All Posts – Page 40 – I Remember JFK: A Baby Boomer's Pleasant Reminiscing Spot

Flash Bulbs

If you were to time-travel back to the mid 60’s, you would find that photography was a pretty technically challenging affair. I mean, nowadays, we shoot auto-focused, auto-exposed, auto-flashed shots with our $100 digital cameras and see the results as soon as we plug the memory chip into our computers.

But our fathers went through a more arduous experience. Open the camera, wind in the film, then, if the pictures were indoors, insert a flash bulb and instruct the camera to take a flash exposure. Then, of course, the exposed film had to be removed and sent in for processing.

It’s the flash bulbs that we’ll be concentrating on today.

Perhaps our fathers felt like they had it easy. They might have been old enough to remember when using flash involved igniting a pile of magnesium powder on a tray! But sometime in the thirties, the magnesium powder was changed to thin pieces of foil, and was contained within a glass bulb that was ignited electrically. It was truly a quantum leap in photography.

By the time we Boomers came along, the bulbs had been coated with blue plastic which provided the perfect color balance for use with outdoor color film. Thus, the same color pictures looked right whether shot inside or out. That plastic coating also kept the bulb from shattering from the sudden influx of heat, a common occurrence with earlier models. The foil had also been replaced with very thin wire strands.

By the 60’s, another leap in technology was made. Four flashbulbs were included in an ingenious device known as the flashcube. My father’s Kodak Instamatic used flashcubes, and my dad must have thought they were the greatest thing ever!

Flashcubes got even smarter. The earliest ones relied on the camera’s battery for power, but by the early 70’s, the Magicube was produced. It had primers similar to those used in ammunition which ignited the fine wires inside each bulb. Now, many cameras didn’t even need batteries!

How could things possibly get any better? Enter the Flipflash.

The Flipflash showed up in 1975. It had eight bulbs that would fire off consecutively. Once half of them were used, you flipped it over to use the rest.

How much better could flashbulbs get? The answer was none.

Electronic flash showed up shortly afterwards. I bought an affordable Kodak 110 in 1977 which had it. The end was in sight for the flashbulb industry.

But flashbulbs really don’t cause me to look back longingly on their former presence. Let’s face it. They were a pain. However, many a kid learned to listen to their fathers thanks to them. After ejecting a spent bulb, he would say “Don’t touch that, it’s hot!” Yet, how many of us just HAD to learn for ourselves?

A flash bulb also made a convincing space craft, flying alongside the electronic tubes I also used for the purpose.

Taking photos has gotten very easy. I just fired up my photo manager and found that I have 1,814 of them on my computer. And I really don’t consider myself an avid photographer. Historians will likely view the arrival of the cheap digital camera as a turning point in the number of photographs taken by the average Joe.

The same could certainly be said for the invention of the flash bulb.

Firecrackers

Ah, summertime. No school. Swimming. Playing all day long. And, as July 4 neared, FIRECRACKERS!

Fireworks greatly entranced me when I was a kid. When those booths would start opening up in Miami, Oklahoma in late June, I would hound my parents mercilessly to give me some money to go buy fireworks. I would come home with bottle rockets, smoke bombs, and long rows of my favorite: firecrackers.

Really, the concept of selling flammable, explosive items to minors is against everything our sadly litigious society stands for. But somehow, fireworks have survived, albeit in wimpier format than when we were kids.

I loved firecrackers. There were so many things you could do with them! My plastic army men, had they any consciousness at all, would have dreaded my coming home with a bag full of Black Cats. That’s because, in short order, they would be hurled skyward by hidden explosive charges. I would take the prone riflemen and lay them on top of firecrackers and blast them off the ground, with my screaming accompaniment. Sadistic to describe, but lots of fun. The army men didn’t seem to mind either.

Firecrackers were fun to stuff in holes in rocks, like they were sticks of dynamite. Or you could blow bark off a tree. Another fun pastime was taking empty cicada shells and attaching them to a Black Cat. The explosion would literally disintegrate them.

Of course, you also had duds. There were fun things you could do with THEM, too. You could break them in half, light the powder inside, and they would turn into sparklers. Another neat trick I learned was to stomp on the fizzing firecracker and it would explode. Or, you could painstakingly shake the silver powder out of them and make your own bomb.

I once collected the powder from a hundred or so firecrackers, bound it tightly in aluminum foil wrapped in black tape with a fuse stolen from a smoke bomb, and lit it. It blew a fist-sized hole in the dirt!

