My very first thought in answer to "ideas of how people ought to be" was Walt Kelly's Pogo, who has been with me as a tutelary spirit since I was 8 years old. I bought ALL the books as they came out through the 1950s and 1960s, read and re-read and assimilated them into my being.
The thing about Pogo as a character is that he's always Nice, warm-hearted, thoughtful, equable. Other characters in the strip are various degrees of calculating, conniving, foolish, overbearing, misguided, one-dimensional, silly...
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but Pogo (and Porkypine too) never break character from Nice. Something to admire and emulate, replete with a background of word-play and preposterous doings great and small. I took so much of my sense of humor from many many hours of careful study of Pogo, and when I had the opportunity to answer the "what's your name?" question on moving to Andover at age 10, I adopted Pogo as my alter ego and nom de guerre. It stuck for longer than it probably should have (at Acadia I was known as "Professor Pogo"), but didn't follow me to library school or to Virginia. But (along with Oook) it still seems like an active identity, one I'm comfortable inhabiting.
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(go back to the original blog post or forward to Family of Origin or to Mantras and Mentors or to Literature)