Hometown Hero Makes Good
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Millions may
know him as
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Pardon us for taking time out of the mouthpiece world to celebrate. After all, being a Super Hero is not an everyday event...for most of us.
John was born 2 months after we first opened the shop doors to our business 21 years ago. In retrospect, yes, we were crazy. With our first son still on the way, John (the elder) had quit his job with Giardinelli’s to set out on our own.
John Stork posing as Super Hero "Hyper- Strike"
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Our first customer came walking through the door on October 1st, 1985 asking for a 3 piece mouthpiece. We didn’t even have our own design for modular parts at the time! John, (the younger) is the reason that we left New York City for the rolling hills of Vermont. Yes, we were crazy again. Everyone thought that we had to be out of our minds to try to take a mouthpiece business out of a major city. But it was our conviction that by the time John got to be of school age, we would be gone. Even if that meant doing something else entirely, we were dead set on not sending him to a public school in Manhattan, so we laid plans early on to cultivate the mail order side of our business. We pulled the plug on the big city and made the move when John was 3 ˝ years old.
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Hero in
Training
and as
Visualized
Phase II
Once in Vermont, having a worldwide business was not enough. (Yeah, that’s right we upped the ante on craziness one more time.) We added training in the martial arts and home schooling to the work load, and yes, a second son! Did it all pay off? Let’s just say we’re feeling pretty darn clever about now.
I hope you can take the time to enjoy John’s work this summer. “Who Wants to be a Super Hero” is a fun show where Stan Lee (creator of Spiderman, the Fantastic Four, The Hulk) puts the would-be super hero contestants through a series of challenges to find the most super hero like among them. We’ll be watching every episode here…making every effort not to burst too many buttons in the process! As Stan Lee would say, “Excelsior!”
The full comic book treatment!