While M-80’s were available in those days, I never saw them. I think Oklahoma had banned them, but you could still find them in bordering states. I saw my first one when I was 24 years old in California, having been obtained in Tijuana. As reckless a kid as I was, it’s no doubt best that I stayed away from them.

Nowadays, they barely put any powder at all into firecrackers. If you break one open, the powder doesn’t even shake out, it’s more of a thin film painted onto its paper container. But when we were kids, firecrackers had POWER! And we loved blowing things up with them.

Filmstrips in School

How did kids in school see the world in the 1960’s? Frequently by means of film strips.

Film strips were strips of 35 mm film that had positive images on them, much like movie film. However, it wasn’t designed to be quickly run through the projector like a movie. No, each slide was a scene in itself.

Many film strips were silent. Words at the bottom of the image described whatever was portrayed. But it was also common to see film strips that were synchronized to records. The teacher would play the record, and a beep would indicate it was time to move on to the next slide.

Of course, it was easy to get lost. When that happened, the class would loudly offer the teacher their assistance in locating the correct slide for the dialog.

We loved film strips. It meant a break from the tedium of regular classwork.

The sound film strips would be shown at my school through an ancient projector, much like the one illustrated above. It had a noisy fan that kept that great big light cool, and presumably the film as well.

But in the school libraries, there were more personal versions of film strip viewers. I remember we had models designed for single use and text-only filmstrips. There was no provision for sound, like the students from 1972 had in the illustration to the left. We had little separated cubbies on a long table so we could view our film strips side by side.

We would be shown pictures from other countries, photomicrographs of cells and protozoa, health/hygiene stuff, and occasionally, fun stuff like cartoons.

I remember one teacher with a two-pack-a-day habit who would appoint a kid to be the film strip advancer and would slip off to the Teacher’s Lounge for a smoke. Don’t worry, Mrs. Finley, your secret is safe with me. 😉

Today, of course, our grandkids in school are treated to live videos streamed over the internet, or perhaps DVD’s viewed on plasma TV’s. But if you’re old enough to remember JFK, you can recall when multimedia in class meant the teacher wheeling in the 1950’s model film strip projector, and playing a scratchy record. It was great stuff.

Essential 60’s Accessories: Ashtrays and Lighters

Let’s step back in time and step inside a typical home of the 1960’s.

We’ll use my modest Miami, Oklahoma dwelling, of course. It was a 1950’s era tract home sitting on a modestly traveled street. Very typical of what WWII veterans were raising families in.

If you have time-traveled from the 21st century, the first thing you will notice when you step through my front door (three small staggered vertical windows placed at adult-viewing level) is a pervading odor of stale cigarette smoke.

If you see me sitting on the carpet, playing with a pile of toys, please note that I am completely oblivious to the odor. Second-hand smoke was a fact of life for a kid of the 60’s, completely unnoticed. There are many different accessories for the home that we all use everyday ranging from toiletries and kitchen ware, to coffee table books and coasters for your drinks. In the 1960’s coasters and kitchenware were both essential things to have to furnish your modern office or home, but ashtrays and desktop lighters were must a have. They were used by most people whereas today’s home furnishings and modern office furniture will usually only have them as nostalgic decorations, if at all.

You will also spot a variety of smoker’s accessories. These include ash trays of various shapes and sizes, as well as desktop cigarette lighters. No properly-furnished 1960’s dwelling would be complete without them. Even if it turned out that the owners didn’t smoke, odds are that any guests who came over would. It would be an ungracious host indeed who didn’t provide an ashtray for a visitor.

Ashtrays and desktop lighters were ubiquitous home furnishings that could be found in an amazing variety of shapes and sizes. Some gadgets, such as the depicted hand grenade model, consisted of both a lighter and ashtray when separated. The image of the brass, hand-decorated Indian ashtrays seen to the right spurred childhood memories for me. We had one of the “sultan’s shoes” sitting on the coffee table, and it was transformed into a speedboat when pushed across the carpeted floor. I must have spent hours sliding that little shoe around making appropriate motorboat noises.

Mom tolerated me playing with ornamental ashtrays, but desktop lighters were strictly hands-off, of course.

Naturally, that didn’t stop me from playing with them when mom wasn’t around.

It’s difficult to effectively stress to today’s younger generations just how deeply smoking was embedded into 1960’s society. Every restaurant had an ashtray at every table. Hotel and motel rooms featured cheap ones, the assumption being that guests would likely make off with them. Grocery stores would feature a free-standing ashtray at each front door, placed there in the hope that you would finish your cigarette before grabbing a cart.

