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Robert Hegyes, who played Juan Epstein on the ’70s TV series Welcome Back, Kotter, died yesterday of a heart attack. I never knew Hegyes … but boy, did I know Epstein!
In fact, because I grew up in Brooklyn, I felt as if I knew all the Sweathogs. (Which, for those of you who never watched the show, was the name for the gang of kids in Kotter’s class at James Buchanan High School.) And I’ve got a feeling that one reason I was given the assignment of writing a couple of issues of the Welcome Back, Kotter comic for DC back in the late ’70s was because Joe Orlando thought I was a Sweathog.
Oh, I know that the two issues I wrote list Larry Hama as the editor, but as I recall, all of my interactions on the title were with Orlando. I can remember him laughing as we worked out the plot for Welcome Back, Kotter #9 because I was embarrassingly just as ignorant as Vinnie Barbarino would have been about certain historical events. (And no, I’m not going to tell you what they were.) I think that tickled Joe.
In any case, having seen every episode of the series by the time the opportunity came about, I could hear all the characters’ voices in my head … including that of the Puerto Rican Jew, Juan Luis Pedro Felipo de Huevos Epstein, who always had a forged excuse note handy signed, “Epstein’s Mother.”
Those issues were two of the easiest assignments I ever had in comics, because I basically did improv in my head with characters whose personalities I’d first seen on display not that long before in classmates at my own Brooklyn high school, observations then sharpened by compulsive watching of the series.
I’d have loved to have written more stories about the Sweathogs, and would have continued to do so if the series hadn’t been cancelled, making my issues the last.
I’ve got no anecdotes about Hegyes, because I never met him or any of the rest of the cast … but for a few months, all of them lived rent free in my head … and it was fun!
And if you want to see what I looked like when I was a Sweathog … here’s a photo from the front page of Shorelines, the school newspaper of South Shore High School.
I think I’d have fit right in with the rest of those Kotter kids, don’t you?
James
Nope, not by a long shot. In fact that pic of you denies any possible association with Sweathogs. You could read, never mind being on the school paper and graduating. Now, I was a sweathog, a drop-out who was into drugs and a vicious disrespect for the rules. Setting fires and throwing things out the windows. Fighting, Cursing at the teachers. All of the fun stuff that was implied but couldn’t be shown on the TV.
I used to love Welcome Back Kotter, It reflected a world I did know well. Of couse we used to try the worst things we could find, Ranking contests, “Up you nose with a garden Hose”, “Sit on it and rotate” . The more obscene the better. Yet Wikipedia notes that it has roots in East Africa Who knew?