were not put on display, but given as gifts to his friends, as if they were private visions.

Cafe, les pallicares (1956) depicts soldiers in the Greek War of Independence (1821-1828) standing beneath a Greek flag in a cafe.  The swordsman, the waiter, and the toga-clad philosopher suggest icons of male sensuality like the leatherman and the cowboy in the U.S.

Two Soldiers and a Philosopher (1951) are three other types of Greek masculinity, one nude.

Hunter and Watchmaker (1975).  I don't know the significance of the hunter and the watchmaker, but time is passing, and through the window we can see the sea.  Maybe they're a gay couple.

The Death of Archimedes (1950-60).  Archimedes was a mathematician and inventor who died at the hands of the Romans during the Second Punic War (Syracuse is visible in flames through the window)

Hero (Philopoemen), undated, but probably from the 1950s.  Philopoemen was an ancient Greek general (strategos).

I don't know why Engonopoulos experienced such a burst of masculine energy late in his life.  Maybe he was coming out.  Or maybe he just wanted a hero.

See also: The Penis Festival of Greece

The Gay Villages of Sonia and Tim Gidal

When I was little, my search for a "good place" often led me to the My Village books.  Tim Gidal (1909-1996) was a a pioneer in the field of photojournalism and a respected academic at the New School for Social Research.  In the interest of fostering international understanding, he and his wife Sonia published My Village in India (1956), a photo-story about the everyday life of a real ten-year old boy in a rural village.

It became so popular that they started scouting out villages in other countries, eventually traveling to 23:

1956: Austria
1957: Yugoslavia, Ireland
1958: Norway
1959: Israel, Lapps (Norway)
1960: Bedouins (Jordan), Greece
1961: Switzerland
1962: Spain, Italy
1963: Denmark, England
1964: Germany, Morocco
1965: France
1966: Finland, Japan
1968: Korea, Brazil
1969: Ghana
1970: Thailand
They only stopped when the couple divorced.



Each story was written in present tense and covered a few days in the life of a 10-12 year old boy: shepherding in Yugoslavia, fishing in Norway, tending to a vineyard in France.  He also went to school, played with his friends, talked to other villagers, went to a festival or took a field trip to a big city, and sometimes solved a minor mystery.  On the way you learned something about the history, language, and culture of the country (probably for the first time).

No gay people or same-sex romances were ever mentioned.  So why did these books offer a glimpse of a "good place"?

1. The boys were all exceptionally cute, from my preteen vantage point, and in warm climates they often stripped down to swim or fish or frolic.  Even in cold climates: the Norwegian boy stripped down for bed, and the Finnish boy was photographed completely nude in a sauna.

2. Their fathers, older brothers, and neighbors all lived off the land: they were farmers, shepherds, fishermen, loggers.  That meant endless photographs of muscular adult men.


3. American media of the 1960s was full of preteen boys "discovering" girls.  But the Village boys never expressed the slightest interest in girls.  Indeed, they didn't seem to know any, other than their sisters.

4. However, they often came in pairs that were extremely expressive by American standards: always hugging, wrapping their arms around each other, lying side by side, even kissing each other on the cheek.  To my preteen mind, it was obvious that they were boyfriends.

See also: Looking for Love in the Encyclopedia; Tracking Down the Gay Boy of Mykonos

Michael Forest: Playing a God of Masculine Beauty

The September 22nd, 1967 episode of Star Trek had the cryptic title "Who Mourns for Adonais?"

Even when I grew up and studied English literature, the title was still cryptic.  It comes from "Adonais," an elegy written by Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley for his dead friend, John Keats.

He took the name from Adonis, the ancient Greek god of masculine beauty.

So audiences were supposed to expect a god of masculine beauty?

They got one: 37 year old Michael Forest as Apollo, an alien who was mistaken for a god by the ancient Greeks, and who still expects worship.  It takes a femme fatale scientist to subdue him.

The heterosexist plotline didn't detract from the image of Michael Forest as Apollo, clad in a toga, with a laurel leaf, his bare chest, shoulders, and arms visible, one of the iconic beefcake shots of the Boomer generation.

Although never a beefcake star of the Henry Willson stable, Michael managed to display his bare chest several times during the 1950s, in guest-spots in Westerns (as an Indian) and swinging-bachelor dramas, and in horror-sci fi movies like Beast from Haunted Cave (1959), 

He fell somewhat short of the superlative physique necessary to cash in on the 1960s bodybuilder craze; his only peplum was Atlas (1961), directed by Roger Corman.

But he worked steadily through the 1960s, with guest spots across the tv dial, and starring roles in movies.

One of his most important was Deathwatch (1966), based on the Jean Genet play about two prison inmates, Maurice (Paul Mazursky) and Lefranc (Leonard Nimoy) competing for the affections the hot, muscular Green-Eyes (Forest).

That's right, Leonard Nimoy playing a gay character, a year before he became Spock.

(This actually wasn't his first; he played a hustler in Jean Genet's The Balcony in 1963)..

After Star Trek, Michael continued to take off his shirt a lot, playing Achilles (1972), a motorcycle thug (1972), a spaghetti Western Man with No Name (1972), and Agamemnon (1973).  Plus theater and lots of voice-over work (look for him in the 2008 documentary Adventures in Voice Acting).

In 2013, he reprised the character of Apollo on the web series Star Trek Continues (2013).

Apparently heterosexual in real life, he has retired to Walla Walla, Washington.