Cars had ashtrays on back seat armrests, and perhaps another one that pulled out of the back of the front bench seat.

Floor-standing ashtrays were found in banks, hospitals, churches, school gymnasiums, stores, and office buildings. Sitting before the desk of a doctor, lawyer, or insurance salesman would mean that there was an ashtray or ashtray/lighter combo within your reach.

Mom’s weekly visit to the beauty shop would mean that she would grab a small ashtray from a collection on a desk and carry it with her as she went from shampooing to sitting under a huge hair dryer. My own visits to the barber shop would be accompanied by the patrons in line using a couple of community trays, and the barber having his own personal model, right next to the jar full of blue Barbacide.

Mom gave up the habit about 1970, and got rid of all of the smoking paraphernalia around the house. That meant that Aunt Marjorie and Uncle Russell would have to use a small saucer during their visits.

Nowadays, of course, smoking is looked upon as a vice. No self-respecting smoker would dream of lighting up in someone’s home without express permission from the host. Isn’t it interesting that forty years ago, the shoe was on the other foot? It would have been considered the height of ill-mannerliness to fail to provide the smoking guest with all of the appropriate accessories for his/her use.

Erector Sets

Late in the year 1969, I got a Gilbert erector set. I even know the model that it was, but not from memory. Gilbert, who by then had been purchased by the Gabriel Co., only had a few different sets on the market.

I had a Senior Powerline set. It had a battery-powered motor so you could make amazing creations like rotating ferris wheels, a lift drawbridge, a crane, and many more acts of engineering.

The concept of the erector set sprang into the mind of A.C. Gilbert as he watched a skyscraper being built in 1911. He pictured a simple toy, a collection of miniature girders, beams, wheels, gears, and metal plates, all designed to be held together with small nuts and bolts.

Gilbert had the money to create and produce the toy, and also launched a national advertising campaign in 1913. Interestingly, that decade would also see the introduction of two other construction toys, Lincoln Logs and Tinkertoys.

The erector set was a wonderfully heavy gift for a child to unwrap. It was full of real metal parts, and you knew that this toy would last considerably longer than your plastic ones.

And what you built was up to you! The bigger projects took more time and work, so if your time was limited, you might make something small. The included manual contained a massive collection of projects running the gamut form the simple to the complex.

However, one thing I could not do was freelance.

If I tried to make something up out of my imagination, it would never work. I would end with a collection of metal parts bolted together that looked like a random collection of metal parts bolted together. I guess that proves I don’t have the mind of an architect or engineer. I was certainly never tempted to pursue either career path.

However, when I followed the plans, I was capable of making extraordinary creations. I beamed with pride as I would carry in things like wreckers, windmills, and hoists and show them to my parents. I don’t know if they were really impressed or not, but they sure made me think so.

An erector set taught a kid the importance of committing to a cause. It might take hours to make something really big and elaborate. It wasn’t like playing with your other toys. Commencing to build a motor-powered crane didn’t allow walking away from the project before completion, at least not if your mom insisted on you keeping your room clean and picked up. So you stuck with it until it was finished.

Ah, but the reward! When you’re ten years old, and frustrated because your artistic endeavors look like they were created by a ten-year-old, it filled you with pride to look at your erector set creation that looked just like the plans!

The nature of a toy consisting of lots of little parts meant that some of them would inevitably get lost. And when enough parts vanished, the set itself became a lot less fun to play with. So eventually, it would be discarded.

But the memories live on forever of how satisfying it was to build impressive structures. And so does the idea of making a solid commitment to a cause that requires time and effort to see through to completion.

Electronic Handheld Games

We Boomers had great imaginations. How great? Well, in the mid-to-late 70’s, we would get extremely excited over little red LED’s flashing on a tiny screen. These LED’s, as they lit and darkened to the motions of our thumbs on buttons, would cause cheering, cursing, and occasionally even the tossing of the game that provided all of this “action” (hopefully against a shock-absorbing surface).

Electronic games began with Mattel’s Auto Race in 1974. It was the first handheld game to contain no gears, relays, or any other moving parts. Everything ran with diodes, transistors, integrated circuits, and of course a tiny screen with “cars” represented by tiny red LED’s. And believe you me, any kid whose parents shelled out the big bucks for it was popular, at least while he had fresh batteries.

