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ABSTRACT
Juvenile Bigfoot stories of the 1970s filtered generic themes inherent in wildman tales through culturally specific concerns about children's desires, the ubiquity of consumerism, and the power of mass media. The stories were meant to help children navigate the complexities of American culture. Children found something else: a way to break from their parents and claim a place in the social world as adults. They did not fret over consumerism but adapted to it. KEYWORDS: Bigfoot, children's culture, mass media, lore cycle, consumerism
In the mid 1970s, Thomas Steenburg's high school social studies class was assigned to write and present a paper on any Canadian topic. Steenburg lived in the small town of Bancroft, Ontario. He had been interested in the legendary Sasquatch since he was five or six years old and was determined that his essay would be on the creature. His social studies teacher was unimpressed with the choice. Steenburg, however, was determined and eventually won his way. He could regale the class with monster stories if he wanted, but, his teacher warned, he would be graded the same way that all the other students were. Steenburg poured over books about the monster (Steenburg 2000:6). While statistics are difficult to come by, anecdotal evidence suggests that Steenburg's case was not unique. The 1970s witnessed a noteworthy number of children-boys, mosdy-who, like Steenburg, battled with adults over the meaning of the monster Sasquatch.
Sasquatch is, of course, a well-known figure to folklorists, a modern update of the traditional wildman (Kirdey 1964:77-90). Along with Bigfoot, the Yeti, and the Abominable Snowman, Sasquatch penetrated the culture of North American children during the 1970s. The main path-or, at least an important one-for the transmission of stories about Bigfoot and other wildmen was the mass media.
Tracking Bigfoot through children's culture, then, offers a chance to observe the adaptation of folklore to the mass media and contemporary concerns. "Popular art," such as the juvenile Sasquatchiana produced during the 1970s, is "a kind of mass produced folklore," wrote Harold Schecter, "the form of storytelling that has taken the place of traditional folk narrative in the technological world" (1988:11). As this case shows, the adaptation was not straightforward. In moving from (presumably, although not always) oral transmission to...