Gags galore

Every kid (or kid at heart) of a certain age knows the Johnson Smith Co. and its fabulous catalogs filled with the goofy and the gross.

BY BILLY COX

Having built its mail-order empire decades ago upon mountains of plastic vomit, whoopee cushions and fake dog dung, the legendary Johnson Smith Co. prefers a facade of anonymity at its local industrial park residence.

Now celebrating 20 years without an outdoor sign at its current locale adjacent to a Bradenton cow pasture, it's easy to see why.

Receptionist Liz Hood, mindful of leaving a lasting impression on scheduled media visitors, works the phone while begarbed in Fart-O-Meter gear.

Billed as a flatulence detector, the pullover costume comes with a gas mask, storage tanks, and a ratings system that issues a wide range of scores to perps, from "Don't blame the dog!" to "Check your shorts!"

And look — here comes the official welcoming committee.

Fellow employee Frank Roe is dressed as a pickle vendor encased in a foam rubber barrel, its dispensing area located over his groin.

Beside him is JoAnn Brown, hamming it up in a matronly, overstuffed suit billed as the Lost Puppy costume.

Brown performs a 360-spin which reveals the missing canine is affixed firmly inside the wedgie of her pink, polka-dotted dress.

But as JSC president Ralph Hoenle cautions moments later, "We're not really set up for retail sales here. That could be a distraction."

No kidding.

Gag-gift king

Since gag-item entrepreneur Alfred Johnson Smith began taking catalog orders for his low-brow inventories in Chicago in 1914, generations of children — particularly adolescent boys hooked on comic books — have been exposed to JSC's ridiculous, overblown and mischievous modes of entertainment.

As a brother-sister team, Hoenle and Boyd are heirs to that legacy, best known for its flagship catalog, "Things You Never Knew Existed."

That's because their dad, Paul Hoenle, bought JSC in the late 1960s when the family lived in Michigan. With an eye on retirement, he moved the operation to Bradenton in 1986.

Although Ralph Hoenle declines to discuss the financial scope of JSC, its reach is clearly massive.

Boasting two warehouses totaling 70,000 square feet, JSC has diversified into catalogs serving up nostalgia ("Betty's Attic," since 2000), health- and senior-related items ("Full of Life," 2003) and gifts tailored to women with an ostensible sense of humor ("The Lighter Side," 1978).

the company showcases anywhere from 1,500 to 2,000 vendors. JSC counts 30 to 35 mailings a year, and mailing runs generate anywhere from 500,000 to 4 million copies.

As the elaborate costumes suggest, JSC has graduated from pedestrian hand-buzzers, squirting flowers and rubber eggs. But as Boyd ushers a guest into a conference room festooned with severed heads, rotting zombies, internal organs and a hellish clown face the size of Mickey Rooney nailed to a wall, camp is still king.

Hoenle says there isn't a formula for what crosses the good-taste boundaries at JSC.

Every so often, board members might put a controversial item to a vote, or simply ask employees (or "associates," in JSC parlance) if they'd be afraid to show a new product to their children.

Although one of JSC's hottest items is a President George W. Bush "Out of Office Countdown" calendar, Hoenle describes himself as an "equal-opportunity offender" whose angles are more mercenary than political.

Raised in Catholic traditions and having graduated from Catholic universities, the former law student graduate once considered axing a boxing-nun finger puppet after hearing from a few offended customers.

"Then I got a letter from a nun who taught school who said she loved it and wanted to order some more," he says.

Evolving consumer tastes

One look at a classic JSC catalog from 1929 reflects the evolutionary nature of consumer appetites. A dominant gift-item theme is racial stereotyping of blacks, eminently popular the year the stock market crashed.

"Um, that's where we'd cross the line today," Hoenle says.

But in that same catalog — as a hardback book reissued in the 1970s — is a fond and more contemporary prologue written by Jean Shepherd:

"The Johnson Smith catalogue is a magnificent, smudgy thumbprint of a totally lusty, vibrant, alive, crude post-frontier society, a society that was, and in some ways still remains, an exotic mixture of moralistic piety and a violent, primitive humor."

Shepherd is best remembered as the author of "A Christmas Story," the novel and screenplay that's become iconic holiday TV fare.

Shepherd's masterpiece, among other things, pays homage to America's fascination with the sort of kitsch that JSC began injecting into the marketplace 92 years ago (although, oddly enough, only since 2003 has JSC begun selling the frilly, fishnet-clad Leg Lamps so coveted by Darren McGavin's "Christmas Story" character).

Also among those countless young hordes enamored of JSC's comic-book ads peddling garlic gum and X-Ray Specs was Michael Erard, who wrote an undergraduate essay precocious enough to rate a spread in the "Journal of Popular Culture" in 1991.

Now a freelance journalist who doubles as an editor at the University of Texas school of nursing in Austin, Erard grew up in rural areas of Colorado and New Hampshire and says JSC provided him with an idealized link to another life.

"Novelties are sort of like prosthetics or crutches that allow you to break the social frame if you're not gifted in storytelling or joke-telling," he says. "I never went to those urbane parties in the city, and the adults in my family weren't into practical jokes. So I have these vague memories of saving my quarters and fantasizing about how great it would be to hang around adults, with that kind of humor, and bust up parties with phony blood and things of that nature."

Watch out for Dad

At JSC's Bradenton headquarters today, Paul Hoenle's kids say their experience was just the opposite.

In the quaint, homespun era before toll-free phone numbers, credit cards and the Internet, they remember helping Dad fill warehouse orders in the summer and ripping open envelopes to count dollar bills and coins.

But they were on constant alert for Dad, who lives in Sarasota today but was unavailable for comment.

"You'd never let Dad hand you something directly," says Boyd as she adjusts a 3-foot long cockroach into a standing position. "You were always afraid you were going to get shocked."

"That's right," adds Hoenle, sitting across from a Deluxe Latex Skeleton suspended from a noose. "Something was always jumping out at you, or squirting you."