Football seemed to be a natural fit for handhelds, and accounted for many of their incarnations. The pictured game was Mattel Electronics Football, circa 1977.

But memory tests soon got red hot a little later in the decade. In 1978, Merlin and Simon appeared, both challenging you to repeat patterns of lights by punching the appropriate buttons. And as some of us enter the twilight years, take it from me: you NEED to have your memory challenged on a daily basis! Use it or lose it.

The games quickly got more sophisticated. By 1980, you could get bowling, hockey, baseball, chess (THAT was cool!), and Missile Attack. I was always vaguely disturbed by playing Missile Attack, as the cities full of innocent people that you were striving so hard to protect were ultimately doomed, it was just a matter of when.

In the early 80’s, LCD screens began to appear, and realism took a quantum leap. After all, those tiny LED’s required a lot of help from your imagination to become basketball players, bowling balls, or nuclear ICBM’s.

In 2000, Mattel re-released their original 1977 football game. It was a hit, in large part from younger Boomers trying to recapture the excitement of seeing those little LED’s light up and being transformed them into hulking football players.

Chemistry Sets

Man, the things our parents let us play with in the 60’s and 70’s. I haven’t looked at modern-day chemistry sets, but in a land where you can’t get authentic Kinder Eggs because of the fear that you may be stupid enough to give the hidden toys inside to a child of less than three years of age, I can’t imagine either of the two chemistry sets I once owned being offered for sale today.

More’s the pity, because a chemistry set, circa 1970, made you more mature. Read on for more details.

My first set was a Skilcraft my parents bought me in 1970. I was ten years old. The manual that came with it was divided into two sections: lightweight magic you could perform with chemicals, and more serious experiments that would teach you about chemistry.

Kay chemistry set, possibly 50’s vintage

The magic tricks consisted of stuff like preparing two test tubes of clear liquids (one contained phenolphthalein solution, I can’t recall the other needed chemical) which you could mix together to magically form “grape juice.”

You can see where this is heading. Today’s poor, stupid, coddled youngsters, upon being told that they could make chemical “grape juice,” would obviously gorge themselves on it, necessitating an emergency room visit, as well as lots of legal action.

At least that’s what our modern society would have you believe.

The more serious section of the Skilcraft manual taught you how acids and bases would interact, how you could use red and blue litmus paper to detect them, how you could mix two liquid chemicals to immediately form a solid precipitate, and how it happened at the molecular level, stuff like that.

As much as I ate that stuff up, I’m surprised that I never pursued a career in the field. In fact, I never even took chemistry in high school, despite the urgings of the teacher to do so. Don’t ask me why.

But I seriously loved messing with my chemistry set when I was ten. Eventually, it fell into disrepair and vanished. But when I was TWELVE, I got the most equipped Skilcraft set that they made!

I was in heaven. This incredible set even came with a balance beam, so you could compare the weights of chemicals! Cool stuff indeed.

Just think for a moment about what kids were given: Chemistry sets came with an alcohol lamp, which you filled with the flammable liquid, lit with a match, and used to provide intense heat for experimentation purposes. They also came with glass test tubes, which could shatter upon impact, or even from heating them too fast. They came with lots of chemicals, most of which were relatively harmless, but a few of which (e.g. cobalt chloride) had long, finely worded warnings printed on the back of the bottle warning of dire consequences in the unfortunate event you poured them into your eyes, or ingested them. And carelessly mixing benign ingredients without guidance could create harmful reactions, as well.

Ergo, a ten-year-old with a chemistry set instantly became a mature young man who knew how to safely handle fire (the enclosed manual stepped you through it), potentially dangerous chemicals, breakable glassware, and also knew enough not to venture too far in experimentation.

It’s a pity today’s ten-year-olds aren’t given the opportunity to do the same

Cardboard Records

As a borderline audiophile who used to spray his records with a preservative that would supposedly extend their lives, I am a real fan of digital music. I love the fact that my extensive mp3 collection is backed up four ways, unlike my old record albums, which either wore out or were warped by leaving them in my car on a hot day. Just dropping an album might result in a permanent skipping spot, as happened with my original Rickie Lee Jones debut album. Right at the end of Company, too, my favorite song!

But there is one area where analog record album technology has it all over digital. That’s in the case of cardboard records. Yeah, let’s see you digitize THAT!

You probably remember these on the backs of cereal boxes. That’s where the depicted Archies album came from. Larry Staples, who, BTW, designed this site’s logo, and who came up with this column idea, once owned the very record depicted here. He nearly wore it out, as a matter of fact.

