It’s Earth Day, an event that was first celebrated right around the time I was conceived in late April 1970.

Being “good to the Earth” and giving “a hoot” were big parts of my childhood.

In fact, I won the Littleton Electric Light Department’s 1979, “Stop Peaking” poster contest.

If I recall, LELD was worried about “peak hours” when Littleton households were demanding (at times) more electricity than LELD could crank out.

To bring attention to the issue, LELD asked Littleton’s 2nd graders, of which I was one—and maybe other grades, I don’t remember—to make energy-conservation posters and enter the competition.

Some kids had posters with lots of lights off. There were lots of appeals to this strategy of energy conservation. There was this one classmate, already known to be “gifted,” who suggested running the washing machine at bedtime, when, he asserted, “no one does wash.” At first blush, great idea, but I’m sure I was not alone in worrying about everyone doing bedtime wash for many months thereafter.

Well, for me, what I lacked in drawing skills (the appearance of the poster itself), I made up for in a clever play on homonyms (peak/peek) and, it seems now, looking back, implied nudity.

Here’s what I included in my hand-drawn poster:

A bathtub with a curtain drawn around it with a person, glimpsing out from behind the curtain, wearing a shower cap—this primarily to skip having to think about what poster-winning hair would need to look like—with the words “Stop Peaking,” making the fairly provocative suggestion that there’d be something behind the shower curtain worth “peeking” at.

Here’s what I got for winning:

I loved this book. It is one of the very few books from childhood that I held onto. And I held onto it. Not my mom or dad. Me. I read it to my kids.

In 1979, I used implied nudity to win the Electric Department’s poster contest.

Imagine what fun is in store for the contest I’m participating in now:

Come to Candidate’s Night on Wednesday night at 7:00 in Room 103 in Littleton Town Hall.