Super Rog reaches for the big time
'My sense of direction is so bad ... I get lost on ego trips!"
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Roger Ford |
Toolbox
By ED BARNA Herald Correspondent - Published: March 10, 2005
When graduates of Beeman Academy in New Haven were planning their annual alumni dinner last summer, one of the organizers had an idea about where to find a keynote speaker.
There was a guy in his brother’s class who in his high school years at Mount Abraham Union had been head of the drama club, MC’d the school variety show, did some magic, even performed at basketball games. Maybe Roger Ford was still around.
Usually the class clown — Ford’s own characterization: “I was pretty much sort of a nut growing up” — settles down, sobers up and by the 10th reunion can be found selling cars, running a marketing department or helping people with deeds and wills. Not old Super Rog.
Beeman discovered they would be getting someone who had toured the country with a comedy troupe after going to clown college, had held a regular monthly spot on a San Francisco comedy club’s calendar and had taught creative dramatics.
Also he had been a breakfast cook, pig farm insulation installer, canvasser for an environmental organization, computer trainer, legal secretary and traffic safety instructor, among other material for jokes and stories.
The alumni invitation came at the perfect time.
“I had just started going to Toastmasters — Rutland’s club — to develop that kind of program, so I said ‘yes,’” and immediately began work on a comedy routine about his supposed manual “Notworking for Dummies.”
Ford’s ambitions as a comedian and humorous writer came to the attention of the Rutland area this past November, when he went from winning the local area and Division A Toastmasters humorous speech competition to placing second in District 45, which includes almost all of New England plus two Canadian provinces.
Actually, it was not his first such success: back in 1984, he had taken second in a California district, with a distinctly Vermont-tinged routine, “Think Bovine.”
There have been other indications of his renewed determination to become known as a humorist. Vermont Public Radio included his tale “Not Even a Store” for its Funny Vermont Stories Night. Locally, he’s appeared for a Middlebury Town Hall Theater variety show and been the keynoter for a bank’s senior citizens’ club dinner.
He even got to entertain at a birthday celebration held at Starksboro’s elementary school, on the same stage where his performing career had begun to evolve nearly 40 years earlier. At 14, he had gone there to impersonate a chimpanzee.
But the real push toward comedy might have come earlier, from working on his father’s dairy farm. As his online biography puts it, “Roger grew up on a dairy farm in New Haven, Vermont. He left as soon as he could.”
The family lived in Bridport then Addison, where he father worked on or managed farms for other families. By the time Roger was 5, he was old enough to do his share, taking over the job that barn beginners usually got: “hoeing off the cows.”
That meant raking manure out of stalls into the gutter.
“Sometimes you got the tail in the face,” he said, and sometimes it was a wet, stained tail. “I didn’t like the barn at all.”
(Joke from his standup days in San Francisco: “My mother said the city is dirty. Now remember she’s talking to a kid up to his waist in cow manure ... I could never understand why we didn’t just leave. We had a tractor.”)
When they moved to their own place in New Haven, he was 7 and ready for the more pleasant job of feeding the calves. But “my father was a tough boss,” he said.
“I was supposed to be born on his birthday. I was supposed to be modeled after him. None of those things happened,” Ford said.
“He saw a lot of me in him, but didn’t always like what he saw of him in me,” he said. “He finally got over that I would never be a farmer.”
Meanwhile, in New Haven he had access to something new: their TV could bring in Channel 8, out of Poland Springs, Maine. Already in Bridport, he had become a Captain Kangaroo fan, but now there were other influences, like his big hero Superman.
“I was Super Rog in high school,” he said.
In a booklet of stories he has published, “The Adventures of Super Rog!” he wrote, “I had long suspected I was an alien — or extraterrestrial, as we prefer to be called — which would explain why I was such a stark contrast to everyone else in town, not to mention my immediate family.”
(SF joke: “As a child, I realized nothing on television resembled anything in real life. I was born on the wrong side of the screen.”)
Super Rog even made it to basketball games, helping to stir up school spirit along with the cheerleaders. But that wasn’t his only adventure.
There was the time he and a friend in the Literary Club got the idea of riding a cow through the gymnasium for a talent show. That wasn’t allowed, so he ended up parading through in a three-piece suit carrying a Wall Street Journal attended by several ducks.
