My Springfield...

It’s my birthday this week, and my gift to you is a personal tour of my birthplace: Bristol, Connecticut.

Whenever I mention my hometown, everyone says the same thing: “Bristol, eh? I drove through there once.”

Everyone passes through, no one stops. But they should! It’s a friendly town where nobody locks their doors and everyone gets robbed. We boast two world-class museums: one for clocks, one for carousels. Basically, if it turns in circles but doesn’t go anywhere, Bristol will build a museum to it.

Anytime I meet someone from Connecticut, they’re from some town I’ve never heard of, like Pumpkin Corners or Old New East-West. We’re not that big a state – there’s only two smaller -- we should be able to keep track of all our towns. There’s 169 of them, and most of them sound like the names of English butlers: Simsbury, Milford, Sterling and the beloved family valet, Old Saybrook. You could fill six seasons of Downton Abbey, with servants like Wilton, Weston, Wolcott and Wallingford. And those are just the W’s!

I was Grand Marshal of the hometown parade because Radar never comes back and the other guy was in prison.

Today Bristol is the home of ESPN. But in my youth, it was a blue-collar town, filled with hard-working, dopey dads. Whenever I wrote about The Simpsons’ hometown, I pictured Bristol. It was my Springfield.

We had three factories, but they didn’t even make things – they made the things that go in other things: springs, ball-bearings, brass. Now, we don’t even make those.

Like Bart Simpson, I’m the product of underfunded public schools. My grade school was built in 1895, and often during class, a huge chunk of plaster would drop from the ceiling onto my desk. Most of my teachers were what we then called ‘spinsters’, and they stayed at their jobs for decades. When the school was finally converted to condos, one of those teachers moved in there. That’s dedication.

My grade school is now condos.

I learned comedy writing in Bristol, working for the high school paper. Mrs. Kelly, my faculty advisor, would hack my articles to pieces and ruin all my punchlines. This was excellent training for a career in television.

I once wrote a parody of our Student of the Month column. That month’s winner was a clearly psychotic kid who suggested we change the school colors to ‘black and darker black’.

Mrs. Kelly changed it to ‘black and blue’. “I can’t believe you missed the obvious joke!” she said.

“That’s why I didn’t do it!” I cried. “It’s the obvious joke!”

“You’ll never get a job writing for Cracked with that attitude.”

Every night I’d pray to God that he’d punish Mrs. Kelly for her crimes against comedy.

A year later, she won a million dollars in the Connecticut Lottery.

God always listens to my prayers, then does the exact opposite.

Still, I got a great education in Bristol – I learned useful skills like reading and math, and useless ones like diagramming sentences – what WAS that? And they made me dissect frogs, which will come in handy if I ever see a frog having congestive heart failure.

Bristol public schools helped get me into Harvard, and for that I’ll never forgive them.

There is no point to diagramming sentences.

I always dreamed of becoming Bristol’s most famous citizen, but I’ll have to settle for third place. #1 is Gary Burghoff, who played Radar O’Reilly in M*A*S*H the movie, M*A*S*H the TV show, and the sequel AfterMASH. That’s it – he plays Radar O’Reilly or he doesn’t work.

Bristol’s #2 celebrity is Aaron Hernandez, an NFL tight end who went to prison for murder. It’s typical of my town that we didn’t even produce the most famous football player/killer. Damn you, O.J.

Me, a homicidal football player, and Radar O’Reilly – what can you expect from a town of 50,000 people? Well, the island nation of Saint Lucia has the same population, and they produced two Nobel Prize winners. And ancient Athens had 50,000 people and they were home to Plato, Socrates, Sophocles and Homer… no, not THAT Homer.

There’s one more Bristol boy who deserves attention: Joey D’Auria. He was Chicago’s Bozo the Clown from 1984 to 2001. He was the last one in America — The Man Who Killed Bozo. Before that, he achieved Gong Show fame with the brilliant — BRILLIANT — routine, Dr. Flame-O. Watch the clip — it got him on the Carson show.

I’ve used so much of what I saw growing up as inspiration for The Simpsons. One of the very first scenes in the first episode of the show has Homer losing a game of Scrabble and then throwing the whole game into the fireplace.

My friend’s father did that. His name was Mr. Burns, by the way.

Years later, when I won my first Emmy for “The Simpsons”, I had my wife take a picture, which I sent to my hometown newspaper. Three days later, that photo of me in a tuxedo clutching an Emmy appeared on the front page of The Bristol Press. The headline read, “Local Man Claims to Win Award.”

Local Man Claims to Win Award

I remain unduly fond of my hometown and wouldn’t have wanted to grow up anywhere else. I guess everyone’s like that. When I met Seth Macfarlane, creator of “Family Guy”, one of the first things he told me was, “I’m from Kent, Connecticut.”

“Never heard of it,” I admitted. “And I’m from Bristol.”

“Bristol, eh?” Seth replied. “I drove through there once.”

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