The Guardian, SPRINGFIELD, Oregon
Snow recently coated Springfield, canceling school, so a boy nicknamed Bart and two friends spent the morning building a snowman on the corner of Fifth Street. They rolled the two main mounds so big that they could not hoist one onto the other. Bart had an idea: “They look like testicles. Let’s add a penis.”
Three hours of dedicated effort later, a three-meter phallus towered over the corner of Fifth Street, delighting its creators and infuriating an elderly neighbor who arrived in a motorized wheelchair.
“Disgusting! Indecent!” she cried, jabbing the sculpture with a pole until it crumpled. Bart was defiant. “We’ll build it back bigger and straighter.”
Welcome to Springfield. Not the cartoon version, where Bart Simpson wreaks mayhem in a fictional town, but the real place, population 59,000, which originally inspired the television series and now, in some startling ways, reflects it.
It has a Latino Bart, a prank-loving police force, Indian convenience stores, a blue-collar underdog spirit, rumors of mutant amphibians, dingy taverns, cheap beer and doughnuts; lots of doughnuts.
And now, fame. Last week, Matt Groening, the cartoon’s creator, told the Smithsonian magazine that the animated town was inspired by one near his childhood home of Portland, Oregon.
“Springfield was named after Springfield, Oregon. Springfield was one of the most common names for a city in the US. In anticipation of the success of the show, I thought: ‘This will be cool; everyone will think it’s their Springfield.’ And they do,” he said.
They did. Now Springfields in Illinois, Kentucky, Massachusetts and elsewhere that had claimed The Simpsons for themselves are mourning their loss and Oregon is mulling its gain. An ambivalent trophy. The longest-running US sitcom is a pop cultural phenomenon that has earned multiple awards and immortalized its characters — but it is also a merciless parody of family and societal dysfunction.
The rainy strip of malls and single-story homes along Interstate 5 in the southern Willamette valley lacks the sunshine and the nuclear plant of the fictional version. A gritty town battered by the decline of its lumber industry, it is mocked as “hicksville” by its rival, snootier neighbor, the university city Eugene, which Groening renamed Shelbyville.
The animator drew on his experiences growing up in the 1970s, but today’s Springfield has a wackiness and poignancy to rival its cartoon equivalent.
Edgar Aguilar — Bart to staff and classmates at Springfield high school — is the 16-year-old son of Mexican immigrants who work in a fast-food restaurant, part of a fast-growing Latino population. It was his idea to build the snowman last month and also his idea to amend the plan.
“Well, we couldn’t lift the balls. And they looked like a pair of genitals. We improvised,” he said.
He tried in vain to protect it from his affronted neighbor — an encounter filmed on a phone and uploaded to Facebook.
“She demolished the whole shaft,” he said.
Edgar’s father laughed and his mother groaned at the episode, much as Homer and Marge Simpson might have.
“Homer is always letting Bart off the hook,” said Edgar, who usually wears his black hair in a spike.
In another echo of the show, Edgar lags in schoolwork but his sister thrives.
“It’s across the board. The boys struggle and the girls — oh my, whoosh, way ahead,” said Carmen Gelman, the principal, a charismatic Latina with a nose stud who overcame youthful poverty, abuse and delinquency to become a respected educator.
She bears no resemblance to the uptight Principal Skinner from the show. Told that a sparkly purple dildo had been left on a colleague’s chair, she exploded with laughter. She also laughed off Edgar’s snow sculpture, noting that other boys built their own versions during the snow.
“His was the best,” she said.
In addition to Edgar, Bart’s subversive spirit dwells, improbably, in a uniformed police officer, Jason Moloney, stationed at the school. The 39-year-old, who bristles with hardware, grew up adoring the cartoon rebel. He has spiked blond hair and is compared by some colleagues to Bart.
“I lived through Bart on TV. I could enjoy him getting away with things I couldn’t do in real life,” he said.
Moloney’s job is to protect and advise the 1,340 students and staff, but he enjoys rapport with Edgar, who teased him as a “rookie” when he started patrolling the school and asked for his gun.
“I told him to give it to me, that he didn’t know how to use it,” Edgar said.
Both, however, turned somber when discussing why police are in Springfield’s schools: a 1998 shooting at a nearby school which killed two and wounded 22.
The police here are widely considered efficient and honest, unlike Chief Wiggum’s bumbling force, but have a knack for slapstick. Their Chinese-made shoulder badges, it was recently noticed after five years, misspell Oregon as “Oregdn.” New badges have been made.
John Umenhofer, 50, a decorated sergeant, recalled himself and a partner ribbing each other before a supposedly routine bust — “You kick in the door.” “No, you kick it in” — only to discover, upon entering, an arsenal of AK-47s. Umenhofer dates his sense of humor to 1970 when Oregon authorities dynamited a beached sperm whale’s rotting carcass, sending up a huge chunk of blubber that flattened his father’s newly bought car.
“Dad saw the funny side,” he said.
The mayor, Christine Lundberg, dismissed any comparisons to her sleazy animation counterpart, Mayor Quimby. The real post is voluntary, with no salary.
“I don’t look like him and I’m not corrupt. We don’t do local politics like that. I do like his sash, though. I don’t have one,” she said.
In a former career, the mother-of-four fixed navigation gears onto navy jets — including at the Top Gun base — before serving popcorn to schoolchildren, which paved an entry to community politics.
Lundberg, who calls herself a pragmatic independent, played down rumors of five-legged frogs owing to pollution from lumber mills, which Groening re-imagined as a nuclear plant.
“Once, I did see a six-legged frog in my pool,” she smiled. “I ran into the house and told my son and he said: ‘Mom, they’re mating.’”
There is a town hall administrator called Lisa Simpson — the name of Bart’s sister in the show — but she shuns the limelight. Asked if she has four fingers, like her namesake, a poker-faced colleague replied: “We don’t know. She keeps her hands in her pockets.”
Groening sent a plaque to the town in 2007, in effect admitting that this corner of Oregon was the real Springfield, so most local people were not surprised by this week’s announcement, but some still professed ignorance.
“The Simpsons? I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said the Indian clerk at a 7-Eleven off 14th Street.
The TV show features a convenience store called Kwik-E-Mart owned by an Indian man named Apu, but that appeared news to Springfield’s real, numerous Indian store clerks. The owner of the 7-Eleven, an Indian man who gave his name only as Sam, also declined to be interviewed.
“Busy day, no time. And in any case I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
Wayne Jones, 28, serving at the Bright Oak Meats convenience store, said he revered the show and that it correctly depicted the town’s appetite for doughnuts, made by a local company, Master Donuts.
“They go very fast. Especially the chocolate-covered apple ones,” he said.
Instead of Moe’s Tavern, the town has the Mohawk Tavern, where Christina Ruth, 33, serves US$2 beers (US$1 during happy hour) and shots of rum-filled jelly to customers who stop on the way home from work for what they term a “drunk on.”
“If there’s a Homer here, it’s me,” said Marc Callagan, 21, a pizza deliverer and karaoke enthusiast. “I’m the only one who punches inanimate objects several times a day.”
A kilometer or so down the road, Douglas Dougherty, 65, an evangelical pastor at the Springfield Church of God, lamented the town’s link to The Simpsons.
“It certainly is funny, but it pokes fun at things sacred. The show is just too irreverent for me,” he said.
The recent spate of snow penises, he added, was not a good sign.
“What can I say? Values gone astray,” he said.
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