Typically the ’80s ending is the one you saw coming. Not this time.
569. This was the first cartoon after the Easter break, beginning the last big block of Molarity cartoons in The Observer.
570. The sports page had a note about how Notre Dame, “the Wrigley Field of College Football,” will host its first night game on September 18, 1982, against Michigan, starting at 8 p.m. ABC Sports would provide a portable light system for the game.
571. I got a phone call at the end of the day from a student lamenting, “Tell me that Mitch is not dead!” It was now obvious that Molarity had entered the realm of teenage slasher films and campus was wondering if I was really going to kill off my characters. This was long before Bob Newhart’s Dick Loudon woke up with Suzanne Pleshette on Newhart, or the Seinfeld characters went to jail in their finale.
572. A front-page story announced that the Canadian prime minister, Pierre Trudeau, would be the commencement speaker, one year after Ronald Regan spoke. Meanwhile, among the 12 awards the newspaper won in the Indiana College Press Association’s annual ceremonies, Jeb Cashin ’83 won first place for his comic strip, Simon, and I won second place for Molarity. I was not even aware that I had been nominated.
573. The Observer was in the middle of running a series articles about Father Hesburgh’s trip to El Salvador, taking the material from his travel journal.
More to come. We’re not there yet. . . .
See the first five classic strips. Buy the book with all 581 original cartoons: MOLARITY: The Compleat Molarity is available at the Hammes Notre Dame Bookstore and Amazon.com. Check back monthly for more classic Molarity strips. Molarity Redux, the updated, continuing adventures of Jim Mole and friends, also is posted monthly. For those new strips, check out the cartoon archives.