I’ve never really asked why, but my younger sister has been studying to become a mortician. She’s currently a computer analyst, so she hopes her studies will lead her to a new career. Some people may feel that a mortician is a somewhat morbid career choice, but she doesn’t care, it’s what she wants to do. Going through an old stack of childhood photographs the other day I stumbled upon a possible clue that could lead to the reasons behind her pursuit.

It was 1975. The shot featured my sister and me along with three of our little friends from the neighborhood. All of us were in costume, but the green grass and short sleeves proved that the picture was taken in the summertime, so we were not dressed for Halloween. Nope, we were dressed for a funeral.

My sister was adorned in a dress, a black pillbox hat and an old pair of our mothers black pumps. I wore my father’s old army dress shirt, officer’s hat and for some reason a long plastic cigar peering obnoxiously out of the side of my mouth like General Patton. The other kids in the group were alternately festooned in military-like regalia or other 70’s style clothing. We all featured a dour expression on our face. Sad perhaps because we were posed around a small, crudely made casket.

Don’t worry, we weren’t laying a cute furry pet to rest, nor were we burying another small friend from the neighborhood. We were in mourning for a badly battered GI Joe. If you were a child in the 60’s or 70’s you remember those real GI Joe action figures. Each about a foot tall with fuzzy “lifelike” hair, angry disposition, bendable joints and sometimes even “kung-fu grip”! They were macho dolls for boys, and my little circle of friends was no different, we pestered our parents to get them for us and spent many imaginative hours devising ways for them to save the world and perhaps do nasty things to our sisters Barbie dolls. Sometimes though we’d get bored pushing around GI Joe in his GI Joe Jeep or changing him into his GI Joe Scuba suit, we needed some new adventures. The funeral was simply the end result of one of those adventures.

None of us had just one GI Joe, we had many. They all basically looked the same, some had beards, some didn’t. Some had brown hair, some black. Best I can recall they were all named Joe. Occasionally, when a GI Joe was played with just a little too hard, their limbs might become loose, and then you couldn’t pose them in the menacing stances we all enjoyed. It was this particular misfortune which befell one of our GI Joe’s that eventually led to the funeral.

Imagine a slightly demented group of pre-teens with too much time, and not enough to do – that was us. Wouldn’t it be cool to see what happens when a real car runs over one-armed superfluous GI Joe? We could make it happen. Now, we didn’t live and play on the dangerous streets of a busy city. We grew up in a very typical suburban Long Island neighborhood, with light enough vehicular traffic to play a full inning of street baseball without once having to shout “Car!!!” So we set about balancing the doomed GI Joe into a standing position with a series of small wood slats and branches, right in the center of the road. We even pointed his one good arm outwards, with his hand bent upward as if he were imploring the vehicle speeding towards his certain death to halt. Then we stepped back to await the exciting accident we knew was about to occur.

In our anxious childhood brains, the wait seemed interminable, but in reality it probably was about five minutes before we spotted something coming up the road. Yes! It was a truck! But of course, it was heading towards our GI Joe from the wrong direction and was going to smash him from the back. The coward! Sitting on the grass a safe enough distance from danger, but close enough to view the impact we all leaned closer in anticipation. The truck came closer, my friends little brother covered his eyes so as not to be witness to the carnage. The carnage was not to be of course, since GI Joe stood only twelve inches high, the big truck simply passed over him with only a breeze. That was a letdown. We had to wait for a car.

Over the next half hour or so, probably ten cars came and simply drove around our sacrificial toy. Being a tad older now and a driver I I can better relate to the angry glares we received from those annoyed adults forced to maneuver around the stupid doll. Then we came up with the brilliant idea of disguising the GI Joe in a pile of leaves and twigs. First we raised him a bit higher with a couple of pieces of wood, and then covered him up with leaves, twigs and other assorted compost items. We didn’t have to wait long for a result. I believe it was an old Buick LeSabre or some other large square gas guzzler of the early 1970’s that came motoring down the block. The impact was powerful as the large chrome bumper took out our GI Joe with a resounding thud. Matter of fact the collision between Detroit metal and plastic army man actually sent the doll airborne and he flew a good thirty feet forward landing hard down to the asphalt, oh it was glorious!

We all ran to the landing area while the Buick sped off into the distance. Expecting to see a mangled plastic mess, we were all shocked to see that there was barely any damage at all. Now what? We tried throwing him into the air and letting him plummet to the street. Nothing. We tied him with rope and dragged him through the neighborhood while tied to the back of our bikes. Nope, still looks like he could fight another day. We even tied him to a brick and left him overnight at the bottom of a pool to see what the chlorine would do. It didn’t do very much, but his hair did develop some very nice highlights.

We were all pretty much ready to move on to something else, which in those days usually meant street baseball. Aluminum bats were relatively new, and we were all intrigued by the distinct “ping” sound that the bat would make as it met ball. We wondered what sort of sound the bat would make when it met plastic action figure, and, we found out soon enough. I didn’t own the aluminum bat we used in our games, so I knew that I wouldn’t be swinging for the GI Joe, but I did have the honor of tossing the first pitch. Turns out that was the only pitch that was needed, as the kid who owned the bat took one mighty swing and smacked that poor toy into oblivion. The legs went one way, the arms another and the headless anatomically incorrect torso flew back and smacked me in the lip. Sure, I was bleeding, but I would live to destroy other action figures. Our brave, tortured GI Joe alas, would not.

It was anti-climactic actually. All that effort, and, so we thought, clever attempts at childhood homicide wasted as all we really needed to do was smack it with an aluminum bat. We gathered the pieces and determined that this GI Joe was indeed, finished.

So what better way to honor his memory than a full out military style funeral, arranged by a handful of children? We all got dressed up, we lined our street with as many American Flags as we could find, we even invited our neighbors to stand in front of their homes and salute as our procession of bicycles passed by, the last one of course pulling a wagon which held the cardboard box casket containing the assorted remains of the late GI Joe.

We held a small ceremony around the gravesite (a small wooded area in front of our house) and even played music on our portable tape player in honor of our hero, it was a Tom Jones cassette belonging to one of the kid’s parents and the only one we could find. Then we buried the box and went about doing whatever we did during the rest of that summer, waiting for the ice cream man, riding our bikes and playing baseball.

The next summer, we dug up the GI Joe wondering what could have happened to him having been buried nearly a year. The cardboard box was in bad shape but the doll pieces were just dirty. We had no idea at the time that it would take several thousand years for the plastic toy to decompose. Most of us lost interest, but my sister took the GI Joe in and attempted to reconstruct it. Not sure if this incident had anything to do with her desire to study forensic sciences, but, then again, I’ve never really asked.