Think WD-40 is slick? You’re among friends
The number 47 has a fan club. So does the spray lubricant WD-40. And rats.
Fan clubs aren’t just for sports teams and entertainers. They’re also for things like Marshmallow Peeps.
These “quirky fandoms,” said fan culture researcher Matt Hills, “are about people wanting to mark out an idiosyncratic identity, to establish their identities as somehow unusual but in a positive sense.”
A way for people with a shared yet unique admiration to celebrate – well, something.
Such as the ubiquitousness of 47.
Eric Levine of Portland heads up the 47 Society. Some 260 members worldwide provide sightings of their favorite number on the Web site www.47.net/47society. “All taken in with a grin,” as Levine said.
The 47 mania began at Levine’s alma mater, Pomona College in Claremont, Calif. According to legend, two 1964 summer graduate students doing research on random numbers heard an advertisement for a medication that absorbed “up to 47 times its weight in excess stomach acid.” That same summer, a statistics professor showed students a parody of a mathematical “proof” demonstrating that all numbers are equal. The grad students decided that was their sign: All numbers equaled 47.
As a student hearing that story years later, Levine was intrigued. He began noticing the number in publications, addresses, telephone numbers. “When I graduated, I thought, ‘That’s it, goodbye college, goodbye 47,’ ” he said.
However, “I realized fairly quickly that it kept following me around.”
The number 47, that is. (Example: Levine met a young woman whose license plate contained the number 47; the two are now married.)
Levine is now an English teacher at Cleveland High School in Portland. Students bring him 47s to post on a 47 board in his classroom. “Like someone took a picture of a scoreboard tied at 47-47,” he said.
This all makes sense to researcher Hills, author of “Fan Cultures” and a lecturer in the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies at Cardiff University in Wales. “It’s an intensification of how we want to belong but remain an individual,” he said.
Take the Rat Fan Club. Founded in 1992, it has about 450 dues-paying members worldwide who share a love of and admiration for the generally very unpopular rodent.
“Rats need their fans, they need help, they need somebody to promote them and educate about them,” said founder Debbie Ducommun of Chico, Calif., aka the Rat Lady.
As Ducommun pointed out, “Dogs look up to us, cats look down on us, rats are our equals.”
She has 22 domesticated rats. Each comes when called by name. They live in eight cages in her living room.
The fan club helps its sister organization, the Rat Assistance and Teaching Society, with fund-raising for rat education of pet care professionals. Fans are also waging a letter-writing campaign to the television show “Fear Factor,” which uses rats to frighten contestants.
Other fan clubs worship products.
The colorful, spongy Marshmallow Peeps candy drew 16,000 members to a fan club begun in 1999, said Lauren Easterly, Peeps brand specialist for the Just Born candy company in Bethlehem, Pa.
At marshmallowpeeps.com there’s a special area for fan club members, who have access to such Peeps perks as apparel and other merchandise, and may play Peeps games and download Peeps screensavers.
“Our consumer relations department gets thousands of letters from fans professing their love for Peeps,” Easterly said.
The Internet has permitted legions of fans to find each other easily – groups such as the Donald Rumsfeld Fan Club at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ rumsfeldfan. There, 293 members dedicated to the currently embattled secretary of defense keep in touch daily by exchanging messages. (As one member writes: “He needs all the motivation he can get in these trying times.”)
At fanclub.wd40.com, fans of the canned spray lubricant may leave their “Slick Stories,” sign up for a weekly newsletter, even play “The WD-40 Spray Game!”
Bill Trumpfheller in San Diego keeps tabs on the company-run WD-40 Fan Club and its 71,700 members. That’s as of May 4, he noted. “It’s probably gone up since then.”
The club began in 2000, when the company asked customers to help compile a list of 2,000 uses for WD-40. About 350,000 entries poured in.
“The stories people told were fanatical,” Trumpfheller said. “It’s almost like the can itself is a rock star. People put it up on a pedestal.”