And wearing them out was a real possibility, too. They were nothing but a thin coating of vinyl affixed to cardboard. It was up to the music fan to cut it out perfectly, smooth out the warps, and liberate the music from its crude container.

While cereal boxes were the commonest place to find these puppies, I remember MAD Magazine would sometimes include one. The one in particular I recall was some song called “Makin’ Out”.

Another phenomenon was the flexi-disc, which was a thin piece of vinyl frequently featured in magazines. I won’t talk about it here, as I feel it warrants its own column at some future date.

The Archies became superstars via cardboard records, even though they never accomplished existence in the real world. They were simply a collection of studio musicians whose makeup varied from session to session. Hmm, maybe they need their own column too.

Anyhow, if you managed to hold on to any cardboard records from the 60’s or 70’s, they are highly collectable. Just like those Reggie Jackson rookie cards I attached to my bicycle to be beaten to death by the spokes. (sigh)

Black Light Posters

The perfect accompaniment to the Seven-Up flicker light circa 1972 was a room full of black light posters, along with WLS on the radio. Now, according to That 70’s Show, marijuana smoke would also be a part of the ambiance. But I grew up in small-town America, and while pot smoking was certainly something we had heard of, the fact is that junior high students in northwest Arkansas simply didn’t commonly engage in the act.

But we did love turning the bright lights off in our rooms at night and laying back and enjoying some good music, with the black light making our posters glow beautifully, and perhaps a candle or incense completing the perfect sensory experience of relaxation.

Black lights first appeared in the 60’s. According to BrainyHistory.com, the first black light was sold on May 27, 1961. Hmm, I guess it would be as hard to argue with that factoid as to prove it. But by the mid 60’s, concert posters frequently featured fluorescent colors that looked great in regular light, but shined like beacons under the influence of ultraviolet light.

UV light can be weakly produced by an incandescent bulb. That was the first experience many of us had with black lights. It simply required a purchase of a special bulb for about three bucks, and unscrewing the old 100-watt job in the desk lamp, and replacing it with the tiny 40-watt generator of purple photons.

But that little bulb made a world of difference in how Led Zeppelin or the Rolling Stones looked on those posters. However, the ULTIMATE black light experience required the purchase of a fluorescent fixture.

My older brother worked at an electrical supply outlet after he was discharged from the Navy, and he was kind enough to provide me with a 4′ light fixture, complete with black light bulb, that absolutely horrified my parents. But they tolerated my little journey to the wild side, and my room was turned into a perfect mellowing-out spot to lay awake at night and listen to great tunes on the radio and think about a certain brown-eyed young lady who shall remain nameless.

Today, black lights continue to entrance teenagers in love, but they just don’t have the sex appeal that they did in our youth when they were wild, new, and perhaps slightly shameful.

Bang Caps

George Carlin said that the problem today’s kids have is that they have to wear a helmet to do anything. When we were kids in the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s, we engaged in activities that would shock today’s society that is so obsessed with protecting us from ourselves.

For instance, we used to walk into the neighborhood grocery store and buy explosives.

The explosives were in the form of roll caps. The brand I saw everywhere as a child was Bang Caps.

The summer afternoon air was frequently filled with reports and smoke as we dueled with our trusty cap pistols. But after a while, we would crave louder explosions. That meant finding a hammer.

The roll caps would typically come 250 shots to a box. There would be five rolls of fifty each. Now sure, it was fun shooting them one at a time (and tearing off spent shots. Remember the neighborhood being littered with strips of red paper?). But boys being boys, we craved bigger, LOUDER!

So we would take an entire roll of caps, set it on a brick, and have at it with a hammer. The result would be an ear-ringing blast that would rock the neighborhood. It was as least as loud as a firecracker (which had a lot more power in those days than the wimpy glorified ladyfingers that they sell today).

There were all sorts of toys that used the caps besides pistols. I remember a rounded-nosed-missile that was made of gray metal. You slid a cap into its nose and tossed it. The heavily weighted nose would hit the ground first to produce a nice little explosion. And of course, you would cram three caps in the nose to make it louder.

I guess you can still get cap pistols, but nowadays they have to have an orange barrel to keep cops from mistaking them for the real thing and blowing a kid away. What a sad turn our society has taken.

But if you remember JFK, you can recall a time when the neighborhood rang with miniature explosions (and occasional bigger ones). It was fun, it was innocent, and it was a long time ago.