Remembering John Peck [1942–2025], a.k.a. The Mad Peck, Doctor Oldie, and co-producer of Comix: A History of Comic Books in America
TALES OF PECK
JEFFREY HEISER
I was on the radio with John Peck after Jeff Lee, Esquire, had left. I was the last of four guys who did the Giant Juke Box Show with him. Like a lot of kids, I became a big rock and roll fan, and as several ex-girlfriends could attest, music was all I wanted to talk about. When I was in college, I was living with Linda Brown at the time and she would listen to the Giant Jukebox on Saturday nights. So, after she became another ex-girlfriend, one day I'm hanging around the house and she calls me up, out of the blue, and says, “Hey, Dr. Oldie's looking for somebody to be disk jockey with him. Are you interested?” I'm like, “Are you KIDDING me?”
This is a dream come true! So I wind up go into his house, the old place before there was America Street. I going through the kitchen and his words of wisdom were about the lawn, which he said he would mow it once in the springtime, and he felt he didn’t have to do it again. That's typical John. So you you walk in the kitchen, you go up the stairs, and there's this room, and the door has got five locks on it. Literally. So he opens up all the locks and goes inside and it's a small room and it's like the records all the way around, 360 degrees of records, except for a cutout spot where the stereo system was, with the turntable and reel-to-reel deck, where he did all the Dr. Oldie stuff. And I just thought that was just amazing. And I thought *I* had a lot of records at the time, but it was like, wow, this is what I want to do.
And he also had a Sony Trinitron, which at the time was a really big deal.I had a 12-inch portable black and white and he's got a color TV and a fancy one at that. So we did the show and I was on there for about five years. I would pick him up every Sunday night and drive up the show and then take him home afterwards and go home After that we finally got off the air. We never got paid for that by the way. I mean he figured out that he could get a lot of records in some nefarious places, all the doubles that he didn't have.
Another funny thing: he talked about doing record reviews in high school and I did the thing thing, but I didn't know that you could write to the record companies and ask them for free stuff. I wish somebody told me that! Also, during the time I knew the man, he was really good with his hands. Actually, if I look around the room, there were three record shelves that he built. They were each about out so high, with five rows of albums. And we built those maybe 40 years ago. We did all the work. I found the blueprints for them. Very detailed and he tells you three different places to buy all materials. Like you would go to one hardware store to buy the screws, another hardware store to buy the glue. And then you go to this other place to buy the lumber. But he had a rule, which said, if he helped you build one, you had to build one for him. No free ride.
I still have that shelving today, and I look around the room and it's all stuff that would remind me of Peck, which would be, there was a Byrds poster, a Cream poster, a stack of Raymond Chandler paperbacks. We had a lot of odd things in common, not just records. And then, of course, we started doing the record collectors shows.
On the last radio show we did, I remember there were a few interesting things. about the last show. He did a bunch of outer space songs and he's talking about them and he said that, because radio waves are infinite, centuries from now, there's going to be some little alien running around the spaceship and he's going to push an audio button, “And my voice is going to come out over the speaker! And that's immortality!”
RoB YEREMIAN
In truth, I met the Mad Peck first and then I encountered his work after that. It was at a Providence comic con, most likely 1988. I was set up as a dealer — I'd been doing the show for a couple years — and this super-skinny guy with a bandana comes walking over to my table and asked if I bought comics and I said yes. Then he showed me some Silver Age Marvel comics and I bought a few of ’em from him. I asked him if he had more, he said he did, so I gave him my phone number and then I didn't hear from him. At the next show, (probably three or four months later), he shows up and we talked again.
Then I started at the University of Rhode Island. One of the first things I did when I got to college was go to the library and looked under "comics" to see what books they had. I had heard of the book Comix with Les Daniels, but all the copies in the Providence school system and Providence public libraries had been stolen, so I could never see a copy. But, sure enough, the copy of URI was there. And when I opened it up and I saw the first page and it said Les Daniels from Providence, 1970 (or whatever it was) and my mind was blown.
So I looked up Les Daniels in the phone book, and called Les, and I said, "Hey, I saw your book. Do you happen to have any of those comics? I'd be interested in buying them." And he goes, "No, those are all supplied by the Mad Peck Studios and I don't really have anything to do with those."
So I put two and two together because he didn't introduce himself as the Mad Peck; he just introduced himself as John Peck. And, at this point, I'm involved at the radio station at URI, and once Peck heard that, from there on in, we were freaking buddies for life! Because I was into underground comics, I was into music, I was a DJ on the radio, and I liked to smoke weed with him. That was it! We were attached to the hip until the very end.
RICK ROWE
Back in the ‘70s, I had a comic-book mail order business called “Desi DeSimone and Rick Roe,” but it was more than comics. It was almost anything you could think of in pop culture. And we operated out of the east side of Providence. Somehow John Peck and Les Daniels got wind of us. And so they became fairly regular visitors to our basement operation. These guys used to come over and they would sit on concrete blocks and read the thousands of old Golden Age comics we had at that time and read them all day long. We had a huge collection of DCs at one time that Les was really interested in because he was writing about them for his DC history. Anyway, for years we just hung out together and I think once in a great while Peck would appear at one of the conventions we were doing. We used to sell in Boston and East Hartford at conventions. At one point, we just kind of lost touch. I got out of the whole game. I stopped collecting. I think I unfortunately got rid of everything I owned, which is really stupid on my part because it’s over the fortune now.
Sometime in 1993 I was working in Warwick at a company that made medical instruments and across the road I found was Rob’s first Time Capsule comic shop right on Post Road across the street from us. I got to know Rob pretty well at that point and Peck was one of his regular customers. He was in there all the time. So John and I started going to comic cons in Boston and Hartford, searching for Matt Baker comic books. That’s real impetus with comics right to the end, too. He always wanted to write a book about them, but somebody beat him to it.
We scoured these conventions. We got to know everybody, all the dealers well. We spent about two hours one day talking to Mike Kaluta in Boston. Little adventures like that, but we would take off, usually in his car, once in a while in mine. And we usually take two or three joints with us and smoke them on the way up and back. So we were in a good mood the whole time. We did that for a number of years… Later, after being apart for a while, we got back together and started hanging out once in a while at the Time Capsule.
To tell the truth, I knew about him before I even moved to Rhode Island because I was a huge comic collector all my life. I was a student at this Famous Artists Cartooning course. I took that in my high school days. In fact, I concentrated more on that than my high school studies. But I was deeply into undergrounds way early and I always wanted to smoke pot when I was a kid, but there was none of that available. I was a nascent hippie from the start, always drawn to that sort of thing. So the undergrounds, as soon as they came out — the underground newspapers — I was into.
I used to listen to his Dr. Oldie show all the time on the radio. That was a lot of fun. I still have a couple of mix tapes he gave me. Peck was acerbic to say the least. He could be very dry, but he could also be very funny. And he was also a lot of fun to hang around with most of the time. He had his problems as we all do, but he and I got along really well, for the most part ,for years, right up to the end, frankly, right up until he passed. And I really cherish the memory of John. We were just such good buddies.