“It was memorable,” he said. It got him into the Drama Club (“If this guy will do that, he’ll do the play”), which helped him become the co-MC of the Variety Show.
Along the way, he had been studying magic, eventually finding books that had the secrets in them, and wowing his family with things like making the spots change on big dice. Magic provided his entry into the talent show his junior year.
Coming back to Vermont later in life — New Haven was one of his home bases during travels that took him to California, Texas, Chicago and London, among other places — he did some of his magic for children. Those with long memories at the Mary Johnson Day Care Center may recall a pirate called The Jolly Roger, or The Christmas Elf. “It was terrible,” he recalled, “and they loved it.”
Another formative element, one that is important now for his recent efforts as a literary storyteller, was listening to the elders in this family and their accounts of past days and doings.
“I couldn’t wait until I heard some of their stories,” he said.
At Bucknell College in Pennsylvania, he had started at a chemistry major, having always done well in math and science. But partway through, he switched to biology, then to religion, graduating in 1975.
(SF joke: “One thing about religion majors, you can never skip class — God is everywhere ... I loved religion, but I considered becoming a doctor. I couldn’t decide: bury the dead, or bill them?”)
“I wanted to be a writer,” he said. “I decided to give myself five years to try to be a writer.”
Hemingway’s travels and Kerouac’s “On the Road” being models, and the 1970s being a very open decade, the next few years were to be varied and eventful. After stints in Texas, Ohio and England, he went to San Francisco, where he did his first clowning. He had helped to organize a parade, went to help supervise the event as Raford the Clown, and had people tell him, “You ought to be a clown.”
He got some training along those lines in Blue Lake, Calif., at the MoMing School of Dance Bozo Ensemble. Then in 1979, he joined Volunteers In Service To America, which sent him to work in Chicago with a 13-church service organization called Christian Action Ministry.
Following that, he decided to take his offbeat path to becoming a successful writer to the next level by applying to the Dell’Arte School of Mime and Comedy in San Francisco, where he could add clowning skills like juggling, physical comedy and presentation. At about the same time that he got accepted for a position with the Bennington Marionettes, word came that he had been accepted.
After graduating from Dell’Arte, he and six other graduates worked up an act, a mummers’ play, and took it around the country to Renaissance festivals, calling themselves the Victims of Circus Dance Theatre Co.
The name was a play on the phrase “victims of circumstance.” That was a summer affair; in the winter, he went to New Orleans, then to Sedona, Ariz., where he found work as a gallery assistant and waiter.
In the end, it was San Francisco that attracted him enough to settle down. It was there that he developed standup comedy act that went from open mike status to regular booking and, in 1988, made him the winner of the first annual Bay Area Fog Comedy Competition.
Humorous speaking was part of Toastmasters there, too, and participating not only brought him the previously mentioned district prize, it also brought him together with his first wife.
In 1992, starting the move from standup comedy to humorous writing that is his main effort now, he earned a master of arts degree in writing from the University of San Francisco. Meanwhile, he earned a living by such means as delivering singing telegrams and more permanently by starting a word-processing business.
But in 1999, his first wife died of cancer. He left San Francisco and came back home again to New Haven.
(SF joke: “Vermont winters are not as bad as people think. Especially in June.”)
Today, he lives in Shoreham with his second wife, Brenda, described on his Web site as his “Internet bride.” True: like many lonely men in the midlife years, he decided to try finding companionship via an Internet dating service.
When they first made contact, he sent a picture of himself with the Thanksgiving turkey. She wrote back, “Are you the one on the right or the left, and does that mean you cook?” “Yes, I do, in more ways than one.” And on to the altar: they were married Nov. 11, 2001, at 11:11 a.m.
Life continues to be an adventure. The temporary services agency he works for sends him hither and yon; he’s had a Web site selling digital cameras; he might be getting some more training at the graduate level.
(SF joke: “My sense of direction is so bad I get lost on ego trips ... Robert Frost, great Vermont poet, wrote the poem “The Road Not Taken.” I live on that road.”)
One thing is for certain: there will be stories. ’Til the cows come home.
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