Turtle Day in Dover, NH!

November 9, 2003

I didn’t make it to the “Turtle Day” event in Dover, NH, during which two special markers (a sign and a custom manhole cover) would be unveiled to publicly commemorate the fact that Kevin Eastman and I had created the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles at 28 Union Street in Dover back in 1983.

Knowing that my wife Jeannine WAS planning to attend (along with our daughter Emily and our grandson Arthur) I decided to write up some comments that Jeannine kindly agreed to read at the event, if an opportunity presented itself. As it happened, due to timing issues, she was not able to read all of what I wrote, so I thought I would post the complete text here:

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Sorry I can’t be with you all today. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone involved in this event for all their efforts. It’s quite an unexpected honor to have have our creation memorialized in this way.

I have many fond memories of the two years that my wife Jeannine and I spent in Dover. So many simple, homely things… here are a few…

Like walking downtown to eat at our favorite breakfast joint, the Wooden Spoon…

… Spending many hours at the Dover Public Library, where I had my first experience with a computer, when the library purchased one which they allowed patrons to use…

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… and taking advantage of the library’s magazine exchange, where people would bring in the magazines they had finished reading and leave them in stacks on a shelf just inside the library’s entrance door, a type of recycling which I thought was such a great idea…

… taking long, quiet walks through the large cemetery not too far from Union Street…

… riding our bicycles to Tuttle’s Red Barn to pick up locally grown produce… and occasionally riding those bikes through the center of Dover and out to South Berwick, a lovely bucolic route…

… Going to the ice cream place in downtown Dover, the name of which escapes me now, but if memory serves, it was on the corner of a block which also had a downtown movie theater…

… Driving up the “Miracle Mile” and finding a store where Jeannine and I bought our wedding rings at the Service Merchandise store…

… Getting some paid illustration work from the Moxie bottling company, which I think was in Rochester, New Hampshire, a town not too far from Dover, and through that work becoming aware of the legendary “Moxiemobile”… … and getting some more paying illustration work for a local real estate business…

… and of course taking advantage of our new proximity to the ocean, and enjoying the many gorgeous ocean views and beaches.

Although circumstances and necessity required us to move away from Dover after those first two years, I think I could have been happy staying there a lot longer. Now, there are two people I’d like to recognize for their importance in the creation of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

The first one — as you might guess— is my dear friend Kevin Eastman. I first met him in Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1981. We knew pretty quickly after our first meeting that we wanted to work together, to collaborate on some kind of creative venture, likely in the area of comic books.

It took a little while, but we eventually got around to collaborating on a story intended for publication in comic book form. But it wasn’t the Turtles — this initial effort was a story about a robot called the Fugitoid. a character who would eventually find his way into the Turtle comic books.

Sometime in November of 1983, after Kevin had moved into the house on Union Street in Dover and we had formed Mirage Studios — which was kind of an “in-joke”, because it wasn’t really what you would think of as a studio, just Kevin and I sitting in a couple of old stuffed chairs with our lap boards, drawing and writing while we goofed around and watched various bad TV shows.

On a more or less ordinary evening, Kevin drew a sketch which would kick off a creative process that eventually transformed our lives in many unexpected ways. It was a drawing of an anthropomorphic turtle, standing on its hind feet, with nunchakus strapped to its forelimbs, and wearing a bandana. He called it a “Ninja Turtle”, which — all things considered — seemed to make complete sense.

I felt compelled to draw my own version of this unique character, making a few small changes. This inspired Kevin to work up a pencil drawing of four of these Turtle guys, each with a different martial arts weapon.

He handed this to me to ink, which I was happy to do, and I ended up adding “Teenage Mutant” to the name. Fortunately, Kevin approved of this suggestion. The following day, we looked at these concept drawings again, and soon realized that we had to expand upon this wacky idea, which kicked off several months of writing and drawing, eventually resulting in a forty page comic book story.

I don’t think I could have asked for a better collaborator than Kevin. He brought to the Turtles project a great deal of talent and heart, along with incredible amounts of energy and a wild sense of humor.

We scraped together what money we had, including borrowing some from one of Kevin’s uncles, found a local printer in Somersworth, New Hampshire, and a few weeks later we had a stack of boxes in our “studio” filled with what turned out to be 3275 copies (we’d only ordered 3000, but the printer generously did a bit of overprinting) of the first printing of that first issue of “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles”, which we premiered at Ralph DiBerndardo’s comic book convention, on May 5, 1984, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

Events led to us temporarily dismantling Mirage Studios, as we both left Dover that year. But later that year we remade Mirage, this time in Sharon, Connecticut, where we soon found to our great delight that we could actually make decent livings creating and publishing further issues of “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles”.

After two years there, we moved Mirage Studios to Northampton, Massachusetts, where it stayed until a few years ago. The other person I want to make note of for her importance in the overall story of the birth of the Turtles is my wife, Jeannine Atkins.

Back in 1983, she had plans to go to the University of New Hampshire, in Durham, NH — just down the road a piece from Dover — to pursue a Masters degree in writing. We got together that summer and fell in love. Not wanting to separate, we agreed to move to New Hampshire together.

I had never considered moving out of my home state of Massachusetts. but I had a strong feeling that it would be unwise to let this relationship end. So we moved to Dover together, and found that house on Union Street. It was owned by a Dover resident, from whom we rented the house for about two years.

We eventually got married there in June of 1983, our friends (Kevin included) and family members crowded into the small back yard.

The thing is, if I had not met Jeannine and moved with her to Dover, it is highly unlikely, implausible — I might go so far as to say nearly impossible — that Kevin and I would have ever ended up creating a studio together, locating it in a house in Dover (or anywhere, really)… and there would have been no late-night goofing around, and no drawing of a “Ninja Turtle”… and none of all this Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles stuff would have happened.

— Peter Laird 11-2-2023