The story that followed was liberally sprinkled with quotations taken equally from the government report and the Psalms of David. The startled residents of Fillmore learned that one George Abnego, a citizen unnoticed in their midst for almost forty years, was a living abstraction. Through a combination of circumstances no more remarkable than those producing a royal flush in stud poker, Abnego’s physique, psyche, and other miscellaneous attributes had resulted in that legendary creature—the statistical average.
According to the last census taken before the war, George Abnego’s height and weight were identical with the mean of the American adult male. He had married at the exact age—year, month, day—when statisticians had estimated the marriage of the average man took place; he had married a woman the average number of years younger than himself; his income as declared on his last tax statement was the average income for that year. The very teeth in his mouth tallied in quantity and condition with those predicted by the American Dental Association to be found on a man extracted at random from the population. Abnego’s metabolism and blood pressure, his bodily proportions and private neuroses, were all cross-sections of the latest available records. Subjected to every psychological and personality test available, his final, overall grade corrected out to show that he was both average and normal.
Finally, Mrs. Abnego had been recently delivered of their third child, a boy. This development had not only occurred at exactly the right time according to the population indices, but it had resulted in an entirely normal sample of humanity—unlike most babies being born throughout the land.
The Bugle-Herald blared its hymn to the new celebrity around a greasy photograph of the family in which the assembled Abnegos stared glassily out at the reader, looking, as many put it, “Average—average as hell!”
Newspapers in other states were invited to copy.
They did, slowly at first, then with an accelerating, contagious enthusiasm. Indeed, as the intense public interest in this symbol of stability, this refugee from the extremes, became manifest, newspaper columns gushed fountains of purple prose about the “Normal Man of Fillmore.”
At Nebraska State University, Professor Roderick Klingmeister noticed that many members of his biology class were wearing extra-large buttons decorated with pictures of George Abnego. “Before beginning my lecture,” he chuckled, “I would like to tell you that this ‘normal man’ of yours is no Messiah. All he is, I am afraid, is a bell-shaped curve with ambitions, the median made flesh—”
He got no further. He was brained with his own demonstration microscope.
Even that early, a few watchful politicians noticed that no one was punished for this hasty act.
The incident could be related to many others which followed: the unfortunate and unknown citizen of Duluth, for example, who—at the high point of that city’s Welcome Average Old Abnego parade—was heard to remark in good-natured amazement, “Why, he’s just an ordinary jerk like you and me,” and was immediately torn into celebratory confetti by horrified neighbors in the crowd.