April 30–May 7, 1998

on media

Spooked over the Spook

Here's a tip: When you're being interviewed by Philadelphia magazine, choose your words very carefully, and don't punch up your prose with comic-strip analogies. This is advice that Montgomery County Sheriff Frank Lalley surely did not get before speaking to writer Benjamin Wallace.

The strip in question is The Wizard of Id, a daily staple since 1964. Remember it? Takes place somewhere in the Middle Ages, features the wizard, the king (as in "The King is a Fink"), Rodney the knight, Bung the town drunk and eternal prisoner the Spook?

If you're a little hazy on "the Spook," you're not alone. The Philadelphia NAACP is calling for Lalley's resignation over his use of the term in a Philadelphia profile of Jonathan Newman.

At the time of the interview, Lalley was campaign manager for Newman, who's challenging Jon Fox in the GOP primary. While touring a new detention center in Norristown, Lalley pointed, chuckling, to a section of wall with rings to handcuff prisoners to, and said, "This place is supposed to be state-of-the-art, but then they have these hooks. It's like, get the Spook, hang 'em from the chains."

Lalley claims he was referring to the hairy (Caucasian) Id resident. Written with a capital S. Wallace, on the other hand, lowercased it, on the assumption that it was a racist slur.

"Yeah, I did take it as a racial slur at the time," Wallace said in a phone conversation, adding that "there was a general good-old-boy tone" to Lalley's speech which made it plausible.

Plausible enough, in fact, that Wallace went so far as to set up Lalley's quote with an intro—"doing his best to disprove the notion that political correctness pervades American society"—which virtually forces readers to take it the same way.

Now, however, even Wallace buys the Wizard of Id defense: "Given his explanation, I believe him. It would just be too coincidental to be able to pull out a comic strip that happened to have a character in that situation that fit so perfectly."

Certainly the reference to the medieval "Spook" chained to the wall makes more sense in this context than does a sudden lapse into trash-talk. But Wallace, who "read Wizard of Id when I was a kid -not religiously or anything," missed that possibility. "After all, there are only so many meanings to the word," he says.

Notably, Webster's New World does not list the slur meaning of "spook." And the American Heritage, which has the alternate offensive meaning for "coon," also lacks one for "spook."

Wallace, who now believes the NAACP is "misreacting," expresses a note of regret over the turn of events: "If I could do it over again, given how inflammatory it has been, I would call him up before going to press."

-Vance Lehmkuhl